This week’s team call was wrought with undiscernable voices, but it only furthered the discussion on the unknown future for CoPress. In attendance were Greg, Miles, Joey me and a hard-to-hear Daniel who was on call from New York.
Organization
The main focus of the call was centered around futures of CoPress. The team is still posed with two options:
- Go for profit, find a dedicated core team, develop the revenue platform and work on creating a market for it. This will take a lot of time and a lot of dedication.
- Stay non-profit and discontinue expansion of hosting clients
Of course, there are many in-between options. One examples that came up was becoming a “transition” resource to train colleges moving to their own hosting (on a per-hour pay basis). Daniel indicated that the ideal situation might look like having about 2-4 people working on development and managing hosting operations.
Continue reading ‘June 28, 2009: Can you hear me now?’
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Joey, Lauren, Andrew, and I spent a half hour this evening talking more about the decisions we have to make in the next week or so.
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Due to ever-present technical difficulties, this evening’s installment of our bi-weekly team conference call (now on a vacation schedule) got off to a late start at 16:13 PST/19:13 EST. Thankfully, Emily’s adept time moderating skills kept us to a short (and somewhat unusual) 49-minute total. Joining her on the call were Daniel, Joey, Greg, Lauren and myself. Continue reading ‘Late but Efficient: June 14, 2009 Conference Call’
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As the new design associate at CoPress, I have a few projects up my sleeve for the summer involving design and multimedia.
Educational videos
Part of CoPress’ mission is to provide students with the resources they need to be sustainable, and what better way than a few quick video tutorials? These will be simplified tutorials with the pure basics, which can also be accompanied by more in-depth blog posts and wiki pages.
I plan to do the first few videos on my own, but I want the rest of the team to brainstorm with me to write the rest of the content collaboratively.
Right now I’m working on the first video about going web first which will cover in about 4 minutes:
- What does it mean to go web first?
- Why should you go web first?
- How would a web first workflow look? (Both College Publisher and WordPress)
- Problems to anticipate
- Quick tips
Other ideas for possible educational topics include how to use Twitter effectively, how to design a user-friendly Facebook fan page, the steps to prepping for live streaming and whatever else the team can think of. This is just a start.
Continue reading ‘Summer design goals’
June 18th: Minn Daily App & How to Take Your Facebook Presense to the Next Level
- This is huge. We really need to be talking more about this. I’m thinking someone can get in contact with someone at the Minn Daily and get details on the whole process from beginning to end. Because the project is open source, we can expect a lot more college media outlets to be doing this. Maybe the Minn can offer up some advice?
June 24th: Best of Student Media Podcasts
- An in-depth look on what college newspapers are doing well. Are they daily? Weekly? Do the best podcasts include conversations between staffers on recent news? Are they interviews with staff members or news makers? On the tech side, what equipment do they use to record and edit?
July 1: Analytics – When to Know if You’re Falling Behind
- Every industry has their standard (found out this summer 4 minutes is the average time visitors spend on cable news’ Web sites). What is it for college newspapers? How many pages does the average reader visit? How do you know when your site is falling behind?
What do you guys think about using Tinychat for the video part of our next conference call? I’m impressed with how slick it is.
The CoPress board met over Skype on Sunday for our first official board meeting, and we continued to mark off a list of firsts. Andrew Dunn is the inaugural chairman of the board, Suzanne Yada (hey, that’s me!) the vice-chairwoman and Jackie Hai is the secretary. We also have a shiny new set of bylaws, but more of that in a second.
First, the people on the call:
Bylaws
Continue reading ‘May 31, 2009: The first board meeting’
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Adam, Greg, Miles, Emily, Lauren, and Andrew Spittle joined me at 4 pm on Sunday afternoon to partake in our now bi-weekly team conference call. Joey didn’t check in, but we later learned that he was scrambling to get all of his stuff out the door for a cross-country drive.
Hosting
The big shindig this week happened on Wednesday when I learned at about 8 am PT that all of the databases on our primary server were down. When I tried to edit our wiki, it said that it was having trouble connecting to the database. I then tried to load the main website to the same result. After calling and talking to Miles about the problem, I went ahead and called Liquid Web’s support line. They took the action of restarting the server, which appeared to resolve all of our problems.
Analysis after the fact indicated that a spike in requests to the Mustang Daily over Tuesday night/ Wednesday morning used up all of the memory on the server. This caused various services to go down, including MySQL.
Continue reading ‘May 31, 2009: Things that go boink at night’
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