So here we are mid-February. After much struggle, there has been come good progress on both projects. If I had to think of a theme for the past week, it would be “workarounds” I have been trying to find so many workarounds for various issues that have come up.

Ares

Progress on ARES has mostly consisted of storyboarding and plot development. Figuring out which elements of the Greber plan to highlight, how to best bring them forward, and which images to use. Thankfully, the NCC has an extensive archive of Greber photos –plans, propaganda shots, and the like–that will be very useful in this endeavor. I’ve begun isolating some of those as well.

Greenbelt

The Greenbelt is where the most interesting progress has been made. A static homepage has been created and is running on GitHub, though I am now wholly impressed with how it’s turned out. It looks good, but the theme I chose isn’t well suited to the project and doesn’t deliver the functionality I need.

The next option was to create an accompanying OMEKA site, upon which the static homepage would be mounted. OMEKA is extremely ugly in my eyes, but it was wholly endorsed as the best platform to move forward with. I started building some OMEKA pages, but found the platform’s insistent focus on items and collections to be cumbersome and now wholly in line with what I was trying to do. It seemed better suited to archives, rather than a community oral history showcase. That said, there are some good websites out there that use OMEKA –but many involved significant editing to create the desired effects.

That brought me to a third option. Fed up with how long OMEKA was taking, I looked at other digital MREs submitted in the past. Some, like Pembrooke Soundscapes, are labours of love that involved significant work from scratch –no templates here.

Others, like Being Irish on the Praries, were simple wordpress projects that delivered on their objectives without too much fuss, though they lacked any distinctive bells and whistles.

Looking at my storyboard and the core functionalities I hoped to include, I decided Wordpress was probably the way to go.

Greenbelt voices is now up and running, though much of it still relies on filler text while I work out the kinks. Surprisingly, working from wordpress still required some coding skills –for example, to embed a full page storymap (as opposed to a map within a templated page) I had to create a new template with full-width posting. It’s a small example, but one that demonstrated the ability to customize the site even within a large platform, to some degree.

While I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to use wordpress, my hope is that I will. At the end of the day, most users aren’t looking at a site to see what’s behind it –they want the content. Every platform delivers this, but for my objectives, Wordpress was by far the best.

Next Steps:

+Finish ARES storyboard for March 1 +Finish pairing content with images for March 1 +Finish templating for Greenbelt website by February 25 +Load content into website