Inspiration –
I’ve been in the process of fixing several things on my boat, a 1976 O’Day 25 – the S/V O’Jure. As I was putting together plans to rebuild the wedge for my outboard, after countless searches for folks that had done the same (with some success, although limited), I decided to start another forum.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no real expectations that this will replace any of the other sailboat blogs and discussion forums out there; I just wanted a site where I could at least gather and post things of interest to me.
I decided, at the same time, to expand some of my IT skills, and not only set up the site in WordPress, but to add a discussion forum so I could learn a little about Discourse. Again, to broaden my IT skills some, I also set both systems to run in the cloud, using Google Cloud Computing for the WordPress install, and Digital Oceans for the Discourse side.
Plans –
So, what am I going to do with this? Well, my current plan is to begin putting articles of interest on the WordPress website, and invite others to submit articles. All articles posted on the WordPress site will automatically be added to the forum (forum.oursail.boats) as a discussion topic. The website will be reserved for articles, but the forum will also have shorter questions or topics that others post.
I’m really interested in other sailboat owners submitting articles, and the mechanism for that will be set up soon. If you’re interested in writing something from your experiences, please use the contact option on the website, and we’ll get something going right away.
I’m committed to keeping both sites up for at least a year. If there hasn’t been much interest in the sites after that point, I’ll probably call the experiment finished and take them down. I hope though to see some activity, and share stories and experiences with others of you out there.
