In
2007, Carl Forsell was looking for a way to combine volunteerism,
community support and the Internet. It
was not long until the idea Connections Planet started to grow.
Carl spent about four months developing the business plan for the
site. Highlights of the plan included:
-
A section for every residential zip code
in the US, all 33,507 of them.
-
A “Zip
Code Manager (ZCM) would be selected from each zip code.
-
The ZCM must live in the zip code they represent.
-
The ZCM would be selected based on their
willingness and interest in serving the community.
Once
a road map had been developed, it cam time for the nuts and bolts
of the site – programming. Several “off
the shelf” content management solutions were investigated.
When Carl contacted the publishers of these software publishers,
most agreed that their systems could handle 10-20 users, a little
short of the 33,507 needed.
After
rejecting the existing solutions, Carl started programming.
The first few attempts resulted in systems that were either not
secure enough or too difficult to use. Finally,
in January of 2008, the winning combination was produced. Then
the mathematical issues reared their ugly heads. How do you make
33,507 copies of the template and place each in their own directories?
Once that hurdle was overcome came the issue of reading the
directory name and inserting the zip code into the files in that
directory. With help from members of a programming forum on the
Internet, a working script was developed.
Carls computer ran for almost two weeks, reading a directory
name (a zip code) then substituting that into each of the 15
pages then moving on to the next directory. Next the over 500,000
pages were read and two phrases were replaced with corrected
versions.
Once the pages were created, they needed to be transferred to
the web server. Most web sites are 20 - 30 pages, and it only
takes a few minutes to upload the pages. Using a high speed connection
to the Internet, it took almost a month to upload pages to the
server.
Once the site
went live, in May, 2008, Carl started recruiting ZCM’s
.
Since the site is growing mostly by word of
mouth, the number of visitors to the site has started slowly. The
number of visitors to the site has started to take off:
ConnectionsPlanet.com