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.

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!

I had the pleasure of meeting Andy Rutledge in person while I was in Dallas for the Webmaster Jam Session and can say with confidence that he is as passionate about design fundamentals and bringing them to the web as he comes across in his Design View articles and podcasts. In his latest podcast, Andy strayed from his “usual fare” of design education and web industry professionalism to share his views on Living Purposefully. I personally found his message to be quite inspiring and a well-timed reminder to follow that nagging sense of what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. I wasn’t going to write a post about this, but a few people I read and respect have chimed in with rebuttals on the faith-inspired focus of Andy’s message.

As a whole, I see the web community is a very agnostic, if not passionately athiest crowd. For that reason, I think a lot of people suppress their beliefs and convictions out of respect for those around them. If you believe that the idea of a higher power is patently ridiculous, this isn’t so hard to do. As someone who agrees with Andy and believes in a living God, and how my faith in that belief is what also gives me purpose and direction, holding my tongue out of a sentiment so pitifully self-centered as respect is a truly inadequate cause. If I care about the people with whom I share respect and connection, talking about the reason for my hope, purpose, and direction in life should not be something I am afraid to do. But honestly, I am. I’m afraid of pigeonholing myself as a Christian amongst people who admit that doing so will cause their respect for me to “slip a couple notches”.

For that reason, I normally don’t go around offering my deepest sympathies to those who don’t derive their purpose in life from something bigger than themselves. However, if I expressed what I believe is the true penalty of denying God’s existence, it would be a far more poignant plea than my deepest sympathies. That statement which Jeremy Kieth found so condescending was merely background information for the real message and intent of Andy’s podcast. You don’t have to subscribe to any religious beliefs to find merit in Andy’s words. In fact, if all references to God and Faith were removed, the podcast would still be an inspiring post about doing what you enjoy and that which makes you feel whole. If you cannot separate yourself from your beliefs or lack thereof long enough to be inspired by such a message then as as Andy said, “I’m afraid you do not grasp what ‘purpose’ is”.

Q: What do you get from a retailer who makes tens of millions of dollars each year in unredeemed gift cards?
A: Some really cool gift cards!

Ames saw a Fatwallet thread yesterday titled “Moving LED message banner on Gift Card = FREE from BB”. At the very minimum, this sounded like a good gift idea, so we decided to go to Best Buy last night and check them out. Sure enough, they had a BUNCH of them on the gift card display at the front of the store. We grabbed 5. One for each of us to keep and three to give out as gifts. When we got to the cashier I asked what the minimum amount was that I could put on each gift card. The answer: One Penny. He rung up all 5 gift cards, Ames dug a quarter out of her purse, and he gave us 20 cents back. SWEET!

Each Roboshop gift card can store up to 6 different messages. The first one can be a whopping 512 characters and the others can each be up to 256 characters. The back of the card has 3 buttons to operate and program messages for the display. You can adjust the speed and luminosity of each message to a value from 1-9. All the instructions you need to program the gift card are written on the back of the packaging. You can read more about the technical circuitry/LED/battery details from the über nerds in the Fatwallet thread, but for a penny each, I could think of hundreds of cool uses for these little scrolling LED message banners.

1. Cover the top and bottom of the gift card with duct tape and wear it as a scrolling LED Belt Buckle (That doesn’t cost $13.99).
2. Save “Occupied”, “Empty”, and “Do NOT go in there!” as three of your messages and use it outside the bathroom as a status message.
3. Program the same message into several LED units laid end to end and try to turn them on sequentially so that the message appears to scroll seamlessly across all of them.
4. Dissasemble (Johnny 5) and try to find a way to input messages into it through a computer.
5. Set up a scavenger hunt, hiding several units around a city and save the clue for the next stage of the hunt as a message on the LED.

I could go on for a while, but I’m curious - what would you do with a super-cheap scrolling LED display unit?

PS: I feel no remorse about paying a penny for these things as it’s Best Buy’s own policy and because they make millions each year from unredeemed gift cards. I do not however, advocate buying a bunch of these things for a penny each. The fun wouldn’t last very long if very few people horded all of them. Have fun!