Social Networking Project

     I’m just writing to let those of you who have an interest in knowing what I’m up to next, know.  For quite some time I’ve wanted to put together some sort of social networking function.  Thus far I have not really found a platform that is workable.  Recently, I found out about a content  management system (CMS) geared towards exactly this sort of thing called “ELGG”.

     I’ve put together a new server with the latest and greatest everything and installed ELGG upon it.  If you would care to take a look, https://social.eskimo.com/.  I am also using this as an experimental server to try new things on so that I’m less inclined to break the main server.

     Right now it is very bare-bones, just have the very basic frame work installed, but you are all welcome to check it out and make suggestions.  If any of you might be interested in working on this with me let me know.

     To give you some idea of what I have in mind, I started Eskimo North as a BBS back in 1982, and we had a good strong community back then.  When we went to a Xenix platform in 1985, it was not nearly as user friendly and we lost a lot of non-technical folks then.  Ever since then I’ve been looking for ways to bring it’s user friendliness back up to that level.

     In my view, a good social networking platform could evolve out of the functionality we had way back then, a very good messaging system with e-mail, upload / download, chat, an games, add to that the ability to have video, pictures, sounds, and a way to relate people with common interest, friending, groups, etc.  Right now I’m still working on very basic infrastructure, being able to upload and view videos for example.  Aesthetics will come later.