The recent 'Your Green Future' Event we were part of, was a wake up call.
In two days a lot of folk swung by, checked out the ideas, liked what they saw, took a card... and came back home to sign up to the Junkk.com site.
It was only because of a few bounces that came into the Junkk.com mailing address PC that I was reminded to check the nether regions of our steam-driven admin back-end, and especially the registration database.
Logging Jam
There were a lot in there. The total now is over 4,000 (many, as we'll come to, doubtless lost to the disposable email sky... or hotmail, or gmail fairy). That's the ones signed in and already up.
There were also a large number stalled in our awful 'double opt in' system (sign up, get sent an email, re-confirm to activate. All genius for security, but less spiffy in a world of spam, filters and firewalls). This originally seemed like a good plan, imposed on us by those who know better. Long gone now, but as the guy who agreed, the buck stops with yours truly. Time has moved on.
And I just spent a lot of it going through scores that were in limbo, approving manually. Amazingly, very few 'spammers', who are easy to detect.
Many new friends still as a result of the Poundland packaging (if sadly likely to end soon), the Joy of Junk book, mentions on such as the FoE or Guardian, or shows like the one just held in U of Worcester.
I wish I could change the system for the better. I am sure it can be. All things can of course change, be improved, evolve...
But they almost always also take time, and if it's Junkk IT, that means 3rd parties and money, as I don't know my HTML from my SQL. And as such skilled consultant fees I don't have currently.
However, things must change, so ways must be found.
Spring Into Summer Cleaning
So the summer hols reading on the beach will include a bit of drastic editing of pages that have been left fallow too long to serve now, and hiving off bits that it's possible free scripts and social media plug-ins from such as FaceBook and Blogger and Wordpress can do easier, better and much more integrated.
I've noticed Facebook or twitter pages or articles I follow or find all can be shared in the blink of an eye, as I do now especially on the 'Here Are Some We RE:made Earlier!' FaceBook page linked from the Junkk.com home page.
Maybe I can also reproduce the categories within these, to get these shares archived in a way to easily search under various topics again.
It will of course be a bunch of work, but with luck doable.
Looking For Help In All the Right Places
I am also looking at converting Junkk.com to social enterprise or even charity status to see if this can help find more help, especially in terms of the warm bodies (as funded staff or volunteers) to get us back to when we were running 150,000+ unique visitors and climbing monthly.
