My motives were selfish, but they didn’t have to do with getting any free consultation on my primary business. No, I knew that he was fun to have a gab with and I also wanted to twist his arm into helping me with a side project I’m launching called BoatHQ.ca. I’ve blogged about it here before, but it’s remained in a state of soft-launch for months now. Like most side-projects, it had been creeping along as I tried to define the best way to build the community, the services the site should offer and a myriad of other things. The bonus was that I knew that Norm was a boating enthusiast times ten. In fact, I knew that he was—and I’m paraphrasing him here—in the fourth year of a one year restoration of a classic wooden boat.

I wasn’t disappointed. Norm “got it” and provided me with some interesting insights about approach, and a willingness to have a look at the beta-site. Perhaps even down-the-road, he may even even help with the taxonomy of the forum and generate some content in the form of an article or 6 about his restoration project. (He won’t know until he reads this that I’ll be soon leaning on him to actually moderate the boat-building section, though I probably should have saved that part for another meeting in a bar.)

But wait, there’s more—

As we were talking he mentioned the importance of giving things away, and tossed me one: he had often thought there was a real value in distilling things down into their 3 basic elements. That people who knew stuff could usually lay them out simply as a “1, 2, 3″. We chatted about it and I agreed that it was a cool concept, but didn’t think much more than that. Until bed that night. Fueled by a couple of Guinness and perhaps some bad mustard, I came up with a concept of making a user-generated site for folks to do that very thing: share their knowledge of subjects as a series of 1, 2, 3′s. I wanted it to be a simple, straight-ahead interface. Serious or Funny, I wasn’t sure. Maybe both; maybe that would be decided by the users. I just wanted a simple way for people to add them.

Rollout was another question. How do I finance it? Who’s going to program it? Where would I find the time to manage it?

Within six Google searches I had my answers…

WordPress To The Rescue

Knowing that I didn’t have the coding chops to start from scratch, my little project was going to have to rely heavily on some out-of-the-box solutions. Joomla! seemed like too much overhead, and I’m already knee-deep in it with the boathq.ca project. And I’ve been really impressed with WordPress’ development of late. Well, that’s now the understatement of the year.

With a few well-chosen plugins, I was able to cobble together an app, a design and a cool little site. Here are the stars of the show:

I wanted to rollout quickly, so any hopes for a design phase were out of the question. I knew that I wanted to have the title fixed on the left, with the post titles being an extension of the domain name, so when I tripped over Allan Cole’s Boumatic I nearly wet myself. It was perfect: a child-theme for Thematic – which I love working with and protects me from update-hell down the road – and a stunner to boot. It deals with a fontstack that really sings on a Mac, and it really best suits very modern browsers, but this was a fun site, so I wasn’t going to start reaching down to the lowest common denominator.

Next up was a mechanism to handle user-submissions. Say hello to my little friend, TDO Mini Forms. This is a form plugin that allows almost everything I was looking for and more. Users can upload their lists, form design is straight-ahead, and it has functions I hadn’t even thought of – but will definitely be using. Best just to see it in action, as descriptions don’t do it any justice. Hell, I was even able to hack The Man in Blue’s wonderful WidgEditor into it, to make gorgeous little simple text editing for visitors. And if I can do it, anybody can.

Finally, I’ve been testing and trying some of the fabulous plugins available for WP – I’ll add proper credits once I get solid on which will remain in use.

So without further adieu: the123of.com … Do anything — in three easy steps. Check it out. I’d love to hear what you think!