What Took So Long?

I began working on the Occult of Personality Membership section in the summer of 2009. It took more than 6 months for my vision to become a reality. I never imagined that it would take this long and I’m sure you didn’t either.

I decided to use what I already knew, Wordpress, as the underlying software platform for this new membership web site. According to its developers, “WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.” A variety of pre-programmed plugins can be obtained to tweak almost every element of a Wordpress installation, providing the capability to develop highly-customized web sites. However, I soon learned that this extensibility is a double-edged sword.

I spent a little money and a lot of time researching the available Wordpress membership plugins to find the best fit for my vision of this web site. Confidently, I bought and tried multiple membership plugins whose descriptions seemed to fit my requirements. I’m actually still working on the most recent candidate to handle the new membership requests automatically and hope to implement it in the future. But at this point, the time spent researching and trying to configure the membership software has become excessive and I’m out of patience.

I didn’t want to wait any longer to share these amazing new recordings with you. So I decided to use a simple, more direct approach. New membership requests are handled manually and access will not be automatic, but I’ll be actively monitoring the new membership requests and process them within 24 hours. This is a trade-off of waiting less than 24 hours for membership access versus waiting another month or more to get this site online. Honestly, it isn’t fair to the guests who were interviewed months ago to have to wait even longer for these recordings to be released, nor to the dedicated listeners who’ve been expectantly awaiting the launch, nor to those loyal donors who support the show financially.

In addition to the software issues, there were several other considerations. Since the summer, a couple of minor health issues have been a painful and expensive distraction at times. Then, at the end of September, my computer hard drive failed. The data recovery from the hard drive was incomplete, setting the project back by almost a month.  Fortunately, during the time the membership site was in development, I continued to record, edit, and post new interviews for Occult of Personality podcast, as well as recording new material for members.

I thank all the new members for joining, all the guests who’ve shared with us, and all the listeners of the show.  I also thank all of you who supported the creation of the Occult of Personality Membership Section web site with your encouragement and donations. You helped make this possible. Too many times I thought the membership web site was almost ready, only to have to delay again. But the interest and encouragement from loyal listeners to the show, and those close to me, inspired me and kept me moving forward.

The Occult of Personality Membership Section is finally here.