Sean's Mental Walkabout

About 14 months ago I raised my hand to help with a more interactive web presence for the Poughkeepsie Farm Project.  This kicked off a large discussion over the course of the year, a web committee, and a great pro bono new graphic design.  Many many people were involved to get this project to completion, I just consider myself a catalyst.

Today, after a year of work, we launched the new farmproject.org:

Go check it out.  Now that we’re on a drupal platform, we’ll be rolling in smaller features over time.  I’ve got a few ideas queued up that I’ll try to get out there for the first member pickup at the end of May.

We’re 1 step closer to the launch of the new Poughkeepsie Farm Project website, so it’s down to some final edits before it gets flipped live.  While I was looking over the test site the other day, I realized we still had some links, and images that referred to the existing site, which would break once we did the final domain switcheroo.

I came up with the following snippet of jquery to highlight bad links and images client side so that editors would realize they needed to do something about them:

So every time we find a link or image that starts with an absolute url to one of the addresses the site has had inside the content block, we highlight it. This has been incredibly effective so far in catching some things I didn’t even realize was an issue.  This with the combo of drupal’s broken link detector internally is helping us ensure the content is consistent prior to launch.

I’ve been part of a process of redesigning the Poughkeepsie Farm Project website, both visually and functionally since about March.  It’s a group effort, with a good number of people from the PFP, all of whom expressed interest at the PFP annual leadership kickoff.  Last night we did our first review of the graphic designs that were graciously done pro bono for the project.

It amazed me a bit how varied the feedback was.  On most points there were people that had absolutely opposite opinions, and who agreed or disagreed with a point varied over ever detail discussed.  It was spiritted but friendly.  After about an hour of discussion we boiled it down to a base design, plus 6 concrete pieces of feedback that everyone wanted to see integrated.

I was thinking about why there was so many differences of opinion, and I realized web design committees are so tough because our interactions with the web are so personal.  Browsing the web is a solitary experience.  Everyone forms their opinions of what is good and bad in a vacuum, not influenced by others.  This leads to opinions on good vs. bad designs that vary drastically.  Page width/height issues, rotating content/or not, colors that are good or bad, what makes a good logo, how busy should things be, how often should things change.

Every one of us has some strong opinions in those areas due to what each of us use the internet for.  That diversity of purpose is what makes the web as ubiquitous as it is, but it definitely makes the design process challenging, because we all tend to believe the rest of the world uses the internet the way we do.  Which, ironically, is the only demonstrably false opinion that arises during the process.

I, along with much of this country, even this world, was moved by Obama’s acceptance speech yesterday.  Two things really make me hopeful about this new administration.  First, that expert opinions will be listened to.  Many highly technical fields, including much of Science and Security, were completely run out of town in the last administration.  Secondly, that you don’t need to pass a loyalty test to get within 1000 feet of the president.  Rick Warren believes differently than President Obama on many fronts, many wanted him thrown out of the inaguration because of it.  But now we have a President that likes to have people around him with different points of view, to challenge his assumptions, and makes sure he’s seen all sides of an issue.  How refreshing is that.

And, throughout all of this, I am really impressed by this call to a new age of service.  This has been a consistant message for the last many months, and it personally inspired me.  Being a software guy, I have a skill that is massively needed by non profits.  The tech team of non profits, if they even have one, is usually one or two fresh college graduates, with a massive turn over rate.  It is a set of skills they don’t know how to hire, manage, or use, and one they can’t afford to contract.  The net result is that most non profits don’t really manage to leverage all these wonderful resources out there.  In the tide of this new age of service, I started thinking about what I could do to help on this front for our farm.  I offered my skills over break, and things are starting to kick off now.  Over the next few months I’m sure I’ll have some new experiences to post up here about the whole process.

If you are a Tech person, I highly encourage you to look out there at non profits or causes you are interested in, and step up.  Become their webmaster, or spend a few hours a month helping them on some tech front.  You have a set of skills they desperately need, and even a modest investment of your time and resources can do amazing things in helping out those organizations reach their goals.

Favorite thing heard at the Winter Sun CSA pickup yesterday:

We’ll send out an email once the website goes live.  We were hoping it would be up by now, but we’ve been having problems.  I never thought that one of the skills I’d need to have as a farmer is PHP.

This out of a conversation with the Hudson Valley Seed Library project. I’ll post a link to their website once it’s live.