[ale] How Do I Join? (attn Marc)

[Aaron Ruscetta]

On 2009, Feb, 20, , at 7:51 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:

>  On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 7:23 AM, Geoffrey <lists at serioustechnology.com> wrote:
>>
>>  [snip]  If you want to help support
>>  the website, the first thing you should do is find out who currently
>>  does that.  Then, you should contact them and discuss your
>>  concerns/ideas.  Throw something together, stick it out there and see
>>  what people think. [snip]

Respecting your generous offer to do some volunteer work with ALE, I
think Geoffrey offers the right approach for getting involved here.

Since we moved the ALE.org web site and hosting to a new server and admin,
I've fallen into the spot of default web site maintainer, mostly because
I was already doing most of the meeting and event announcement postings
and I helped coordinate updating the hosting situation last year.

We did a major update of the Word Press package in the course of the server
move, but it is about due to go from 2.5 to 2.7 now. I was a little slow
in getting around to updating the site content (slow because of time needed
to learn enough of Word Press and the site layout to do more than post
"blogs") but I have done a fair number of minor maintenance and
touch up bits over the past six months -- things like fixing links,
updating the meeting direction pages and updating the "about" paragraphs.
I've also ben trying to be a little better about posting event and meeting
details in a timely manner.

Agreeing with what several others in the thread have indicated, I think
the web site design is fine for the information we are currently delivering
and I don't see a lot of reason for a major re-design of ALE.org if it is
ONLY for the sake of FORM. However, since Word Press is a very capable
Open Source CMS tool, I do think we could be doing a lot more in terms
of FUNCTION on the site with the help of some fresh ideas and someone who
has more time and inclination to "make it so".  And I think the only
challenging consideration in "making it so" is also "making it easy" to
manage and sustain for the time when more volunteers want to help out or
someone who doesn't know much of Word Press web dev has to become the
maintainer by default.

Given the details from ALE's current "web master" above along with the
suggested working plans and technical design specs from ALE's current
Sys Admin, James Kinney, below, if volunteering to help i0mprove and
maintain the form and function of the ALE web site is still of interest,
then ALE would welcome your generous assistance and involvement.

>From here, I suggest we try to arrange a casual face to face meeting
involving Marc, James and myself with open invitation anyone other
ALE members who might be interested in assisting with improving our
group's web presence.  As the principles, Marc, James and I can work
out a time and place off list, then I will post a formal open invite
to the list and the ALE site.

Hopefully this will work for everyone and ALE will gain a few more
active volunteers to share the few critical chores of maintaining
the group!

peace
aaron

> As the sysadmin for ale.org, I can speak to this.
> We are running wordpress for the site itself. Please feel free to set
> up your own wordpress installation (ain't open source grand!) pound in
> your design ideas and send a link to me (and the rest of the whiners
> who _HAVEN'T_ volunteered to refresh the look :-) and [WE] be more than
> happy to take a look at it. I guess you would need to package it up as
> a wordpress theme. We currently use a theme from many years ago.
>
>    I don't view the current site as "ugly" but rather "dated".
>
>    Lastly, NO FLASH ANIMATION!!! (and minimal abuse of javascript to move
>    things around on the page please. Some of the geezers still don't have
>    X running so they use links and mutt exclusively. :}

>    James P. Kinney III