Introducing DIYalogue

Being first-time home owners, my wife and I are constantly taking on new projects and running up against new challenges. From scraping popcorn ceilings, to patching holes in the walls, to gutting our 70s kitchen; we’ve been able to do a lot of the work on our house ourselves. Along the way we’re learning new skills and the money we’re investing is increasing the value of our house.

Even though neither of us had any home improvement skills when we moved in to our first place 2½ years ago, we are both fortunate to have professional tradesmen as fathers that have been there to answer our questions and come help with some of our crazy projects. We have neighbors that have loaned us tools and cheered on our progress. We also have friends that have been there when we needed extra hands and who we’ve been able to help with their own home improvement projects. This network of family, neighbors and friends really makes it easy for us to be do-it-yourselfers. For a while now, I’ve wanted to create the same type of community online. A place where people can ask questions, get encouragement, and share their DIY success stories.

Enter Ning. Ning is a web application that allows anyone to build and customize your their very own social network. I first signed up with Ning back in 2005 when they were still beta testing. At the time, Ning only allowed you to create quirky hot-or-not, craigslist, & flickr knockoff sites. I never found a use for my own custom hot-or-not site, so I kinda forgot Ning for a while. Since then, the Ning platform has changed dramatically. A Ning-created site can be customized to share music, movies and photos. Each user can create a customized profile page, write blog posts, and participate in the forums and groups in the network. In short, it’s the perfect tool for a community of weekend warriors to share their experiences and expertise.

DIYalogue logo

But what should I call this social network for do-it-yourselfers? The requirements were simple. It had to be short, DIY/community related, and have an available domain name. After a lot of trial and error on the last requirement, I decided on DIYalogue. I’ll probably write more elsewhere on the development of the logo, but I think it turned out pretty sharp.

So whether you’re a first-time homeowner, a seasoned DIY veteran, or even just a fan of home improvement shows, head over to DIYalogue.com and join us!

6 comments on “Introducing DIYalogue

Maria says:

Nice work on the logo! Brings back memories of Chuck’s class. 🙂 I like the site concept too – would have made my job at Home Depot a lot easier.

Jan says:

I am doing a california patch right now. Thank you so much for the helpful info! 🙂

I’m glad you found that article helpful, Jan. Ames and I finished patching 2 holes in our kitchen ceiling over the weekend. We didn’t use a California patch this time though, we spanned the ceiling joists for a stronger patch since we had to hang a can light in one of the areas we were patching. 🙂 Amy’s mad drywall mudding skills made this the best ceiling we’ve worked on so far.

Ames says:

Yay! You think I have mad drywalling skills!

Lea says:

The icon and naming is killer! It’s funny you have this type of post because I recently finished a Ning skinning project for an affordable/sustainable housing group! It was surprisingly easy to customize though a bit of a pain to figure out the exact specificity of each element I wanted to design.

The logo was a lot of fun. I would have liked to fully skin the DIYalogue site itself, but if I did I would have never launched it. I think I only put one CSS override in the advanced styling pane to align the header picture so the specificity there wasn’t a problem. 🙂

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