Day 1 of GiveCamp done. Really hot. The air conditioning was out in the airport and it really heated up in there.
My project this year is for the International Women’s Air & Space Museum. The minimum project was pretty easy and we’re basically done with it already.
Continue reading post "GiveCamp 2017 day 1"GiveCamp is almost here again. Taking off a half day tomorrow to pack, prepare, and hopefully make it there on time.
Continue reading post "#1542"Looks like I’m going to GiveCamp after all. A few days after going on the waitlist, a spot opened for me and I was able to sign up.
Looks like I may not be going to GiveCamp for the first time in a long time. I’ve been going every year since 2011.
Continue reading post "#1506"GiveCamp 2016 is over. Another successful year. The new Cleveland Garlic Festival site is live. I didn’t do much on the site the final day besides for fix some URLs and move some files to help with the launch. I did break away to help another team fix some issues with image sliders on the homepage. Not just any team, but one doing some updates to the Cleveland GiveCamp website. I don’t believe those changes are live yet though. During this, I got to work a little while with my cousin’s friend Dara for the first time.
As usual this year, I recognized a number of people from previous years. My project manager was a project manager from a couple years ago. I talked to several of the people I’ve worked with in the past and have seen multiple years. There is definitely a networking aspect to the event. Some of the people I see at meetups and other events.
Continue reading post "GiveCamp 2016 done"Day 2 of GiveCamp is complete. My team is in quite good shape. We shed one member early on. I too left to be re-purposed, but that didn’t last long. I briefly helped one team determine that, after my attempt to help them hack a plugin, it was time to jump ship to another. They didn’t need my further assistance, and the organizers couldn’t find another place for me, so I went back to my original team. Another of our members went home early. Even at a relaxed pace and searching for things to do, we were able to complete their nice-to-haves and improve some things from their quick-setup state. Tomorrow should be easy.
The event of the day more present on my mind at the moment is that my tent pole broke. When I first lay down in it, I saw the pole going at a weird angle. I got out and pulled the fly partly off to find the pole split and rather sharp. The tent was standing alright, but, not wanting the pole to poke through the fly, I attempted to fix it. I spent like an hour between working on and thinking of a field repair. In the end, nothing really got the broken pieces to stay together when the pole was arched. Now I lay in a slightly tilted, wonky tent, tired My tent is a Eureka Midori, and this is the second Eureka I’ve had the pole break on. Neither had I used very many times, maybe a handful each. Disappointing.
First day of GiveCamp 2016. Working on the Cleveland Garlic Festival website. Seems like it’s going to be another relatively easy one, as I think the last few have been. We are rebuilding the site to run on WordPress and be responsive, plus other general improvements as we go. I’m on a team of four plus one organization representative. Things are going smoothly.
Registered for Givecamp again.
Slightly over a week ago, I finished my fourth Cleveland GiveCamp. GiveCamp is a weekend of developing websites and other things for area nonprofits. As usual, it was a good time. My project this year was an update to Lake Erie Ink’s site. They had actually had their site built at the GiveCamp two years prior (I was not on that project, but know someone who was). They just wanted a map added to their site that showed where kids were writing or writing about. With six developers and a developing project manager, along with a WordPress plugin, we were able to get the basic functionality working rather quickly. So quickly that we had something working Friday night and started shedding developers to other projects. By Sunday it was basically down to just me and the project manager (plus the Lake Erie Ink people, of course). We added in some extra improvements in addition to the map. We brought in a couple of designers for brief stints to help us with some design issues.
For my part, I did help some with the map, but spent most of my time making their site responsive and tweaking the home page to include a callout for the map page. The site had not been designed with responsiveness in mind at all. It had nested divs with fixed pixel widths that accommodated padding of the parents’ even when width: 100% would’ve done the same thing. In addition, id’s were used a lot, even multiple times per page, there was a lot of unnecessary redundancy and extra CSS in the styles (such as repeated blocks and things like margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px), and extra heading elements were made up to provide extra heading styles (h7, h8, and h9). The templates were confusing at times and some had different versions or nearly identical related templates.
Finished my third Cleveland GiveCamp last weekend. Another successful event. This year, my project was a new web site with more features for Bike Cleveland. We were doing well enough with that project that I was able to help another project Saturday night and Sunday, a web application for the Cuyahoga Valley National Park Environmental Education Center.
Bike Cleveland is a bicycle advocacy group for the greater Cleveland area. They had an existing site that was in WordPress, but wanted it to be more engaging for members, allowing more involvement and discussion. Our group was composed of a team lead, four developers, a designer/ux person, and a learning teen with photo editing knowledge. Our client was good with WordPress, able to install plugins and what not, and generally understood what we were doing, so he was very easy to work with.
We started Friday night discussing what he wanted. We decided what was most important and what we could skip if time was short. He wanted to involve members with forums, an ability to submit events, forms to submit accidents and thefts, to have buttons to share things, and to emphasize ways to become involved with the organization. They also wanted the site to work on mobile devices so that people could use it from phones while out cycling.
Continue reading post "GiveCamp 2013"