Mixing a Modern web presence
Under the banner of Miss Fitz-Poste Modern Mixers, my partner Julie and her friend/cofounder Emily (henceforth, “the Fitz-Postes”) for about a year have been running a mostly monthly vintage-themed event: a new-fangled take on the old-fashioned concept of a social mixer.
The exact content varies with the theme but this Sunday afternoon’s Hello to Berlin will do as an example: three burlesque performers, a band, DJ and compere, shopping from four craft stalls, hair and makeovers, silly games with prizes, and other bits and pieces. They are genuinely great affairs I’m unashamed to push at my readership because your cooler significant other gets it straight away even if you don’t, and in any case you get to laugh at what I wear on the door.
Other than manning said door, my main contribution is to enable their online presence. The website is a zero budget affair, static pages hosted off the side of a slice I was already renting. The visual design is technically sound but that’s the nicest thing anyone is likely to say about it something under my direct management. To mitigate that, apart from core static copy served directly from the slice, the structural approach is to embed and aggregate content which is hosted elsewhere and created/managed by the Fitz-Postes. As much for my own diary as anything, I’ll describe the current arrangement.
We host photos at PicasaWeb (embedding tag-driven slideshows within our site pages) and videos at YouTube. Any substantial written content, especially if it has potential long-term value, is created as blog posts. The blog is hosted on Blogger but to avoid tight coupling that would impede migration, we reference it as and serve it from a CNAME we control. The content is syndicated via a feed to the social spaces most of our regular punters use to follow us day-to-day: an almost pointless MySpace, an obligatory Twitter, and by far the most popular current portal Facebook. The Fitz-Postes’ update with shorter notes and talk to punters very frequently on Facebook, which I think is appropriate for this immediately valuable but more ephemeral stuff, and has a much lower activation energy - which is important, because more updates is better business.
And finishing up said business: tickets are sold as PayPal items, and email is implemented in a similar fashion to the blog: permanent public addresses under the modernmixers.co.uk domain are backed with mail accounts hosted elsewhere, currently Gmail. (The Fitz-Postes use theit Google accounts to co-ordinate more admin through Google Docs, unsurprisingly.)
