Built in 24

I present to you what I hope is the perfect vehicle to collate all the content I and many others generate before, during and after the Socitm 2013 conference. However, getting to this point took slightly longer than I had anticipated.

I knew off the bat that my job of social reporting would need a more permanent vehicle than just a Twitter hashtag and a Lanyrd page. Those things work before an event, during the event, but you get more than a week after the event and surfacing that content becomes very difficult.

In fact, when trying to research last year's conference a simple twitter search for the hashtag #soctim2012 brought back very few results. I suspect it's something to do with Twitter upgrade to v1.1 of their API but I won't get into that.

When I first thought of a site like this my mind went straight to Wordpress. In my network at least Wordpress is far more widely known and used. Many blogs I read on a regular basis and mine included are powered by such a platform so I figured it was the perfect choice. Yesterday I set to work building such a site (the skeleton of the site is here if you're interested).

When deciding on the tools and platforms I'm going to use I knew it was always going to be from a number of different providers. Flickr for images, YouTube for video content, Infogr.am for data visualisation and so on. The site would serve the purpose of pulling together all those wires and plugging them into one extension cable. It sounds perfect until I found out that Wordpress doesn't allow custom HMTL code in blogs hosted on Wordpress.com.

Not a disaster, but very frustrating. It was like having all the plugs but they just wouldn't fit into the sockets no matter how hard I tried. I thought about it for a while and after trying a couple of other platforms I've used in the past I remembered that Blogger was still about and since it's now owned by Google I thought it would be a little more flexible than Wordpress. Fortunately it did and everything slotted into place neatly.

Now onto generating content.