With the advent of Ning charging for their service, actually i thought we were doing them a favour as we were drawing people into the site and their adverts - clearly that didn't pay for them though, i digress. Ning were going to start off by charging a small amount about $2 a month if you had less than 150 members of your Ning.

The How? WHY? DIY! ning now has about 123 members just  27 members short of the 150 mark. That was OK, I would be willing to pay that but after a conversation with Liverpool based Nerve Magazine they said there was an opportunity to have the How Why DIY event take place in a shop which they are getting access to as part of the shops up front project.

If/when How? WHY? DIY! Day, as I am calling it takes place then the numbers of people who are going to be involved are well going to exceed 150 in one way or another - leaving me with a problem, for Ning would then have liked to extracted from my very tight pocket $20 a month - I am generous but not than generous so a cheaper way had to be found that would house How? WHY? DIY! plus other groups that I am involved in such as Ignite Liverpool and Social Media Cafe.  I looked at various options for expanding the reach of Joomla (what this site is built upon) using extensions such as Jom Social and extending K2 which i already use but the choice came straight down to Buddypress.

I have never used Buddypress before but i'm not afraid to take risks as I believe that is what life is about (except when it comes to heights) - so here we go the new How? WHY? DIY! network

Take a look and get involved.