I’m also sure you know that post counts aren’t everything.

Needless to say not my cup of tea, but I guess we can just agree to disagree.

I feel that the comparison to Nexopia was fair. Both sites are pretty dated in terms of design and usability. The difference between the two is that Nexopia has some more polished features while C2E has more quality content.

I also wouldn’t bash Nexopia too much, it is extremely successful in it’s own right. Heck, I know several users who have over 111,000 posts themselves, which is the total posts ever for C2E.

Feel free to give suggestions when they come up in the suggestion forum. The web technology moves so fast that sometimes we just need to be made aware of bleeding edge stuff to add them to future plans.

Looking forward to a better RSS feed, and like you say, continuing to help make Edmonton a great place!

I really like that you seem to be pretty pro-active in this community and genuinely like your city. In realizing this, we are all on the same side and we all just want to make Edmonton a great place.

Yes C2E is not a platform and does not have a lot of new tools available to it, but the focus has always been to foster community and to build a place where the average Edmontonian can speak and be heard by decision makers (ie. city hall or a journalist who writes for a major paper). C2E is a volunteer run organization and has the constraints of time/budget of one. Keep this in mind before giving up on the concept.

The comparison to Nexopia (of all places… why there!? ugh) is pretty off base. Eric, I imagine that you haven’t read enough of one or the other to realize how different they are. That’s about as much as I can say about that.

Mack, your suggestions have been noted by the way.

Okay so you caught me wishing for something that I think is better – Web 2.0 / AJAX / APIs / Twitter – is that so bad?

I realize that C2E was never designed to be a platform, and I’m not suggesting it should become one. I’m simply suggesting that it make the experience for its users a better one, by leveraging some other platforms.

“Here’s what I hate about it: C2E looks and feels and smells like it was built in 1996. There are quite a few “Web 1.0″ aspects to the site, such as the old school message boards, the lack of permalinks, and the horribly ugly URLs for the pages that do have permalinks. Instead of blogs, they have “columns”. Thank goodness the site has RSS, or I’d probably never use it.”

So, we have
- looks and feels like 1996
- old school (read: simple) message boards
- lack of permalinks
- ugly URLS
- Blogs being called Columns and not Blogs

1996
Looks somewhat ‘web 2.0′ to me. We have gradient backgrounds, rounded corners, search boxes, etc, etc. Ticked quite a few of the web 2.0 boxes. Sure, no fancy AJAX or anything, but that adds a lot of development costs and quite often little to the actual site.

Simple Message Boards
Think about the target audience: normal Edmontontians. They use vBulletin to power their forums; quite possibly the most widely implemented forum software on the web, for a reason. It does well on the fine line between ease of use and powerful features. Things are where people expect them to be. Considering the target audience, I’d say vB is a sound choice.

Permalinks
Not sure which lack of them you’re talking about – I see permalinks for their Column posts and Forum posts.
The URLs are ugly, sure, but to the average person, does it matter? Does it even make a difference to you using the site?
The only reason I put much effort into my URLs is SEO purposes.

Blogs/Columns
Same as the forum software. It’s trying to use terms that ordinary people are used to. Is it a good idea in todays day and age where a lot more people know what a Blog is? Probably is for a site like this. More people can relate with the word Column than Blog.

C2E was never designed to be a ‘platform’. It has a fairly simple mandate and until things like Twitter and FriendFeed become as popular with ORDINARY people, there’s no real need for them to integrate with a site like C2E. About the only exception to this would be a site like Facebook. Facebook is starting to reach the kind of market penetration with ordinary people that makes it worth looking into. A lot of my clients are starting to use Facebook on a daily basis (and they’re normal people). I’m willing to put money on none of them having even heard of Twitter.

“Add web 2.0 / AJAX / APIs / Twitter” is not the answer for most sites/situations, as much as the ‘web 2.0′ community would like it to be.