Oooh, oooh, oooh. Swinging Belleville rendez-vous. Marathon dancing, doop dee doop. Voodoo can-can

[hazelchaz]

Photos fron Sunday at CascadiaCon, including the Heinlein Banquet are online. Click on Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, or the lady (whose name I've forgotten) who's come between them to see the pictures from Sunday.

Regarding catching up and staying current with my captions and photos: Some captions get typed on location -- when I had some down time at the Radisson during the NASFiC, for example. But any photos that aren't captioned on site will generally not be typed up until the photos come online. The present situation is an excellent example. I sat down with my notebook and typed up all of my notes for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday; then I sorted the Sunday photos by daytime, Heinlein banquet, party hopping, and late-night (i.e. after midnight, so they actually have a Monday datestamp). And I expect I'll type up the Sunday captions by the time the Monday snaps go up...

Part of it has to do with what happens to the little notbook. On location, I have the notebook with me at all times, and I'm never far from the computer; so typing up the captions is something I can do a bit at a time. I can do it in stages, by first matching up my notes to photo file numbers (the above photo is cas433, for example -- photo #433 of the CascadiaCon photo project) and jotting the numbers down in the notebook while looking at the photos on the screen. But once I come home, I'm not carrying the notebook around with me all the time, so even if I'm in a position where I could be typing captions I don't necessarily have the data. (Sometimes the notebook is set aside because I've filled it up; the Glasgow trip used two notebooks, and the Seattle trip used part of the second Glasgow book and filled up an additional notebook. So now there are three full notebooks, none of them suitable for adding more captions when I take more photos such as that birthday party last weekend...)

Figuring out my limitations and how my work progresses is helping me to figure out how to get these things go as smoothly as possible.

Speaking of limitations: I desparately want and need more help on laconiv's website. What sort of help, you ask? Well, the jobs of taking care of laconiv.org break down more or less as follows, unless I've something out:

1. Website design decisions
   
2. Major site updates -- have to figure out where they fit in the design
   
3. Minor updates -- it's readily apparent where to put the new pages
   
4. Trivial changes -- trivial in the sense of dead easy, like fixing a typo on a page
   
5. Specialized page updates -- basically anything that's not a straight cut-and-paste. Simplest of these is adding a member's home page to our Members Home Pages list -- it's cookie-cutter HTML, but it's not just a matter of plain unadorned text with paragraph breaks. At present the "new members list" is in this category; I'm working at making it easier for Membership (Elayne) to upload the list directly, which feeds into the next topic...
   
6. Scripting, CGI, and automation issues, to make it even easier for the webmastering team to maintain the website. (Such as when a page is updated, the little "Update" tag should appear automatically in the right place, and an entry should be logged in the What's New history; preferably a descriptive entry, if that can be arranged.)
   
7. Adding new @laconiv.org e-mail addresses (this often needs to happen concurrent with minor updates)
   
8. Adding or maintaining who those e-mail addresses forward to. The e-mail addresses are generally set up as Mailman mailing lists, so we can easily add/delete people, we can turn over authority to do so to the department head responsible if they take an interest, and we have archives of the message traffic in case someone gets hit by a bus or has a computer meltdown or otherwise loses their own e-mail archives.
   
9. Reading the "Info" and "Help" e-mail and taking appropriate action, which is usally shooting back a quick stock answer (or sending them a URL with the answer), or forwarding the e-mail to the right department; from time to time, giving advice to the rest of the update team about answers we might want to put on the website.
   
10. Keeping an eye on outside point-of-contact e-mail traffic subject lines to make sure that there seem to be responses going out for about as many inquiries that come in.
    
11. Possibly compiling a Kevin Standlee-style "Death of Emails" summary of what's being talked about on the internal discussion lists; this means listening to all of the discussion lists and condensing them somehow.
    
12. Maintaining the Staff Website, where departments can upload files instead of forwarding attachments to the mailing lists.
    
13. Maintaining our blog presence.
    
14. E-mailing out press releases when appropriate, and coordinating them with items #3 and #13 above.

That's all I can think of right now. I'm comfortable with tasks #1, 2, 5, and 6, and Elayne's on top of #7 and 8. Christian and Elayne are on #9, but could use a relief. Scott's working on #12, and joansteward is overseeing laconiv for #13. I think we've got someone new lined up for #14.

Getting a new page with a new departmental e-mail address up and running isn't that hard to juggle, because usually uploading or changing a new page will have an automatic two-day (weekday) delay on it, and that should be enough time to get the department head to confirm it. Also the automatic delay gives the department head a chance to see what the page will look like, and on top of that it helps to make sure the webmasters don't get in each other's way; if you log in to edit the Members Home Pages list, and you see that there's already a deferred copy waiting to be activated a couple of nights down the road, it probably means someone else on the team has already dealt with it.

I'd like to have a number of people with the skills -- you shouldn't be afraid of a Unix command prompt, for example -- so that we can have "webmaster@laconiv.org" go to a team, and whichever person can get to the issue first takes care of it. It worked well for Chicon 2000, so I'm hoping to put it in place here.

tapestry01, are you interested in joining the project? I heard a rumor you might be... or someone else named Tim, not really sure...

Chaz

Comments

We're not using the hard parts, though.

[hazelchaz]

Here's how you'd add a page to the website. Let's say you were doing a page about the blood drive, that would go live on the 22nd.

Download a copy of http://www.laconiv.org/2006/web/blank.htm
Save it on your computer as _200509221_blood.htm .
Drop in the text for the blood drive, using, say, NOTEPAD.
Upload it back into the right directory...

If you were to log into the server with SSH, you could use "cd" to go to the right directory, "ls" to see what's in it, and "defer" to assign a 2-weekdays-in-the-future filename... then download a copy of the resulting file, edit it, re-upload it, and so forth.

Mostly i'm looking for people willing to edit HTML without using one of those fancy web page design programs that bloat up the file size by adding lots of extra HTML...

Chaz

Re: We're not using the hard parts, though.

[hazelchaz]

Oops, typo; _200509221_blood.htm should actually be _20050922_blood.htm to go live on the 22nd of September.