Can't make PeopleAggregator my own 

I stumbled on the first PeopleAggregator installation I'd seen in the wild today: a social network for social networking conferences.

It's unmistakably a PA site. You can tell by the look. Call me shallow, but looks matter to me, and that's what caused me to stop experimenting with it after my last try in August. It's not that I don't feel comfortable tricking out LAMP stuff; I do it all the time with my eyes closed. The format was just too rigid to allow me to customize it visually to the extent I wanted to without going to extreme lengths. Plus I don't like the default look nearly well enough to just live with it.

For instance, I looked in the CSS for more than two hours to work out how to change the container width, and ended up sighing at the realization that all the elements within are based on a 1016px-wide page and I'd have to tear apart the whole scheme, or start the look from scratch.

I really really like the idea of a roll-your-own social network, and commend Marc Canter for his vision and dedication to it. I want to like it, but I've tried the hosted version and my own installation and I just find it too much trouble to make it my own.

Maybe when PA gets more traction its developer community will share themes with more layout flexibility, and graphical elements that are more subtle with less reliance on gradients, and I'll try again. Or if they emulated Moodle, the open source LMS, which has a nice bare bones plain theme created for people who want to build their own themes from nothing. I'm not willing to give up on it because I do resonate with the principle behind it.

For now, I think if a department or functional unit at work wanted to try a targeted socnet, I'd have to, with some regrets, recommend making it with Ning. Not because it's so much more flexible but because its simpler default look I could live with.

About looks 

Do you feel sheepish when you admit that appearances count as much as other factors? I do; it makes me feel superficial even though I know I'm not.

But darn it, when a thing or a person is attractive it makes an emotional connection. Even Walt Whitman thought so, and you wouldn't exactly call him shallow.

Look at Dave's review of his new Chumby yesterday. He mentions a lot of factors but you can tell he's charmed by the cuddly appearance of the device and by the looks of the graphics it displays. It influenced him, made a connection with him. Don't you have to make that kind of a connection with a targeted social network? (See post just previous.) I think so.