We go live…

by Betsy Richter on June 23, 2008

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…with a little help from our friends.

It’s been a rock and roll rollercoaster, people. Got the idea to create the site eight days ago. Built a skeleton site seven days ago, and started floating it in front of friends and people I trust.

Six days ago, I got tons of positive reinforcements and offers of assistance from people like Food Dude at Portland Food and Drink. Cuisine Bonne Femme from PFD even offered to jump on board as a contributor, hooray!

Five days ago, Dieselboi – my co-conspirator and partner over at Portland MetBlogs – decided to make the leap over to something new and join the team. That turned my ‘maybe’ project into a ‘hell, YEAH – let’s DO THIS!’ goal. And I started throwing out insane dates of a Thursday launch. (Last Thursday – but I got talked out of that Right Quick, of course.)

But there wasn’t any pressure, right? We’re just kids in a barn getting ready to put on a show, right? So we settled back down into leisurely walking down the path of building something, sometime…

Uh, we were – until we got outed Wednesday morning (five days ago) by none other than Portland’s blogging Godfather, Jack Bogdanski. (In fact, I took a break from an intense all-day meeting at work to check my personal email, only to discover that surprise! we were on the air already – dummy text, lack of stats package, and all. Next time? I’ll password-protect the site…)

And then the offers of help and encouragement really started rolling in. (Not to mention authors. Did you see who we’ve got writing for you already???)

Aaron Hockley offered to license me some of his photos for a banner. Guilty Carnivore – someone I’ve never even met before – spent his weekend putting them into a photo montage. People came out of the woodwork cheering us on. (Did you see the hordes of commenters already?)

So how could I do anything else than to power through this weekend and get the site ready for an Official Launch on Monday after all? So we defined our mission, pulled in some resources, and I stretched my idiot savant coding muscles to the limit to get things ready for y’all.

(I have to say I’m insanely proud of the fact that we just pulled off a ‘8 days to a functional, efficient, welcoming community blog’ project, of course. There’s nothing like setting a BHAG goal and then hitting it out of the park.)

And here we are. With your help.

We hope you’ll all continue to be a big part of what we do here, each and every day…

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Tagged as: site launch

{ 16 comments }

1 Jack Bog June 23, 2008 at 2:02 am

Hey, don’t blame me! You showed up as a Technorati trackback on my site.

8c)

Good luck, and sorry to let the cat out of the bag early.

2 Betsy Richter June 23, 2008 at 5:41 am: @Jack Bog -

Sorry, didn’t mean to assign blame. It was my own damned fault – and it ended up being a good thing in the end, even though I just finished a ‘lost weekend’…!

3 Cosmic Charlie June 23, 2008 at 2:10 am