Are you ready for some football?!

Yes. It's actually that time of year already. Hard to believe.

• School is back in session for the kids.
• School is also back in session for the grown ups (those of us who are in college).
• Daylight savings time looms nearer.
• Work resumes for those who work seasonally (as in for schools).
• The USMC Birthday Ball is on the horizon. Dresses and shoes to buy...
• Shorts and tanks are getting packed up in lieu of the layered look.
• And, yes... it's football season.

Things have been a little bit quieter on the forum for the past week or so, but I think this stands to reason as we get into this season. Hopefully it's a temporary dip and when we all get some down time we'll be as active as ever.

Meanwhile I will keep working on details-- when I'm not at my son's football games or my husband's work events or doing my school work or at the office or.........

Bald is beautiful...

... and it's a good thing. Because I've been pulling my hair out trying to get the web site just so. It still has a long way to go, but it's come a long way in a short time.

We now have:

-An intro page.

-An interactive main site with profiles, private messaging, etc.

-An upgraded forum (from phpbb2 to phpbb3) which is a "slave" to the main site, meaning that only one login is necessary to access both.

-An online calendar for birthdays, anniversaries and special events.

-A members only chat room.

To get to this point there was a lot that had to be done behind the scenes, much of which is invisible to viewers. For instance, I had to install a special component to allow me to embed video on the site and several others for other reasons. The avatar gallery had to be reinstalled on the forum and the smilies had to be formatted. We also had some issues both with logins and user permissions (reading, replying, etc) on the forum which have been rectified-- or so I believe for the moment!

I am still trying to get the "quick reply" function working on the forum. I completed all the steps for installation-- including some PHP file editing that I'm not particularly comfortable with-- and I can see some evidence of my work on the back end but nothing shows up on the forum. So I've missed a connection of the moving parts somewhere and I still need to get that up and running. Also, I need to find a way to edit the flood interval setting for the chat room. If you type an entry too quickly after a previous one, not only will the chat room reject it, but YOU with it. That needs to be fixed.

I had hoped to have every little detail attended to before I start class tomorrow. And though I failed to accomplish that, I do feel good about what's been done thus far and I see progress. It's a step in the right direction!

usmcwives.com: Progress in millimeters.

"Success usuallly comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it." - Henry David Thoreau

I have come to the conclusion during the re-design that even if progress only comes in very small increments, it's still progress! And I will embrace every step that leads in the right direction.

With that in mind, the page is slowly but surely getting better. A lot of the time I have spent hasn't yielded any visible results but has improved the administrative capabilities of the sight or given me leads on utilities that can be added in. My biggest desire at present is to find a way to bridge the site and forum so that 1 user login will suffice for both the forum and the main site. This would be unnecessary except that the site offers a lot of bells and whistles (user profiles and the like) that would benefit us. New user registration on the site's main page is disabled (with member registration only possible on the forum) until this gap can be bridged. Duplicate accounts/logins would not be efficient. I have found a couple of options that it's remotely possible for me to use, but the technical elements of the installation process frighten me just a bit. I am, after all, self trained and not skilled in the technical arena. But we shall see!

New additions to the page include links to our forum, blog and survey as well as RSS feeds for the blog and for news articles from Marines.mil.

It looks like this at present:

http://www.usmcwives.com/Joomla

Grabby McSnatchy

So, I've been trying to do a little bit of research about online forums and resources for Marine spouses and girlfriends.  The idea is for me to be somewhat well informed so that I can pass on any good leads to the ladies on our forum.

My philosophy is:  To each her own.  What works for one person might not for another.  What one person lives by might bore the life out of the next person.  So on our site I have posted (and will post more) links to other sites and good forums.

But I find it interesting how grabby some places are with their users.  I get that they don't want blatant spamming or advertising for other forums (and I never do this!).  But some of the little rules and nuances I have come across are very rigid and seem to be geared towards keeping their guests inhouse.

Am I just ignorant or naive?  I mean.... I understand why a for-profit business wouldn't want to redirect its customers the competition.  But how good is a support forum or resource center if it doesn't actually offer ALL MEANS of support and a wide array of resources?

This is just a musing about the situation.  Complaining is a waste of energy.  But I have resigned myself to stay true to the goal of offering up whatever goodies I find to others who may be interested.  If that leaves me talking to myself but results in happy members, I'm good.

Birth.

So, the past few days have seen the birth of two things which are really still in infancy but about which I am excited. Like a dork. Seriously.

First is the usmcwives.com forum. I'm fumbling around like a lunatic trying to spruce it up, but I think it looks pretty good so far, given my experience level. I've reached out to some of my online contacts to review it and I can see that many have. I've gotten a lot of survey replies in the past couple of days. I'm stoked!

