slu.sh – A dream of sorts -

It was an idea that came out of my frustrations online and the lack of accountability for the quality of what I was being directed to. (well most of it, anyways – the worst of it)

I’m not going to get heavily into what slush is all about, not right now anyways (there will be plenty of time for that as we move forward); however it is important to note that without you, without the people who care about the content on the web – without being able to make the distinction between good and bad – there would be no slush.

slush means to add accountability to content-creators. It means to point fingers at the people who shouldn’t be doing what they are doing and patting those on the back who deserve the spotlight. And almost more importantly, to bypass the ‘seo’ness over content’ that search engines of today place more and more emphasis on. Yes you can rank up based on how well you ‘game the system’ rather than how qualified you are.

So on that note, slush only exists because we were fed up. Our hope is maybe, some of you are too.

slush has been a work in progress since 2007.

Before the name slush was settled on, it went through a steady stream of names but the idea was always the same. It wasn’t until about 6 months later that we settled on slush and another few more month before we had a basic working proof-of-concept online that we could play with. By then, around mid 2009.

About 8 months ago Tim and I decided it was time for a redesign and out came v2. Yep, before we even opened v1 to the public.

The original was fine for what it was but two years is old in (template) design years and some features were dropped and new ones created – one of the more surprising things that came of the redesign was that a few original features flourished! – the back-end was rewritten from scratch to accommodate our more focused efforts – while still maintaining a fluid and simple approach. After all, that was kind of an important point. While we would have loved to have 1 button, 1 box, 1 click = result – it just doesn’t work like that. There are hoops, my hope is that they are blurred enough and enjoyable enough that they don’t seem like an effort – especially so when you consider the other options. *cough*

So this is where we’re at right now.

The redesign is in place. The basic functions are almost complete and we are slowly approaching alpha2. No date has been set but once it is, I’ll share it here. It will be a closed alpha, of course, but I will be sharing and updating this blog with good news and snippets of what you can look forward to when we open the beta.

Stick around and you just might learn something (: