a bit of bonhomie

Unplanned delays are tricky for a control freak like me, I can either sink or swim. The decision about whether or not I’m going to get a feasibility study grant for my business was delayed by ten days – they’re now deciding on Monday. I know I shouldn’t place too much store on what they say, but it does feel like a first official hurdle. If I can persuade people to part with their money, then I must be on to something.

After sinking for a bit, I decided I’d use the time constructively, and I’ve been labouring over Astrology Bookmarks all week. The scuttle part I built from scratch in a day, but I’m only really happy with it now, six days later. It’s a hybrid, using scuttle as the main social bookmarking component, gregarius as the back-end blog aggregator, and feedburner to link the two. I’m also using grazr on the page.

I’m actually rather impressed that all this software is freely available, freely hackable, adaptable, and it works well enough for people to want to subscribe. I’m very grateful to them all. It’s not been easy, it’s been quite a challenge as I’m not a coder. It’s quite hairy to go into php scripts and tinker with them and see what happens, but it’s been very satisfying, especially when people started subscribing later in the week.

It occurs to me that of course the same hybrid model could work for other interest groups. Form an orderly queue, please…