Birth of jangama portal

I have had this idea of creating a portal for the mobile users in Sri Lanka for some time. Since I have been sitting on my idea and not doing anything about it, I went ahead and purchased a domain name to force myself to do something about it. I purchased jangama.com a few months back. Jangama means mobile in sinhalese. I thought it was an apt name to call the portal which was essentially going to be a user community for mobile device users. I actually wanted to create a strong consumer lobby of mobile users.

Now I was sitting on the domain name as well. It is still pointing to un underconstruction page. But this time around the reasons were partially financial. I need to purchase web hosting space.

I was quite determined that I was going to base my portal on the dotnetnuke portal engine. More than anything else, it was going to save my time spent on developing the portal. Besides I found that DNN had almost all of the stuff (modules) that I needed to have in my portal (and a few more). But the problem was, as I mentioned earlier, was web space. I needed to find web space of around 17 MB's that supported ASP.NET.

There were free web space providers, like brinkster.com, etc, etc. But all of them had plenty of limitations. For example, most of the free web space providers did not support ftp access to the free accounts. Or they had limitations on the file sizes, or they expired the accounts after a while (webmatrixhosting.com). Hence I was left helpless.

Then I came across somee.com. They are fantastic. They offer 15MB free space with ASP.NET 1.1 support. And for a free hosting account, their bandwidth seems quite good.

I have uploaded DNN and created a portal @ www.jangama.somee.com for my portal. I am in the process of carrying out dual tasks at the moment. First is testing out the hosting service, before I upgrade my account to a paid account (yes you heard me right, I am planning to get a paid account with somee.com). Second is building up the portal, getting the modules together. So far I am pretty happy with both elements of my infrastructure, the DNN portal engine and my hosting provider somee.com.

I hope to finish work on the first version of the portal by the end of the month. And hopefully, by next month I can unveil my portal to my friends for their comments and eventually to the broader internet community.