MrsBrown's philosophy of life and stuff

I had a terrible time at the meeting last night.  It was inevitable, but I could have prepared better.

I want the Stormhold website to be moved to a wordpress site (from Drupal), I want the currant admin to change and I'll take the job myself if I have to.

Doing that is fraught, as the current admin has had the job for the past 20 years (at least) and is emotionally attached to the job. 

I did a lot of work with the current admin about 8 years ago, when he was just as attached to the job.  I spent a lot of time and energy carefully making the drupal website look and have the best functionality I could.  It was a place I was happy to send newcomers to and I would regularly check what was going on and I had a person lined up who updated the events pages regularly.  I stopped being Baroness and attending council meetings and then, either  the main server crashed or he updated the version of drupal we were using and he lost the lot and had to rebuild.  Some of the pages I had carefully written and coded could only be retrieved from the wayback machine.

The new version of the website looks dreadful, it's not mobile responsive and the regular event updates are gone.  Also, I no longer have admin access and even if I did, now that I know wordpress I would rather use that.  The current website is too difficult  annoying for anyone to use.

Anyway, after a very confrontational discussion (with no control exercised by the meeting chair) it was agreed that we would prepare a pros and cons paper for the next meeting.  This is a typical approach to solving these sorts of conflicts - put it off until next time.  The problem is, the real problem is the current admin - he needs to go.  Hmmm maybe that's why I can't have a reasonable discussion with him about improving the website experience for the Barony - all of my language and posture show what I really think.

Maybe there's another way?  Can I get the Masonry team to ban drupal from the server?

Goals for the Baronial website:

1. Provide useful meeting and event info for members and newcomers
2. Be a place that gets people to visit regularly
3. Includes enough information for newcomers to be attracted and motivated to come to a meeting/event
4. Can have information added by any of our event stewards
5. Is easily updated by any of our officers
6. Is updated often enough that people don't have to rely on facebook for group information
7. Has a level of automation for event updates - google calendar feed
8. Can be used by local groups to plan their events around ours.
9. Can be used to contact us by the media etc
10. Provides useful resources for members
11. Encourages traffic to our members blogs
12. Looks good enough that people get the impression we know what we're doing

Here's a simple table version of a comparison between drupal, joomla and wordpress.

I'm convinced that drupal is too complicated for us to get a site which works for our weird community based organisation.

so now I'm posting.

The virtuous me would be making another "hood of warmth" baronial token and some lunch for at the Archery Day today, before heading off to the school to do the final pickup of stuff and cleanup.

but blah!

My mind's running too fast for me to sleep, but I'm too tired to be very virtuous. Rose is still asleep and my mind is whirring over when to get her up, so she's fed and dressed before we go to the school to clean. That, unfortunately, is a non-negotiable.

Bugger, that only took 2 min. Maybe I'll sew, and then hope that Rose is still asleep at 9.45am, when I'll ask MsNotaGoth to keep her ear out for the Rose, who'll wake up as I walk out the door and fuck mess up all my plans. And food? I think I might have to make a formal, "you're feeding the B and B this bash" roster. And today? we'll make sure we eat beforehand, or something.

Blah. Did I mention Blah?

Hey! I should publish the instructions for making a hood. Then, when people are feeling helpful, they could make hoods and I wouldn't have to do this rush job on a Sunday morning.

BTW I had a fabbo time last night. I'm still amazed that there were at least 25 people dancing all the way to the last dance. Earlier, there almost wasn't enough room for the dancers in the hall! The fires worked brilliantly, but I should have lit organised to have lit the third brazier. It was funny watching the extra groups of people, determined to have their own conversation circle, without a fire. Although it didn't get below 10 degrees last night - positively balmy!

And I've already been asked if we'll have another ball next year. It's certainly an easy event to run/organise. So maybe I should encourage someone to run one as their first event.

Besides including my son, see the banner in the background? It's painted silk and flutters beautifully.

Here are the instructions for making one; - http://sg.sca.org.nz/projects.htm#banners

I want one, or six, and if I could get others in the Barony on board, we should all have one!