Ive purchased the domain, The Driving Truth. It will be all one word. Ive decided on building a simple site with forums in the thought that we can offer resource materials, links and categories to media including Brett’s podcasts, books, pretrip videos pertaining to individual carriers, our members media and Old Schools book, also a section for company profiles, and training materials.
Nothing fancy, just a stock site. In the meantime, as time permits, I’ll continue setting this up, rather informal and establish moderators and admin.
If we can take a hive, community approach and answer new drivers questions as they come in, that will be great.
I don’t have a timeline yet on the site, but I will. Thanks for your patience. I’d also encourage members to start posting, if there’s issues, please let me know.
OH! That’s a whole new ballgame there. Now you’ll have to get deeper into the weeds for sure.
When I was looking into pre-built offerings, there seemed to be three general categories:
Managed forums - that’s what this Discourse website is. It’s a forum where they manage the backend for you. You manage the front-end administrative tasks, such as user management and style configuration. You don’t need any tech knowledge.
Managed content sites - these websites allow content like blogs, photo galleries, and file downloads. They manage the backend for you, just like Discourse. Therefore, no technical knowledge is required.
For some reason I couldn’t find any options that offered both a content site and a forum. It was one or the other. Maybe I missed one or two somewhere, but I used AI to help me search and couldn’t find anything that was complete.
Run your own site. This is where you have to start getting into the weeds. Most people hope to limit the pain by installing pre-built software, like Discourse and WordPress. Then, you still manage the frontend administrative part, such as user management and the look and layout, and you also manage software installations, updates, possibly SSL certificates, server configurations, and other related tasks.
It sounds like you’re gonna take a shot at #3. That’s how I started Trucking Truth, but once I got into it, I realized I couldn’t build what I truly wanted unless I wrote all the software myself. That is not reasonable, but I never have reasonable goals. It’s a multi-year odyssey, and I spent many years learning and developing it. So you’ll want to stick with pre-built software for sure.
I would suggest taking this approach:
Dig into the capabilities of what you have here first. Discourse may have enough features that you can share videos and files you mentioned here:
You might have to get a bit creative, but Discourse has had millions of users and its easy to find working solutions from other communities on Discourse.
If this place can’t cut it, then option 2:
Keep Discourse as your managed forum and get a managed website like Squarespace that manages the backend for you. They will have the non-forum features you want, such as photo galleries, blogs, and media sharing. There would be two locations to handle, Discourse and your Content Site, but it’s easy to link them to each other in a way that’s not a problem for users. They would need to register on both websites; no big deal at all.
If you want to dive into the tech world, get a hosted virtual private server (VPS), install pre-built software, and dig in.
There is no right or wrong approach; it’s simply a matter of finding the simplest and most effective way to accomplish your goals.
Im looking at a hosted and managed site that you can add a forum to, like a plugin. The forum component is managed as well under the site once it is added. If i can get it all in one place, thats the optimum, given my time constraints. In addition to all my business and family stuff, my house remodel, I have an album that my brother and I are in the middle of recording and producing, which absorbs most of my creative artistic energy.
Its looking like I should be able to have the forum here setup as a subdomain in a page on the main website, Ive got some digging around to accomplish this, but if so, that takes a lot off my plate.
I know Wordpress had a forum plugin way back in the day. I don’t know if I ever tried it or not, but that wouldn’t matter. We’re talking about well over 10 years ago.
So you might get away with using a single Wordpress install for the entire website, content and forum, if they have a viable plugin. That might be a good way to go.
You mentioned using a subdomain for the forum. Subdomains are treated like totally separate domains and can be very useful but also somewhat tricky. It might be a viable option as well.
It’s gonna take some trial and error. Just remember a great motto for tech - look for the ‘simplest, effective solution’ to everything. We all tend to think we need this large, complex stack to accomplish anything. Over the years, the code base for Trucking Truth actually got smaller and simpler and I elminated a lot of tools I used and replaced them wiht basic code.
For instance, I used Wordpress at first for my blog. I think at the time it had like 500,000 lines of code. I wrote my own blog software that had every feature I used from Wordress and it had maybe 1,000 lines. I rewrote it a few years later and it had even less.
Im a firm believer in the kiss principle. My lack of time is also a driving force in simplicity.
Basically, if im reading it right, it should be able to install the instance of discourse (this fourm) as a sub domain on a page of the main website as long as this forum is on a hosted plan, which it is. If not, the longer route will be to self host it on a vps, then do it. The dns pointers can be done with the simple website tools at godaddy.
I just need to dig through discourse and see if it can be done on hosted plan, that seems the simplest. I’ll have some downtime in the next few days. I have the skeleton of the site built, just simple stuff with Ai pics of trucks, etc.
I’d definitely like to kick around hosting a version of the high road training there if that’s something you might be open to considering, also I’d like to have a section that links your book, Dale’s book, Kerseys YouTube, and other literature/media as well.
Its been decades since I coded anything. Not quite as long for network jobs like server migration etc, but still a long time. I always enjoyed that aspect more. I grew up in silicon Valley with computers long before PCs were available, my dad was a systems analyst and consultant. Music wise, we’ve been digitally recording since the very early days of, early 90s.
I think that those of us who participated in TruckingTruth just want something very simple and basic that Davy can manage without investing a lot of time. Just a simple place to post and reply and contribute whatever we can to those who are new and keep in touch with old friends. I’m glad that the Truth lives on.
