Sleeping

DSCF0291,
originally uploaded by afterthemouse.

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At Chris Mallett's wedding

At Chris Mallett's wedding,
originally uploaded by afterthemouse.

Again heres why!
Me, Peter, Mark, Glen, Lee, Chris and Ferny!

Tim and Tim the Native American!

Tim and Tim the Native American!,
originally uploaded by afterthemouse.

People ask me why i am trying to balence home life, work and build After the Mouse... the answer is i made real friends, and where else in the world could we do this?

Got a new friend… he’s called Simon!

Ok so that sounds a little creepy but hey! I asked around a while ago for some help building the new site and Simon stuck his hand in the air and said hello… nice chap Simon, and he’s good with this internet thing too!

And as Simon has some experience of the software we’re using over at the new site he seems like a good chap to get on board! So I am off to buy him a pint or two on Tuesday and we’ll see if we can’t get the new look site off the ground for you all.

Developing a website when you have a clear idea of what you want to do but are not 100% sure how to achieve your goals is frustrating.

I know that I want a friendly easy going site with as much flexibility and freedom for the user as possible but I also want it to be closed enough so that it is only Cast Members who can get in to join the community.

What I have opted for is a concept called the honesty gate. I looked at censoring membership applications until I was sure about the applicant, or waiting for other members vouch for new users in the end these ideas seem to have too many issues… so I am opting to use the system most of us use in the real world online. I will trust everyone until I am proved wrong. I am going to choose to believe that every person who wants to joint the community is for real, and I will trust them, until I see otherwise…

Which is why all this is dragging on. Slowly.

Time rolls on…

As I sit here fretting over the information architecture of the new and hopefully improved After the Mouse site I find myself wondering how far I should go. How many levels of information do we need and how searchable do they need to be?

So I am sat here at my desk on a quiet day in the office with entirely too much time on my hands wondering about the site. More specifically the usability of the site. I would like the members to be able to search out friends and colleges through a variety of methods by name, where the worked, the year they worked together etc.

You see having this site work well and it be successful as a point of contact for fellow Disney Cast Members is important to me, I want… need it to work. I have been playing with this idea in various forms for the last 8 years or so. Firstly with the dlpcastmembers.4t.com and later with mouse.nodstrum.com so I am hoping that using a dynamic, database driven site that the community can grow itself and I can concentrate on managing the look, feel and style of the community… one day soon…

Getting there

Ok so i am posting questions like mad on the Drupal users group, hoping to find out how to get this site working... and sleep and a crying baby beckon... night all

MY HEAD HURTS!!!!

What I am aiming for with After the Mouse is a reunion site for ALL ex Disney Cast Members. It started out as being just for Disneyland Resort Paris Cast then moved on to being for Parks and Resorts in general, then the Cruise lines, the Disney Store… then I got a rush of megalomania and thought global.

The biggest issue is with the sign up process. Getting everyone’s details as exact as possible and thus getting the maximum accuracy in the search results. You see there are a lot of John Smith’s out there who have worked for Disney over the years so being able to find the right on that you worked with is important.

I am working on the where did you work section at the moment and that’s the killer. Thinking about how many resorts there are, how many Theme Parks they each have, how many lands there are in each park, how many attractions in each land… the mind boggles and that’s only the rides…

MY HEAD HURTS!!!!

After the What?

It has just occurred to me that if your looking at this Blog you may not have a clue as to what all this After the Mouse stuff is about… well here goes!

The Mouse in question is Mickey, as in Disney… and the site is about the Cast Members who made Disney so special for all of those who made the magic for so many millions of Disney’s Guests.

A few years ago I noticed that there was no online community for my old work mates. So in around 1998 I started a site http://dlpcastmembers.4t.com which was very labour intensive and poorly used so in 2005 I started work on a ‘dynamic’ database driven website. I bought the After the Mouse address and work started.

C is for cute!

C is for cute!,
originally uploaded by afterthemouse.

Ok so the reason that After the Mouse has been a little slow is the birth of my son Walt (ok, I know what your thinking... but my wife Bekky just loved the name!)

Walt was born on Easter Monday April 9th 2007 and has been demanding all my free time ever since!

The After the Mouse Site...

For a while now I have been looking at an alternative to the laboriously hand coded site I was building to house the ex Cast Member community.
I wanted a bespoke hand built solution, something special… but good grief its hard to keep that sort of quality scalable and able to cope perfectly with an ever expanding member base. So I have gone in search of a content management system, a CMS in the parlance.
I have experimented with a solution called ELGG, which on the surface offered an ideal solution but it was designed for a purpose and it was not mine… tweaking and adapting it was a long drawn out slog and I even ended up calling the developers to discuss a solution. They were great and very supportive. There is in fact a new version of ELGG due for release in the summer that is more adaptable to my needs but hey that’s months away!
So, now I am playing with DRUPAL. I’ll let you know how I get on!