🠈 About Community Color 🠊
Community Color is an independent effort to create directories and calendars for select communities in the Mountain West. The collection includes directories for Arizona, Colorado (where I was born) and Utah (where I happen to live*).
I began creating geodomains because I was interested in understanding the impact that the Internet would have on our society at large. Will the Internet create boundless opportunities for individuals or will it feed the forces of centralization?
I believe that the best way to understand the impact of the Internet on the community is to look at the impact that it has on local communities.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the Internet spawned the creation of new businesses as people created web design firms. People also discovered that the Internet allowed them to sell goods and services throughout the nation.
Unfortunately, as people focused on chasing a global audiences, they began neglecting their local communities. When the recession hit, most of the newly formed companies collapsed. Today, the Internet appears to be a force for excessive consolidation.
The community color project itself is just a large human edited directory. Yes, I have personally looked at every site listed in the directory to see if I can find a local connection. I review the sites about every two years to delete failed concerns.
The structure I use is as follows. If a business has one or two locations in an area, I link directly to the business. If it has multiple locations, I create a "profile page," Each of the locations link to the profile page. I hope to add additional resources aimed specifically at examining the interplay of local and national concerns.
I also switched from using PHP 3 to PHP 7 and from MySQL to Sqlite. This move required that I rewrite every single line of code. The new design is more robust and I hope to add more features.
Funding the Site
This project is an individually funded sole-proprietorship. To fund the site, I joined affiliate programs for merchants operating in the area. I list the affiliate link for the site and run affiliate ads at the tops of pages. Unfortunately the income from affiliate ads dropped below my web hosting fees. I moved the site to a new server in 2017 lowering my hosting fees.
* NOTE: I live in Salt Lake City. I am not LDS. When I started the project, I was actually told by community leaders to leave. So, I moved to Idaho and created directories for Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Montana. I moved back to Salt Lake for the 2002 Olympics. I gave the first directories to other people, keeping Missoula.WS.
Personally, I hold the radical view that everyone who lives in an area is part of the community even if they do not belong to the local church. My goal is to list every local site I find (excluding pornography or illegal acitivities) regardless the race or creed of the web designer.