Working the weekend turned out to be quite productive with Keith and I coming up with new ideas for On Orbit as well me solving the programming puzzle of getting our content management system (CMS) Intercat working our new social news service Mercury. Now whenever one of our editors adds a story using our CMS it automatically gets categorized and added to Mercury. Along with our news stories being added to Mercury any member will be able to add stories and have users comment and vote on them.
One of the smaller services I'm trying to get ready for the launch is what I've called dTwitter. Basically this is Drupal module that allows users to view their Tweets on On Orbit as well as updating their Tweets.
Keith and I made the decision to move back the launch of On Orbit to September 12th. Since I'm on travel between the 5th and 11th it made no sense to launch on the 4th when I won't be around to closely monitor things.
Of note to those of you interested in NASA, the young crowd at Ames has started a new blog called Open NASA. It's an offsite blog geared towards "open content transparency and participatory engagement at NASA". It's worth keeping track of. They get it.
The countdown clock is reset, we are now at T-minus 16 days before On Orbit launch to our alpha users.