Site and Business progressing

Things are starting to come together.

The one-shore.com website is starting to get fleshed out. Yesterday I got the wiki (dokuwiki) installed and created all the tools links. Today I got the forum (punBB) installed and created categories.

The wiki is now more up to date than the tools links. I still need to enable rewrite on the wiki and give it one shore branding (colors, logo, and nav links to return to the rest of the site.) I also want to add the tools links to the side for easy navigation, as well as a link cloud, by most visited, and post info on the home page such as most popular, and latest updates.

The forum is fully branded with a bevy of sample categories and forums. I think I need to notch it down and just make a few major categories. One Shore, Tools, QA Site, Support, perhaps combining the last two. It goes Category->Forum->Topic->Post --- which is one more level than I anticipated creating it. Also, it seems that all the way down to topics, only the administrator can post. I'd like registered members to create topics, for things like adding a tool or posting a support question.

Multiple blogs are available on dev, but unbranded as yet. I may continue to use my wordpress.com and blogspot.com blogs for now, because it provides an offsite location and the possibility that someone may stumble upon it. Eventually I may mirror locally or migrate.

I also created forums on runboard.com, which offers an off-site location, but may be wasted space. It will be a good back up if I have to bring my own forums down.

Yesterday I setup a paypal account so I can receive payments through that. Today I got a skypein number: 206-801-1701, so I can receive calls from the US easier. Only sound (and hence skype) doesn't work on my computer, at least since "upgrading" to Vista Ultimate (it swears there are no sound devices) from Vista Home --so I will have to use Kelsey's for it. I think I may want to go with TalkPlus eventually.

Skypein is $18 for 3 months. It's a good number (though the geek in me wanted 1734) and I'd hate to change it if I start to depend on it. Talkplus is $6.99/month plus 11 cents a minute and can ring my land or cell number here in Ecuador.

The deciding reason I got a number is because I sent an email to be listed on bugzilla's paid support. I also listed as a user. And as a user of Mantis (I use mantis for the one-shore site development and Bugzilla for the qa-site dashboard and integration.) I also have demos of both, and will support either for customer QA sites. I also made a note on Dokuwiki about using them, and emailed Knowledgetree about using their product. Knowledgetree told me about sourceforge, and I registered on there, though I need to look and see what tools I support are on Sourceforge and add that to my sourceforge market profile. I don't think bugzilla or dokuwiki are.

Tomorrow I hope to fix all the links and get the about, contact, and services pages finally up.

I will be visiting the computer school at San Blas square hopefully this week and eventually the technical college looking for people with good english and computer skills looking to join one-shore. I'll also try to network with people online and contact open source project leaders, and maybe company like Knowledgetree, but also, for instance, Atlassian. Crowd is staring to look very appealing to me, though I want to have the option of java-free VPS accounts for lightweight users.

I'l post on craigslist, guru, and look for other places soon. I'm probably not willing to cold call or spam businesses, but need to find out how to talk to someone who might really be interested.