Wrapping Up

Today I spoke with John Tierney about what he wanted for our final wrap-up. I wrote out our process during the quarter, what our objectives were, what our methods were, and what still needs to be done in the future. Sometime next week we should be meeting again over Skype so we can tie up any loose ends in handing over the content for the next group.

Habla Espanol

Today I finished up transcribing the testimonials from the CDC site, then set to work inputting all the tildes and accents into the quotes. After that I decided to take a crack at translating them into English, and between Google Translate and my own decent Spanish skills, I was able to translate all the quotes fairly decently.

The Google Doc of the site outline.

Finally Scratched the Surface

After mining the XO World Map for days looking for leads to new content, I got a flurry of replies today that show a lot of promise. For one, a Spanish-language site with testimonials from teachers, students and community members in an El Salvador distribution. I also got leads to several other local sites and blogs for various distributions.

As for the testimonials I've already found, unfortunately they aren't plain text but images on the page. So to get the copy onto the site's outline, I've begun to transcribe all the testimonials one by one onto the outline Google Doc. Took a good hour and a half to get through the teachers and the community members, tomorrow I'll knock out the students' quotes too. While it's good to have the Spanish-language versions intact, I also want to ask a Spanish-speaking friend of mine if she wouldn't mind translating the quotes into proper English.

Canvassing Central America

I sent out the call for content email to all the distro's in Central America on the OLPC World Map. I'm slightly concerned that there may not be anyone with access to some of these addresses who can read English, but I suppose if they reply in Spanish I could always wing it with an online translator.

Moving to Dropbox

After our IRC checkpoint meeting we decided to move all our content from Google Docs to a shared Dropbox folder. So today I migrated al the files off our Call for Content folder and onto the Dropbox- which was made so much easier by the fact that Google added in a handy function to zip all contents of a folder and download it at once. Took way less time than I thought it would.

I also shot back a reply to a new reply to my XO Map cold calls. She offered some photos from a distro in Vietnam, so that should be some decent new content to add to the site.

IRC Checkpoint Meeting

Tonight we held a meeting over IRC to discuss where we were in regards to our goals set out at the beginning of the quarter. We decided the RIT team should focus on content aggregation for the time being. I'm going to be redoubling my efforts in hitting the bricks looking for content from community members, with a particular emphasis on tracking down case studies and testimonials, and other sources of copy to fill the gaps in the current content framework.

The full transcript will go up as soon it's made available.

Finishing Up the Microsite

Today I worked on getting the microsite to look as good on the XO's screen as it does on an average PC browser. I had to tweak the font settings, and completely rework the scaling of the menu bar, but the site is now 100% XO-viewable. A good 2-3 hours, well-spent.