Bedstuy.org is a [[parking lot]]
Title
BedStuy Community News
Description
Towards the early part of 2002 I was having a discussion over lunch or maybe it was dinner, or one of those meals about Bedford Stuyvesant. This discussion because I happened to be looking for some specifics on Bedford Stuyvesant itself. This quickly led into the discussion that if the domain existed it would probably be a good idea to start a website with links, history, community info etc. Right after that meal I came home to try and figure out what if anything actually existed online for Bedford Stuyvesant. There were a couple of sites that I came across. Bedstuy-Online was the first, but at that time the website was static content, and non-dynamic. The interface for me also was cluttered, and unintuitive. Then, there was everything else, or what i'd like to call everything else. Small pockets of information located all over the web. Some of it clearly incorrect, mostly by people who don't live here and/or took a "tour" of sorts. After looking around, I decided to register Bedstuy.org. Then proceeded to setup a Content Management System (CMS) called PostNuke and began to get to work. I was fortunate to have help from several of my friends in this regard. The initial design of the website; (I don't know if anyone has ever seen it besides myself and a couple of others) was put together by Alissa Small. It was simple, to the point and exactly what I wanted, we discussed for an hour or two what exactly I was looking for until she was quite annoyed with my banter. Two weeks or more later and she had a working design for me.
I then proceeded to try and get Alissa's design to work appropriately ontop of the PostNuke content management system. This proved to be difficult, the problem was that the CMS was so generalized and non specific. It would take a month easily to have created my own specific theme for it. The time for this simply wasn't there. So I subsequently decided to go with a default design and push in Alissa's work when and where I could. The end result wasn't exactly what I wanted but it worked and it worked well. The process of hunting for stories and posting began and basically that was it. Trying to post to the site when and where I could with email, submissions etc proved to be difficult. One person doing this alone just didn't get the site updated with the frequency it deserved. The history stuff needed to be built out, there needed to be a more cohesive functionality to it. This meant i'd have to redo the site but my nature is, if it ain't broke. Don't fix it and again, time would be an issue.
Fast forward to late September, early October of 2005. I'm actually having another discussion and I notice a friend of mine who probably had no idea about Bedstuy.org looking for apartments in Bedford Stuyvesant. I said to myself, yeah I should add some sort of rent module or something but I don't have time. Anyway, I go to load up the site and it's not responding and then when I figure out whats going on. The site has been defaced, disappointing. There was a flaw in the Postnuke CMS that allowed someone to gain access to the site. Well, I could of probably fixed it and returned it to its old mundane outlook or I could take the time to redo it. I'm a programmer by day, student by night, entrepeneur, junior barrister and now website designer. So for the next 3-4 weeks, mostly during the night, I worked with xhtml, css, postgres and php to get everything to the way I wanted it. There were countless people who helped this time around. Primarily with words of kindness and general support. I've thanked them all already but this refacement wouldn't have occured without them.
Contact
- Mynd Intermedia
-
- Brooklyn New York
- United States 11216
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- +1.7187892210
