If I deleted my website, would anybody really care? I think everybody should ask themselves this question. In fact, lets go a step further. If you were somehow thrown from the planet by a sudden lapse in gravity’s pull, would the world be any worse off because you were not on it?

Patsy Finlay's house, just down the hill from where I used to live

My grandmother turned 80 a few weeks ago. She lives in rural Newfoundland and has spent most of her golden years creating an impromptu “Fisherman’s Museum.” She has done some incredible work preserving a dying rural culture that’s been decimated over the past 20 years after the imposed cod moretorium of 1991. Like most young people I didn’t want to leave Newfoundland, but there wasn’t any other option. There was nothing for me there. At that time Asia was as foreign to me as Toronto or Vancouver, so I chose what I thought to be the more interesting route and left for the other side of the world..

Looking at the work that my grandmother did (and amazingly, continues to do), I know that her work has made a huge difference. She’s even won national awards for it, it’s ridiculous. I can’t help but wonder if there’s not some way to do the same thing digitally, preserving old Newfoundland culture on the internet. Old Newfoundland photos can be scanned, stories and songs can be recorded. Content can and should be geo-tagged and mapped. Kids can interview their grandparents and share their what they learn online. It’s a project that could mean something.

So what’s the best way to build a site where users can submit youtube videos, photos, and stories about Newfoundland culture? Drupal is the most obvious tool, as much as I hate to admit (it’s not an easy CMS to work with). Although if I can learn enough to build something that would be way cool too. I’m currently trying to learn some programming thanks to some good recommendations from SamuraiCoder and Karamoon, and I’ll have to wait and see how I progress over the next few weeks. But Drupal is the front runner.

Just like any time that I have a scheme brewing in my head, I fired off an email to my old DalianDalian.com collaborators Chris and Alex asking what they thought. Both these guys have built similar projects in the past, and I enjoy picking their brains (Alex used drupal for DalianDalian and Chris used Django to build Tools for News from scratch).

Alex replied to my inquiry with a beautiful little piece of wisdom that is just too good not to republish:

“Doing something is what’s really important. There can be a lot of wanking over platforms, implementation, topics or whatever. But doing something, and including people, being open in approach, is probably the most important thing to do, I think, and once the ball’s rolling, let it roll in they way it wants to.“

Everybody needs an Alex and a Chris. Really useful.

But I know what you’re thinking. “Rick, don’t you have enough silly web projects?” Yeah, I probably do. But few of them really require any significant time. And for once I think I’ve struck upon one that might actually mean something to someone. So I’m throwing this idea out there just as a public note-to-self that this is something that I should really do. I really, really want to make something that isn’t just a blog or a tweet or social-whatever. Something that matters. Japanese study is still a priority, but if I can learn a lot by working on something like this it will definitely be worthwhile.

If anyone has any advice that might help get this done properly, I’d love to hear it. Has anyone done this in a different geographical area? Any Drupal ninjas out there? Web developers? Newfoundlanders? I’d love to hear from anyone who has any thoughts on this.

June 20th Update: I’ve bought OldNewfoundland.com, and enlisted the drupal advice/help of Alex for  a short time (I hope). While I’d love to do it all on my own and learn stuff in the process, my main priority is to see this thing get done. I don’t really care how.  P.S. Alex is awesome.