Thursday, March 19, 2009
Starting a Lesbian Social Network
I’ve been working on a project, inspired by an idea that my sweety had. It isn’t ready for visitors yet as there is still a ton of feature installing, configuring and customizing to do, but I can at least start sharing what kind of project it is. In short, it’s a social community site for lesbians. There are a few out there already, but none that are exactly what we had in mind. Shoe.org comes closest functionally, but it has international emphasis and is quite frankly an ugly site with teeny tiny print. We also found impulsivegirls.com, but it seems kinda skanky. There’s also lesbianchatzone.com, but there isn’t much in the way of localized functionality.
What I mean by “localized” is finding people who are local to you. The whole idea stemmed from the fact that we don’t really have any lesbian friends. Our social circle is basically my honey’s numerous family members. And while they are a great bunch of people, they are also turning a blind eye to our relationship. They accept me as a person, but they don’t accept homosexuality. It’s a strange and occasionally awkward situation, but we make do and are content for the most part. It would be nice, however, to have a nice little group where we could hang out and be ourselves. Where we could hold hands and be mushy with each other without worrying we might offend someone. We looked into Meetup.com, but really, we don’t know who these people are or what they’re like, and the meet groups are usually very specific in purpose.
If we could have a site where members could get to know each other a little better online, find compatible personalities within their areas, then we would feel more comfortable actually meeting with these people and organizing events of our choosing. Sort of a social network married with Meetup.com. It’s a huge order as far as functionality goes, however, so I’ve got a LOT of work to do. I’ve never done anything like this before, but it’s exciting.
I’m using Drupal as my base, and a lot of the add-ons are pretty easy to configure, but the customizing part is a huge pain since I’m not a PHP programmer. To start I’m going to have to settle with default layouts while I learn how this stuff works. I won’t bore you with any more technical details, but if you are familiar with Drupal and PHP and want to be involved with this project, contact me!
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Categories: • Random acts of geekery • Sometimes I have a life