My friend Kip told me it was important to document the process Kelly and I use to design our blog and website. He thought it would be useful to others, and to ourselves, to explore how we communicated, how we resolved issues, and how we came to understand one another better as a result of this process. He also wanted to learn about the organizational structure of our work. With that in mind, here is a process note, devoted to our current online status. Techie notes are at the end so they’re easier to skip if you’re not interested.
When we first started planning this trip, we decided to have a website that would contain the chronicle of our journey. We had been collaborating on a big Internet project at the time (Kip, you know which project that was.), and designing a website together seemed like a good idea.
We had already purchased a web address to build a site from scratch. As we got closer to actually leaving, we started having trouble agreeing on purpose, layout, design, even the language for programming it. The disagreements were getting in the way of either of us journaling our experiences, let alone sharing them. We finally reached the ultimate stalemate – one very generic home page that would branch to two separate sites. Might as well paint a line down the middle of the trailer.
After a couple weeks on the road, with no published stories, I hit my stubborn spot and read everything I could find about Google’s blog product. It’s free, but they hope the blog owner will add advertisements to the site. It’s built on templates, so there is some latitude in design, but not the control we’d been expecting. That night, I learned how to create the blog site and built a prototype. Kelly was OK with it, but it wasn’t great. A couple of you may have seen this early version. Later, I found a better template and re-built the blog. Kelly really liked that one, so I published it.
We’ve gone back and forth quite a bit on the purpose of the blog. For me, it’s a way to work out my experiences and try to put words to my internal journey. It’s been a long time since I’ve written narratives or descriptions – it’s nice to tell a story! It’s also a way to stay connected with my friends and family. It isn’t so important to me to write a log of what happened each day, or to have an entry for every day.
We talked about writing each entry together. That just wasn’t going to work: partly because of our differing purposes, partly because our humor is different, partly because our writing styles are different, partly because we rarely feel like writing at the same time. At this point, I write mine and she writes hers. That seems to be working out well.
Yesterday, while driving, we got into a heated discussion about how to organize all the various files on our individual hard drives, plus a portable drive we both use. A couple times, we had to go to separate corners of the truck to cool off and think about what’s really important. Take two strong women, each of whom is used to being in charge, and let them work it out. Yesterday, the truck was not big enough for both of us.
Today, we made peace and solved the immediate problems. We now have a standard file structure on each of our laptops, plus the portable hard drive we share. We’ve agreed to naming conventions for our files and documents. We’ve agreed to ensure that each photo can be viewed full-size, by clicking on its thumbnail in the blog entry.
We have not agreed on how raw photos from the camera will be handled, or with what software, to get them ready for the Internet. For example, I like to use Adobe PhotoShop and Kelly likes to use Google’s Picassa. I like to put a border (brown to match the blog template) around each photo to “ground” it within the text. My early entries had a drop shadow, also brown, but I’ve conceded that – it’s just too time-consuming and probably not worth the hassle. The real problem with my photos was size - I was putting small photos on my blogs that could not be seen full-screen. So, as a result, all my photos will have to be re-created from the raw image to match our new standards.
To date, photos have been our biggest problem. It’s time consuming, and not much fun, to sort the raw images into folders. The cameras automatically name them with funky numbers that don’t make much sense to us. We have trouble remembering who transferred photos from the cameras and where those photos were stored. Later, when we start processing a photo for inclusion on the blog, more problems arise. With time and experience, these issues will work themselves out. We’ll probably change our standards a few times before we get it right.
As for that website we own, but aren’t currently using… We’ve agreed to use the site to display slide shows, photo albums, spreadsheets, and other material that doesn’t really work on a blog site. I’m hoping it will be ready in the next couple weeks.
This process of working together has been surprisingly hard for us. Perhaps it’s stress or lack of rhythm, but neither of us has been very good at listening to the other. Solving this problem of blog organization forced us to listen and to have purposeful communication. We will undoubtedly change our blog and website strategy. (Yes, we’ll keep you posted on that.) We’ll undoubtedly have more heated discussions about it. Hopefully, our disagreements will not stand in the way of you reading new stories.
Techie Notes on Organizational Structure
There are a lot of different files or documents that are used for the blog:
• Original documents, usually Word, where we write our content
• NotePad files that contains a text-only version of the Word document. These are used to copy the content into the blog template in Google so we avoid transferring Microsoft’s embedded codes.
• Original “raw” photos from the cameras
• Corrected photos
• Downsized versions of the corrected photos for the blog
• Another set of Word documents that containsthe final content, with edits and photos, copied back from the blog. This is a result of reality – after we see our entries online, we always seem to have little changes.
That’s a lot of files! Each needs a unique name and needs to be in a folder where we can find it again.
We have a main folder, called Blog, which holds subfolders for:
• Blog entries – working copies of various unpublished material
• Website – working files for the website, both published and unpublished
• Photos – corrected photos for publication on the blog or website
• Workspace - temporary storage for files, mostly phots, being worked on
• Final – blog entries copied back from the Internet for personal archival
Each of those folders is further subdivided: there is a folder for 2009 and 2010 in each of them. Then, within each year, there are separate folders for each month.
