New Website: CMBarkada.org

I was inspired to create another website today: a Flickr-esque website to display my huge collection of photos of my friends from Caritas Manila, a major charitable institution in the Philippines. All it cost me to launch the new website was the cost of the domain cmbarkada.org which I registered with Namecheap for $5.06 for one year. Everything else I needed I already had: unlimited hosting from Namecheap and a library of WordPress themes from Virtualmodo and Dessign.net.

Let me explain the domain a little. CM obviously stands for Caritas Manila, while “barkada” is a Filipino word for a close-knit group of friends. So essentially, CM Barkada means “goods friends from Caritas Manila”. It’s a term I coined in 1997. In fact, I admin an active CM Barkada group on Facebook and before Facebook ruled the world I maintained a website which aimed to keep members of the CM Barkada, which were increasingly spread all over the world, in touch with one another. The domain I used for it was cmbarkada.com which is now unregistered. I suppose I could have re-registered it for the new website but I thought a .org domain was more appropriate.

The CM Barkada Facebook group does a very good job of keeping everyone in touch and updated and so the focus of CMBarkada.org is different. It has nothing but photos. I have almost three decades of Caritas Manila photos. Eventually, I would also like to introduce the feature that will allow others to register as users and upload their own photos but that will not be for at least a year. It will take me a while to upload all my photos and then develop and promote the website.

I chose the Right Folio Responsive Theme from Dessign.net. It wasn’t particularly designed for a photo website but with the help of the widget Galleries by Angie Makes, I was able to design a website that displays photo galleries quite well. I hope my friends will like it.

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