I’m headed to West Palm Beach, Florida on Monday for a week to hang out with DJ Strouse and Casey Stark while building cool things with Django, aka work on the Connection Engine. Casey put together a project blog and I’ll probably post updates there, here, on the blog, and on my own blog. To start things off, however, I gave them a short introduction to the ideas behind the Connection Engine.
Tag Archive for 'planning'
Tonight I researched information on creating Wordpress theme frameworks. The Wordpress Codex actually has some really great information with links to example frameworks as well as some handy tutorials for creating a framework. There’s also this post which is a summary of 20 different frameworks; it provides a good overview of some of the options out there.
Justin Tadlock has written an interesting post about why he created a Wordpress framework. The post covers some of the basics about what some fundamental aspects to a framework should be as well as what the benefits are. It’s definitely worth a read and makes it seem as though we are definitely headed down the right track here.
The frameworks
In terms of code to look at for ideas, one of the more well known frameworks is Thematic. This is a framework created by Ian Stewart that has actually been developed into a business model as well.
Elliot Jay Stocks has also written a framework of his own called Starkers. It takes the premise that a framework ought to provide nothing more than a code base, not even any visual styles. Interesting concept and Stocks is a stellar designer so it might be a good basis for inspiration and ideas.
Carrington is also another framework. This one is interesting because they have also built in a mobile interface for the sites. This could provide an interesting basis for developing mobile versions of client sites we create.
Tutorials and Miscellaneous
There’s also this tutorial which is part of a series that covers how to create and structure your own framework. Some good background information.
Secondly, I researched some information on creating a Wordpress child theme. Since this is how we’ll be handling client-specfic themes we will want a solid understanding of how to accomplish this. First, there is this tutorial which takes the Basic2Col framework as a starting point and walks you through how to build a child theme off of it.
Finally, this post looks at why child themes are the future of Wordpress. It also includes a solid list of example frameworks and articles about frameworks and what they can do for development.
That’s a quick highlight of some of the most popular frameworks and posts to give a quick introduction to creating our own.
Two things we didnt cover tonight that we need to figure out in the next couple of days. First, we should institute time tracking for at least all hosting requests, but preferably all project-related work. With this information, well be able to see what type of work is taking the most time and price it accordingly. Im open to whether we upgrade Basecamp to track this information, use another tool, or everyone does it on their own. I’d think that a group tool would be most effective though.
Secondly, we need to have an on-call calendar so that we can rapidly respond if something goes down, even if it means calling the most knowledgeable person. I think we should split up days of the week as well as holidays.
We’ve been consistently able to keep our weekly team calls short. Attendance was a little low at this week’s call because we pushed it back an hour (to 5 p.m. PST) to accommodate for Daniel and Andrew who were at BarCamp. On the call we had Daniel, Andrew, Greg, Will, Albert and Lauren.
High priority: Review of Thursday’s client session
Andrew hosted our first client session Thursday during which about a dozen clients joined him via livestream and chat to walk through the process of setting up a sandbox demo site for experimentation. Although there were no technical difficulties, Greg and I noted that the quality was degraded, making it hard to follow exactly what was going on.
Next time, we’re going to try to improve the streaming quality, have everyone introduce themselves, and outline the goals and format for the session from the start. We’re going to try to do the sessions every other week and switch off who leads the session. If you participated and have any feedback, let us know in the comments.
Medium priority: #NCMC09!
Alas the week of the National College Media Convention is here. Daniel, Andrew, Adam and myself will be in Austin, Texas Wednesday night to dominate the convention with our snazzy new CoPress t-shirts and business cards.
Andrew, Daniel and I are going to meet up Wednesday afternoon in Austin to figure out a game plan for the rest of the conference (sessions we’ll attend, panels we want to be on, etc.). Depending on how many clients are interested in joining us, we’ll hold either a client dinner/lunch or just a general tweetup.
Low priority: Editorial content
Next week Greg and Vanessa are planning on another College Media Lab, but we’re still waiting on guest confirmations. Tuesday I’ll be posting a CoPress promo video, and the rest of the week we’ll be liveblogging from NCMC. I’m also taking a video camera and tripod so we can do a few videos at the conference.
The overall intent of this document is to provide a set of goals for CoPress to steer itself towards in the last three months of 2009. These goals presented as milestones encompass the entirety of our operations, and will give us more specific criteria for determining whether we’re scaling like we’d like to. In short, benchmarks to determine whether we’re on course with where we want to be. At the beginning of 2010, we’ll be able to look back upon this, critically reflect, and define plans for the first six months of the new year.
Managed Hosting
Scaling Managed Hosting, currently our primary business and project for expanding the market, is a top priority for fall 2009. We’re shooting for 75 Managed Hosting clients launched or signed and started with sandboxes by the end of fiscal year 2009.
Getting potential clients to commit to switching during the school year might present some difficulty. One strategy will be to convince them of the merit of working on the redesign for a couple of months, and then relaunching their site over winter break 2009. Most student newspapers should be able to make the transition successfully in that period. With adequate planning, the launches will be within the scope of our abilities and we’ll be able to handle their archives as they come and as our resources allow.
Continue reading ‘Strategic goals and benchmarks for last quarter 2009′
This week’s call was unexpectedly forced to become a text chat due to some difficulties with Skype. Not to be deterred though Daniel, Miles, Lauren, Greg, Adam, and myself typed out our meeting notes and ideas. While brief the “call” still hit on our main development progress and the upcoming ACP/CMA conference.
High Priority
To start things off I covered the Managed Hosting outreach goals for the coming months. Over the next few weeks Daniel and myself will be sending out emails to 10 new schools a week in order to reach out to perspective clients and bring new members into the Forum and Wiki community.
Daniel also covered preparation for the fast approaching ACP/CMA conference in Austin, TX. He’ll be putting together a budget for the event soon and then we’ll start getting business cards, t-shirts, stickers, and maybe even some DVD handouts together. Lauren also suggested the idea of doing some informal tweet-ups during the day.
Medium Priority
Thanks to a lot of hard work by Miles the first stage of the Connection Engine will be up and running soon. Once it’s up on the server we’ll create some test accounts to start putting it through its paces. Lauren and myself will then work on skinning it to fit in the spirit of Version 3 of copress.org.
We also discussed a new workflow for editorial ideas on the blog. We’ll be posting ideas to CoPress Micro with the hashtag #copressblog. Daniel also mentioned a list of ideas for things that we aim to accomplish this fall and will be sending it out to team members later this week.
Editorial/Community
- Monday – no content planned
- Tuesday – Vanessa, commenting policies
- Tuesday – Mo, version 0.2 Edit Flow
- Wednesday – Lauren, edu video #5
- Thursday – Adam, site launch roundup
- Friday or Saturday – Daniel, We Clicked On
I’m headed downtown later today to meet with Nick Cottle and Carolynn Duncan of the Portland Ten, a project to help foster 10 startups reach $1 million in revenue by October 2010. I’m not sure that we’ll be headed down that track yet, especially because they want to work with startups based in Oregon, but they offer Startup Checkup meetings where they ask questions and give feedback on the entire scope of our business. I thought I’d try this out in order to get wise advice on some of the biz dev questions we currently have.
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?
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