Update: Both big, scary projects

Update on big, scary earth-moving project

Rained all night, so the big-scary earth-moving project almost didn’t start today. But the rain wasn’t heavy and the area to be worked is sheltered by house, hill, and trees. Two inches down, the ground was dry. Or as dry as it gets around here. So it has begun:

That’s Lester hunched over the controls of the machine. He decided he was well enough, after all. And I must admit he does better on the seat of that little tractor than he does on his own two feet.

The Wandering Monk, there in the background, is supervising, guiding Lester, handling whatever shovel work needs to be done, and making sure the house doesn’t get clobbered.

The ground here is exceedingly soft. That’s unfortunate for inadequately built houses, which tend to sink into it. But makes for relatively quick work when you have to dig it up.

There will be a lot of dirt to be dug out of that far left corner. So we’re finding useful places to put it. Some will be heaped up to provide eventual backfill for the retaining wall. But for starters, it’s being spread on the low hill in the foreground that’s needed leveling and smoothing. (And don’t worry; they’re not heaping it high enough to harm the cedar tree.) We have other EZ spots to use quantities of dirt removed from their original home.

My job? Staying out of the way.

Update on big, scary website-building project

Beta testing on the new member site began (slowly) Friday morning, and while we’re still waiting for the last few beta testers to step in, so far so good.

The main attraction is the forum. And I have to tell you that so far it’s the most lively 17-person forum you’d ever want to see. Four hundred fifty-five posts in 57 topics! Okay, most of those posts and topics are in temporary boards set up only to allow alpha testers and beta testers to talk with each other. Strictly business, which will be hidden when the site is open. Still, there’s been plenty of action elsewhere, particularly in Silver’s Corner, the money and free-markets board.

Users seem happy, as well as helpful. They’ve uncovered minor glitches and have made good suggestions for site features and policies (sorry; forums have to have rulz, but in part ours will be user-determined).

The one big problem turned out to be our registration procedures. Those are (for reasons too thick to go into) overly complicated. About 1/3 of the beta testers were completely flummoxed by the complexity. Another 1/3 breezed right in. And the final 1/3 had minor problems.

That won’t do. But there were technical reasons our complex registration was unavoidable.

That is, unavoidable until Bill St. Clair stepped in. He’s now writing a plugin for Simple Machines Forums to simplify matters (a plugin that will probably be useful to anybody whose site runs both WordPress and SMF and needs people to sign in to both). I tell you, we have some good people around here.

I’m thinking when that plug-in is ready, we might call for five more beta testers to check out the new registration procedures (and everything else, of course). Once we’ve got smooth registration and log-in, though, we should be ready to go live.

And about that time, we’ll be adding some other good stuff (she says just to tease you).