As a bit of an experiment, I’ve created my.ReflectionUpon.com. This Joomla (the Content Management Software that powers the site, similar to what WordPress does, but for a site, not just a blog) website allows anyone to reflect upon (Ha…. I thought it was pretty funny how the name fit with this blog’s domain) their lives through posting in their “notebook” as well as to set goals for the future. At the same time, they can also find other people with similar goals and connect with them to try and reach that goal together. They can also learn from the experience of the past goals of people.

A screenshot of my.ReflectionUpon.com (click on it to go there)

Originally, I had hoped for this to be a full fledged website, but I realized quickly that such websites already exist. See Goalmigo.com and Inpowr.com. Though anything that I would make with Joomla could not be as “non-buggy” and as easy to use as the professionals both because of Joomla’s architecture and my own abilities with websites. (which are very limited when it comes to web design and programming) But nonetheless, just for fun, I’ve created the site using quite a few extensions for Joomla and some minor tweaking, so that means I actually did very little nitty-gritty programming. I just mashed them all together to work as they do in my site.

If you are familiar with Joomla and you want to know the extensions I used they are as follows:

• Community Builder- the actual connection and profile part of the site
• Fireboard- the forum
• IDoBlog- the notebooks
• JCE (Joomla Content Editor)- the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Editor that is used to post up goals
• UddeIM- the private messaging system for users
• Mass Content- I used this to set up the sections and categories
• Content Submit- Allows users to only post to certain categories and sections
• JoomlaPraise’s Submission for the Joomla 1.5 Template Contest- the theme I’m using for the site

Other details:

• The goals are actually just articles posted by users and I have set up so when you register you are automatically an author
• I tinkered with the PHP files to avoid goals needing to be approved

More than likely you’ll run into problems with the site, you can report them, and I’ll try to fix them, but I have to stress that this site is not for real use. Sure, you can do what you want with posting your reflections, but you won’t really get any use out of the site (unless some event occurs and a lot of people actually start using it).

If you are interested in really taking part in such a goal-tracking site, check out those two sites I mentioned. I haven’t really looked at them myself, but I’m sure they’ll be much more useful than my.ReflectionUpon.com.

On the other hand, if anyone is interested in playing around with my Joomla site, you can contact me and I’ll see what I can do for you (and it’ll depend on how well I know you for you to do so)

So if you want to try my site out, go ahead and sign up for an account on my.ReflectionUpon.com!