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.

Playing With The Microsite

Now that the microsite was up and running, it was time to mess with the design and try to get it looking a bit more Sugary. This pretty much just involved playing with the CSS stylesheet and introducing a better color scheme and some new fonts. I didn't want to go too crazy with new elements, since I want the site to load zippily on an XO screen. I also went ahead and rewrote parts of the menubar so it looks a little cleaner. Plus I added a nice Spanish tagline via the Wordpress admin site. All in all, about 3 or 4 hours of tinkering to get everything the way I liked it.

Here's the link to the finished site.

Figuring Out How to Get At The Damn Site

It took a good hour of talking on IRC with Bernie Innocenti to get the keys and everything else in place so that I could actually access the microsite and start sprucing it up beyond the existing template. Now I'm gonna have to wait till tomorrow to start working on it.

Cold Calling for Content

Today I decided the only way to get the word out to the people on the XO Community Map and get content flowing, was to go to each and every marker on the map and email them myself. So I began sweeping the U.S. listings, from the West to the East Coasts, and after a good 3 hours I was all but finished sending out emails to the U.S. XO distributions. Interestingly, I've already gotten replies from a handful; hopefully these leads will yield some results.

Getting it Organized

Spent a good hour and a half setting up master lists for each of the types of images in the Google Docs folders for our content collection. Each folder now has a spreadsheet with the filename of each image, a caption, the dimensions, and the source. Hopefully adding new files to the lists wil be less of a pain in the ass than working backwards from files already in the Docs.

I also added a few new links to the document in the Docs. We've got a conference call tomorrow morning, and in the meantime I've sent out another call for content to the Sugar mailing lists- this time with a focus on acquiring case studies. Hopefully we'll have more to add to the Docs soon.

The master lists on the Google Docs:
Hardware
Logos
Misc
People
Places
Screenshots

Gathering Content

I've spend a good 2 hours today collecting content from emails from the Sugar Labs mailing lists and adding it to our Call for Content collection on Google Docs. Took a while, but now we have a respectable amount of images to start with.

The images on Google Docs