Using Google+ Pages for Modules

You may have noticed the nice little g+ icon on the site, I've started using a Google+ Page to deliver and organize information about the Contextual Administration module I maintain. This is an interesting new use scenario for me, and I wanted to share what I'm doing and why.

Disclaimer

Everyone knows that the project system on Drupal.org needs a little love. As I understand it it's actually getting that love right now and we just haven't seen the results on the live site yet, so I eagerly await that future, and this is not meant to detract form it at all. Maintaining a module that is inherently complex, I often find that video is the best way of expressing how to utilize the module to its greatest extent. Similarly I try to continue active development on the module, but this blog and my twitter account is about the limit of platform I've devised thus far to discuss what I'm doing and why. I would very much like to open a conversation about these things in a non-issue-queue area, but that has just seemed very impossible thus far. Then last week-ish google+ released their new pages system so I decided to see if it could function in some greater capacity than what I had managed with this blog thus far. I won't claim to have succeeded, but there are some key "win" points here that are worth discussing.

Blog + Share = WIN!

The ability to have content re-shared across all of google+ is a big deal. My posts aren't getting much in the way of traction there yet, but still people I don't know are sharing my posts with their followers, and that's encouraging.

Photo Albums = WIN!

Yeah that seems odd at first, except that g+ allows me to organize these by album, and I can upload videos instead of photos. Organizing the videos, in order, is awesome because while I just finished my first video series, I'm intending to start a new one shortly and logically separating these topics by the "feature" I'm building is REALLY beneficial. The only missing thing for me is the ability to build a help system, and really drupal.org is probably a much better place for that in any event. If you want to see what I'm doing here, maybe steal some ideas and improve upon them or share them, please just click the google+ icon on the page.

Future?

It'd be amazing if I could build some deeper functionality between my existing blog (here) and my g+ pages. Probably should dig into the g+ apis and see what's available, but thus far I'm very satisfied.