Second is the associated usmcwives.com blog. From a practical standpoint, the site doesn't need a blog. After all, I have my own personal blog and the forum itself should suffice for any chit chat. BUT..... being an imaginative soul, I'm thinking I might at some point be able to use the blog in a worthwhile manner. It can be set up so that members can have their own pages and/or input posts. I'm thinking since I don't yet know how to enable NICE profile pages on the bulletin board, this slightly more dummy-proof blog application might be an easier way to achieve the same result. At least for the time being?

And now to move off topic as is my custom: After spending all weekend helping my husband lay flooring on the first level of our house (which isn't completed yet but is BEAUTIFUL!) I was able to sneak off with my partner in crime, Jill, and take in the new Sex and the City movie this afternoon. It was pretty good. It would have been hard to live up to my expectations because I was soooo excited..... But I thought they did a solid job on it. I loved Carrie and Charlotte's latest developments in particular. I won't go into detail in case you haven't seen it. Oh, and I was also ashamed of myself not to have known beforehand that Jennifer Hudson had a supporting role. Outstanding. I've become a fan.

Sisters are doin' it for themselves.

It's time for me to show some love for a couple of my girls who don't even know I'm blogging and don't know I'm talking about them. Why don't they know, you ask? Well because I am very tentative about the things (stores) I am working on and don't plan to come fully out of the closet until I get myself a little more squared away. Once I do, there will be no shutting me up. At any rate, it would be an exercise in confusion to have a discussion with either of these people and mention my screen name because while they might eventually guess who you were talking about, the preceeding conversation would be very Abbott and Costello-like.

As both of these ladies have made their names available online, I will go ahead and use them here as well. And both of these ladies are my friends in real life.

First, a lady not unlike ourselves who didn't like the way something was so she just.... fixed it. The world isn't perfect and neither is her solution, but I have to say I think it's great. Lori is a Marine's wife (her husband actually got out a couple of years ago, but once a Marine....) and also a Marine's sister who went online in search of some helpful information when her brother went off to boot camp at Parris Island some years back. Needless to say, at that time there was nothing of much use to be found on the web. So she started a little forum ("board") on the EZBoard site which has since morphed into Yuku.com. It's called The Parris Island Family & Friends Support Center. Talk about "If you build it, they will come." It's still somewhat underground but has generated such activity over the past few years that it does now show on the first list of Google results if you query "Parris Island." Mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives, fathers and whatsits of recruits have flocked in to mingle with their own kind: the confused, the apprehensive, the enthusiastic, the sleep deprived. Because I so love Lori and the board, I will try to keep my analysis of it here as objective as possible and leave out the extra bit of Ooh Rah. What you will get when visiting this board is some very good (read: current) information for lay people about the daily procedures at Parris Island, comprehensive information and suggestions related to graduation, some input here and there from drill instructors' spouses and other moderators deemed experienced enough to pitch in, a chat room that goes full blast every evening, last I checked, and the occasional bit of drama from stray, misinformed souls who may be under the impression that Parris Island is akin to a concentration camp or who may not have recruits at all but may just be war protestors (although the latter is very rare). There is some occcasional "rank wearing" that happens with some of the Marine wives who work on the board, although I think it is unintentional for the most part and should just be humored because, frankly, being the wife of a DI is a tall order and because sometimes they catch a lot of flack just for trying to help out. If I seem overly familiar with the details here it's because I worked on this board for the better part of two years. I actually made some long term contributions to it that I'm quite proud of. No, I will not tell you what my username is. ;)

As icing on the cake, there are links on the board to a sister board known as the USMC board. This is for folks whose Marines have already graduated from boot camp. It's not quite as active as the Parris Island board, but that is to be expected as the uninitiated tend to be needier than those who have gotten their feet wet. And, because the PI board grew so expensive to operate, Lori started a store on Cafepress, the proceeds of which go to funding the extensive costs for the board's monthly usage (hits, bandwidth, etc). There are some good, company and graduation date specific items on there. Note that I will be very careful when I place designs in my own store not to infringe on anything that Lori is doing.

If you or anyone you know has a recruit headed off to Parris Island, I suggest you have them check out the board. There have been many copycats and some outright stealing of Lori's materials, but this is an original.

Second on my list of shout outs is my friend, Jill. Jill is not a Marine wife but if there were such a thing as a civilian equivalent, she would be it. That must be why we get along so famously. Jill is a mother of 4 who teaches autistic kids, has a great sense of humor (often socially inappropriate-- which I love!), and loves to knit and make felted items in her spare time. I turned her on to Etsy recently and I am so excited for her because she's going to blow right up. I personally own some of her hand knitted items and love them. As a matter of fact, she made a beautiful green blanket for my daughter and I am completely unable to pry it away from her. Jill is definitely shout-worthy and although she is just getting started and doesn't have a large inventory yet, so is her shop. So check it out.

Both of these ladies are good, everyday people that I am proud to call my friends.

TGIF.