After more than a year of planning,
consultation and hard work, I am very excited to announce the
imminent launch of Yehoodi 3.0! For those that don't know, I am one of the administrators of Yehoodi, the premiere social website for the global lindy hop and swing dance community. Approaching our 11th year of operation, we've been wanting to refresh our site for several years to better serve our constituents — the tens of thousands of people who love swing music and swing dancing.
The new Yehoodi.com is going to retain
all that has made us so successful over the past decade: the discussion
boards, swing dance calendar, news, radio show, podcasts, etc. But more than ever
before, this site will be about the Community, making it easier
for everyone to add, rate, bookmark, and comment on swing stuff that dancers care about.
After the jump, you can read about all what the new Yehoodi is going to deliver…
Here's some of what the new Yehoodi.com will offer:
- Community Contributions: All users can submit events, swing resources, videos, forum topics, and almost anything else from one, easy-to-use form
- The Entire Site is the Discussion Board: Anything on the site — events, news, videos, photos — can be conversed about to your heart's content
- Bookmarks and Watched Resources: so you can track all the stuff that you care about most on the site, and get notified when it changes
- Events Near You: Tell us your location, and we will
show you swing events within a set distance from you (i.e. all upcoming
events within 10 miles of Seattle) - Irritating User Begone: The much-asked-for "ignore user" feature is here!
- Faster than Google: A powerful site-wide search engine so you can find what you want fast
October
is an intensive testing period for Yehoodi 3.0.
Starting on October 5, we are going to launch the beta version of
the new site, and start inviting select members of the Yehoodi
community to be beta testers of the new site. These testers will be
tasked with trying out all of the basic functions of the site,
documenting their experience, and submitting bug reports to us. Every
week in October, we’ll add more and more people to this tester group,
until the end of the month when the site will be open to everyone. It's going to be exciting (and nerve-wracking) seeing all these people playing with this site that has been our baby for months and months now.
After this very swift testing period is over,
on November 1, we’ll turn off Yehoodi 2.0 and Yehoodi 3.0 (beta) will
become the main site.
To summarize how I'm feeling, I quote the inimitable Scotty from "Star Trek."
