Tag Archives for self-teaching

When you spell the keynote’s name wrong and the person who volunteers to fix it breaks the site

It had to happen, especially when you are working your way through school and volunteering and perhaps too tired to pay strict enough attention to detail: someone’s name gets misspelled.

It’s not right and should be corrected, but it’s especially wrong when it’s one of the KEYNOTES of the conference, and you’ve just launched a major media campaign to alert every homosexual in North America to go to your website and learn about said keynote.

My main collaborator is a woman who has never used WordPress, she’s bottomlining the Outreach/Press Release end of the Media team, and she got the email from the Keynote first and alerted me, who was trapped at my desk at work without recourse: what happened next is that she like a total I-can-figure-this-out badass looked up the WP log-ins on the shared Google Doc we have all our log-ins on [agility over security!], navigated to the post where the offending typing occurred, and copied in corrected text.

And somehow, broke the site. Continue reading →

Forums: to build or not to build and then how the hell to build

For the past three conferences, participants had been asking for forums to try to scheme rides and housing shares, and the past web designer was unwilling to build them. Now I know why — they are unwieldy and the out-of-the-box solutions are not exactly beautiful and they don’t always work how you want them to.

For a first attempt, I thought fuck forums they are so 2002. I’ll just install BUDDYPRESS AND WE’LL CREATE AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE IN THIS WEBSITE. After realising how non-agile and unachievable that was, I installed bbPress, the forum software that runs with BuddyPress. And this is how it looked, and all it did, note that 50 days had gone by without a use or a peep:

This bbPress forum did not work, so I went back to WordPress.org and began searching for an alternative, thinking perhaps that there were none at all. But, I found this, Mingle Forum, and downloaded and installed in in the /plugins folder on our WordPress site.

Upon first install, it was the default blue color that “all links are, so I went into the Forum’s Forums [meta!] and found out that the design treatment on a forum is called a skin, and downloaded the first red one I found. It kind of matches our site, enough that I am willing to go with it:

Continue reading →

Using Google Forms: failing forward for free

When we decided that we’d use Google as our collaborative software I was bummed that the Evil Empire would be able to data mine our project — and that the possibility of the “cloud” evaporating was present — but I relaxed when I realized it would solve one of the major problems I as a web designer was facing: FORMS.

I *could* take hours to build a form and then have the input emailed to each responsible committee but that sounded like it would take a lot of administrative work and could go wrong at many places. But with Our New Friend Google Docs, committees could make a form tailored to their needs, share it with the Collective’s gmail, and also capture all the responses themselves.

So easy! So amazingly easy that the Performance committee form-builder even taught herself to shut down the form when the Call closed. Now if only the web designer could learn to hide the sidebars so they don’t flow over the input area of the form…

Teaching Ourselves & Each Other: Blogging & Sharing

Theory: Making space for folks to engage in self-teaching is empowering others to teach themselves

An opportunity to honor agreements about process and collaboration:

  • With the Femme Conference, when we agreed on using google-docs as part of our process, that meant we would use the file-sharing and form-making capacities
  • Some people kept sending docs as links not “sharing” –> sent gentle reminders twice over a few months to “Share” so we can all access
  • Some people sent me g-docs with their forms in them –> sent a gentle reminder to make forms in gmail and “share” it with me and the Collective gmail account.
  • Are these details kind of trivial? NO! They determine whether the entire technology setup is going to be collaborative or a shitstorm of emails and confusion.

An opportunity to give people access to resources and to support accessibility by providing resources:

Blogging was happening a lot by four committees and not at all from the other five committes. In the interest of accessibility, I created a google doc how-to and shared it. [download it here] It contains both direct links to WP’s documentation on blog posting and a step-by-step Best Practice Guide that uses screenshots from the actual femme2012.com blog to help folks see exactly what/where they are doing: