Bloggst launch details and more

My weekend of death has come and gone, and I’m happy to say that I’m still alive and kicking, and I’m ready to resume work with my blog and Bloggst. Right now I’m working on the first, writing about the last! All in all, I’d say the launch has been pretty successful. No serious flaws have popped up so far. Some minor things popped up, but I managed to fix them quickly, and I think that the current features can be said to be working fine.

I did have to delay the launch with a few hours on Thursday however, because as I mentioned in this post, vBulletin threw an update at me litterally right at the point I was about to open it up. I just refreshed my admin panel to check everything one last time, and there it was, an upgrade. But no worries, I was able to upgrade without any problems, mostly because this bug-fix included no updates to any templates or phrases. It’ll be a much more daunting task the next time I suspect.

As you can see if you check out the site, as of the time of writing this, 22 people have taken the step and signed up to become a member already, which I’m moderately happy with, seeing how I haven’t had any time to do promote it so far. I’m a little disappointed with the amount of posts however, seeing how only a handful of people have actually contributed with more than a single post in the forums. I understand that people sign up from curiosity, but I would expect than once you’ve taken the time to do that, it will take very little effort to actually make a post. But I guess some people still prefer to be part of the silent majority.

And where do we go next? For starters, I will have to make use of all the connections I’ve made online in the past and get as much help as possible to expose the site to the public and draw in as many potential members as possible. I will also need to make new contacts that can help me reach the more targeted audience, as those will be more likely to actually contribute useful posts, which is of course what I am looking for. Since I’m on a very limited advertising budget, I’ll be forced to work twice as hard, at least, to save my project being left in the dump of failed internet start-ups.

I have discovered that MyBlogLog is actually ideal for the purpose of finding people interested in this certain topic, since you can easily find members of certain communities that are related to the same, and I’m trying to use it for what it’s worth without spamming. I’ve actually been able to make a few connections through this course, and I’m going to keep trying to see if I can find more value from it. Hopefully I’ll be able to strike gold at some point!

I am also running a launch-contest over at Bloggst, which you can see the details of here. It’s a simple contest, posts and referrals give you points, and the people with most points win the prizes, which are also pretty simple, but still some incentive for posting that will encourage a few people to participate I hope!

As a final note, now that the release is out of the way, and Bloggst up and running fully, I will probably be creating a development blog for it as soon as it gains some momentum, which basically means that in the near future there will be no more posts about it in this blog. This probably won’t upset too many people, seeing how they aren’t of my more popular posts, and how I will still be keeping people up to date about what’s going on “behind the scenes”, just at another place. I will still try to keep up the same posting frequency here however, which is generally around four posts per week or so, but hopefully they will just be more interesting to the average reader.