Anahita Social Engine
Excellent discussion about building standalone niche social networks on the latest Anahitapolis Hangout podcast.
Discussion focused on http://beerlovers.com/
http://blog.anahitapolis.com/2012/09/anahita-podcast-episode-9/
Anahita 2.0 Birth Release – Why Anahita Matters to us
July 19, 2012
Anahita Social Engine
Anahita 2.0 is out.
Read about it at the Anahitapolis blog, “So what is new in Anahita 2.0“.
My Club Members-only site, at http://www.southlasallecommerce.com/members, is an Anahita site.
I’ll tell you something: my upgrade failed! I got a “fatal error”, and then a white screen. Yes, I took extra backups before my upgrade, on top of the usual daily backups. So, I logged into Anahitapolis.com and posted my problem.
Anahitapolis.com is not your usual forum support site. The entire philosophy is different. Here’s one of the podcasts we’ve done about it.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it really happened… I had three sites to upgrade last night. Kids sleeping, decide I can’t put it off any longer, I upgrade my two WordPress sites & my Anahita site. I do the backups, and the WordPress sites upgrade fine. Not just WordPress itself, but Genesis Framework upgrade, the usual batch of plugins, and of course have to reset WordBooker plugin. Whew, all went fine. Then, Anahita upgrade. Fail fail fail. Fatal Error. Copy error message. 500 error too! I download the upgrade package and manually upload all the files (theory: will correct copy error). Fail fail fail!
I’m human. I got upset. As in, really upset. So I took a breath, and reminded myself that when I post in Anahitapolis, Ash or Rastin will personally read and reply to it. You think I’m joking, but I am not. My behavioiur in Anahitapolis.com is much much different than in regular forums (which I haven’t bothered with in a while, now that I think of it), because it’s a social Hackerpreneur Club website, not a support forum. Professionals participate in the site, and the developers themselves are uber-active in it. So, it’s far far better to take a deep breath and provide an intelligent post so they can help me as best they can. Put another way, my confidence is so high that I will receive the help I need, that I did what I could to help them help me. So after calming down from my frustration hissy-fit, I posted stats on my environment and error messages and crossed my fingers that it would be an easy diagnoses.
This is what I want in my own Members-only Club Site.
The diagnoses is not easy: migrating from version 1.6 to 2.0 is not cut-and-dried. Ok… I am contemplating doing a fresh install, since I can get away with it this one last time. This would be my third from-scratch install of Anahita. Version 1.5, version 1.6, and version 2.0. From here, there will need to be a migration… and I’m sure to post about this after all is said and done on Anahitapolis.com.
Have you heard my “Learning from Ash and Rastin” podcast? You can read ‘em as well as listen…
UPDATE: Rastin tweeted that he warned me about using an “embryo” release. Anahita 1.6 was an “embryo” release, indeed. Well, v2.0 is intended for production sites, so, fresh install this weekend-ish…
Critical Lessons Learned from 2011
January 17, 2012
Anahita Social Engine
There’s one thing I can say for 2011: critical lessons were learned:
- my point-of-view and focus are strictly site owners & consultants to site owners — not programmers;
- every single risk that exists using GPL software is shouldered solely by the user;
- the extreme reward for shouldering the extreme risk = controlling the code;
- the only way to control the code is to wield the power;
- if you lack the time, technical skill, resources to bring such skills in-house, then you need to form — or join an existing — “Hackerpreneur” club;
- you use GPL code from other projects as Raw Material;
Rastin Mehr and Ash Sanieyan, Founders and Core Architects of the Anahita Social Engine, summarized key takeaways in their blog post “How We Wrapped Up 2011“.
With the advent of Google+ and Google Hangout we decided to try answering some of our Premium Tribe member’s questions during video chat sessions. Very quickly many people signed up to the point that we had to schedule 3 different sessions These sessions are completely unscripted wehere Anahita Premium Tribe members can ask us any questions on the spot and Ash and I do our best to answer them. These sessions are recorded and published with minimal editing as podcasts (Subscribe to the iTunes Feed here). We often start a session as a Q&A formats, but when time allows, then they turn into round table discussions where we discuss different topics regarding Anahita, Community Management, Current affairs in the technology and social networking market in general. We have produced 3 episodes so far. The next episode will be published this Monday January the 16th. We would like to have a new episode every 2 weeks. Let’s see how that goes.
Publishing a Hangout is a great way to communicate to the public what is happening inside Club Commerce — and an opportunity to hear my fabulous Members. Kudos to Rastin & Ash!
…using a social networking environment to deliver service and support has clearly proven to be a superior option over support tickets and traditional discussion boards that are being used by many companies these days.
It’s not just the social networking environment, it’s the attitude that goes with it. There’s a connection with the code, the techies, and peers, that is consistently lost in ticket systems & forums. My Discussion site uses Anahita, but more importantly, I’ve absorbed the attitude.
ADDENDUM: April 26, 2012 podcast with Rastin & Ash continus this theme.