Files are named based on the date of the blog entry. Thus, the photos that go with a specific blog entry are named to match that entry, with a sequential code at the end of the filename. Here’s a screen shot of our directory structure:
When we first started planning this trip, we decided to have a website that would contain the chronicle of our journey. We had been collaborating on a big Internet project at the time (Kip, you know which project that was.), and designing a website together seemed like a good idea.
We had already purchased a web address to build a site from scratch. As we got closer to actually leaving, we started having trouble agreeing on purpose, layout, design, even the language for programming it. The disagreements were getting in the way of either of us journaling our experiences, let alone sharing them. We finally reached the ultimate stalemate – one very generic home page that would branch to two separate sites. Might as well paint a line down the middle of the trailer.
After a couple weeks on the road, with no published stories, I hit my stubborn spot and read everything I could find about Google’s blog product. It’s free, but they hope the blog owner will add advertisements to the site. It’s built on templates, so there is some latitude in design, but not the control we’d been expecting. That night, I learned how to create the blog site and built a prototype. Kelly was OK with it, but it wasn’t great. A couple of you may have seen this early version. Later, I found a better template and re-built the blog. Kelly really liked that one, so I published it.
We’ve gone back and forth quite a bit on the purpose of the blog. For me, it’s a way to work out my experiences and try to put words to my internal journey. It’s been a long time since I’ve written narratives or descriptions – it’s nice to tell a story! It’s also a way to stay connected with my friends and family. It isn’t so important to me to write a log of what happened each day, or to have an entry for every day.
We talked about writing each entry together. That just wasn’t going to work: partly because of our differing purposes, partly because our humor is different, partly because our writing styles are different, partly because we rarely feel like writing at the same time. At this point, I write mine and she writes hers. That seems to be working out well.
Yesterday, while driving, we got into a heated discussion about how to organize all the various files on our individual hard drives, plus a portable drive we both use. A couple times, we had to go to separate corners of the truck to cool off and think about what’s really important. Take two strong women, each of whom is used to being in charge, and let them work it out. Yesterday, the truck was not big enough for both of us.
Today, we made peace and solved the immediate problems. We now have a standard file structure on each of our laptops, plus the portable hard drive we share. We’ve agreed to naming conventions for our files and documents. We’ve agreed to ensure that each photo can be viewed full-size, by clicking on its thumbnail in the blog entry.
We have not agreed on how raw photos from the camera will be handled, or with what software, to get them ready for the Internet. For example, I like to use Adobe PhotoShop and Kelly likes to use Google’s Picassa. I like to put a border (brown to match the blog template) around each photo to “ground” it within the text. My early entries had a drop shadow, also brown, but I’ve conceded that – it’s just too time-consuming and probably not worth the hassle. The real problem with my photos was size - I was putting small photos on my blogs that could not be seen full-screen. So, as a result, all my photos will have to be re-created from the raw image to match our new standards.
To date, photos have been our biggest problem. It’s time consuming, and not much fun, to sort the raw images into folders. The cameras automatically name them with funky numbers that don’t make much sense to us. We have trouble remembering who transferred photos from the cameras and where those photos were stored. Later, when we start processing a photo for inclusion on the blog, more problems arise. With time and experience, these issues will work themselves out. We’ll probably change our standards a few times before we get it right.
As for that website we own, but aren’t currently using… We’ve agreed to use the site to display slide shows, photo albums, spreadsheets, and other material that doesn’t really work on a blog site. I’m hoping it will be ready in the next couple weeks.
This process of working together has been surprisingly hard for us. Perhaps it’s stress or lack of rhythm, but neither of us has been very good at listening to the other. Solving this problem of blog organization forced us to listen and to have purposeful communication. We will undoubtedly change our blog and website strategy. (Yes, we’ll keep you posted on that.) We’ll undoubtedly have more heated discussions about it. Hopefully, our disagreements will not stand in the way of you reading new stories.
Techie Notes on Organizational Structure
There are a lot of different files or documents that are used for the blog:
• Original documents, usually Word, where we write our content
• NotePad files that contains a text-only version of the Word document. These are used to copy the content into the blog template in Google so we avoid transferring Microsoft’s embedded codes.
• Original “raw” photos from the cameras
• Corrected photos
• Downsized versions of the corrected photos for the blog
• Another set of Word documents that containsthe final content, with edits and photos, copied back from the blog. This is a result of reality – after we see our entries online, we always seem to have little changes.
That’s a lot of files! Each needs a unique name and needs to be in a folder where we can find it again.
We have a main folder, called Blog, which holds subfolders for:
• Blog entries – working copies of various unpublished material
• Website – working files for the website, both published and unpublished
• Photos – corrected photos for publication on the blog or website
• Workspace - temporary storage for files, mostly phots, being worked on
• Final – blog entries copied back from the Internet for personal archival
Each of those folders is further subdivided: there is a folder for 2009 and 2010 in each of them. Then, within each year, there are separate folders for each month.
Files are named based on the date of the blog entry. Thus, the photos that go with a specific blog entry are named to match that entry, with a sequential code at the end of the filename. Here’s a screen shot of our directory structure:
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