Something I had been working with intermittent frequency over the past few days (while rewriting the core display engine) was help.tabulas.com. It's far from done; it's really simple right now, only displaying documentations and such, but I have such big plans for it.

With the advent of blogging (ugh, I still hate calling it that), there's a lot of sites that offer the same tools. So how do you succeed? There are two steps to creating a site of success:

1.) Build a community and create brand loyalty
2.) Document, document and document.

People want to know how to use these tools, but too many sites don't bother to explain. Either that or the documentation is too wordy or obfuscated to yield any real progress.

I eventually want everyone and their mom to know how to use Tabulas, and help.tabulas.com will be the way to do that. EVERYONE WILL USE TABULAS AND I WILL BECOME A RICH MAN AND MARRY KEIRA KNIGHTLY.

. . .

As a personal note, some things to do:
- Implement a 'glossary' feature that serves like autolinks on the help site; it links up various keywords to a page that displays all relevant documents
- Add a "one page" feed of Tabulas/Suggestions/Feature
- Expand the request for feature requests as well as a "to-do" list
- Add commenting to each document within the site with self-moderation (+/- system to push comments in/out)
- Eventually build the support ticket center into help.tabulas.com (which means I'll have to start using the tabulas authentication system within help.tabulas.com? I'd like to avoid it ... )

. . .

Gah. So much to do. I've also been simultaneously been working on rewriting the communities feature ... and not to mention that I've started to plan the complete rehaul of all templates to semantic compliancy; it's going to be a bitch to go through all 3000 CSS files and do a search/replace while upgrading the outputting code (no more bad HTML on the entry page and such!).

I've also begun planning how Tokki and Tabulas will interact; I've given some thought on hacking Tokki to be simpler; it's a bit too complex in its stage right now. I think with Tokki I'm going to take it through two phases:

Step 1: Make it a simple picture-sharing site. Don't worry about photographers and such. Make a site that's scaleable, make people pay, and earn some money.

Step 2: Launch a separate site, using the same coding for Tokki but expanded ... for photographers. Hopefully Tokki will be making some nice money so I can really afford to give photographers lots of space/hardware/features.

This is good because it means that Tokki can "officially" launch soon. A feature freeze soon, and a quick rehacking of some features (and taking away some).

Tokki and Tabulas interacting should be very interesting; I think it's going to be a one-way thing; I want Tabulas users to be able to export their gallery to Tokki, with the option of deleting their Tabulas gallery in the process. The idea came to me especially with allen's gallery ... he has to constantly delete his old pictures to add more "recent" ones since he's too cheap to buy a f'ing paid account. The idea here is that he can "export" from Tabulas to Tokki his old album, then upload a new album to Tabulas. Thus his viewers can keep up with recent pictures in his Tabulas while viewing his older "archive" in Tokki.

It's a shame it took most of break to finally get my work ethic back. Time to go to sleep, wake up early tomorrow, and script all day :)