NEWS: CityHippy 2.0

I have been working away for quite a while on a new version of this site and thought now would be a good time to fill you all in on our progress. Obviously progress is slow as whilst CityHippy is a love of mine it plays permanent second fiddle to my wife, 5 month old son and full-time job etc etc etc.

Why did the blog cross the street? To explain Web2.0 to the chicken of course!
I am going to move this blog come hell or high water (not intentionally a climate change prediction) and move it I shall. I intend to move it to the WordPress platform and it will reside full time on the cityhippy.net domain. I used to own the .com but thought that just too damn, well, commercial. From that point on, the blogspot will languish eternally, frozen in time. Incidentally, if you have any links to http://cityhippy.blogspot.com on your blogs feel free to start updating them now as www.cityhippy.net points to this current blog for now.

I have been working with a superb, friendly and UK-based ethical e-media company Make Hay and have so far produced a new logo (with some great over-the-shoulder advice from an old pal and a staunch member of the CityHippy collective, GingerLeaf, experts in graphic design & art direction). I have a favourite logo and am pressing ahead with it but would love to hear your thoughts and if you can guess which one is my favourite from the four shown below, and essentially why, I will give you a prize.

Make Hay have received my intended site structure and they are beavering away on a site design to fit the structure and compliment the new logo, unless you can sway me he he he. In the meantime I have to get to grips with Wordpress templates etc. Easy peasy. Gulp! Any advice gratefully received.

Progress Shmogress
So how will the new CityHippy.net site be different? Well some interesting new functionality but most importantly the site will be more useful, easier to navigate and generally leaner and you guessed it, greener. Greener because we intend to host CityHippy.net on a wind-powered hosting solution. More on that later.

To store or not to store?
I would love it if CityHippy somehow freed me from the treadmill and allowed me to green-blog full-time. Wishful thinking methinks but, as Carl Lewis (I think it was him) once said, winners look to the horizon, not to their feet. So horizon here I come.

Ads are easy to carry and as long as they are relevant and ethical I do not think anyone really minds. But ads don't give daddy enough sugar sadly.

And so to ecommerce my head turns. Question is would you purchase relevant books & movies via CityHippy? What about tried and tested (and reveiwed) green and ethical products?

At this point in time I am planning a CityHippy general store (any interested store partners please feel free to get in touch) with selected items that we will trial, review and then, if they score high enough on the CityHippy scale (and we will be very discerning I assure you), offer them for sale to our readers. I do not expect to become a millionaire from this site and intend to continue CityHippy regardless of whether it pays my bills or not. But if I could do it full time then just imagine how much more the site could achieve. Ultimately if ecommerce helps me produce more content for you and further green my life and help others green their lives then that cannot be a bad thing eh?

Really would appreciate your thoughts at this crucial planning stage.

I love the sound deadlines make as they go by
Lots going on in my life so it is hard to give you a live date but this is a must-happen move and upgrade and I would like it done by July 1st so should not be that far off. May 2009 then it is ;) We shall see.

Namaste

Al

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