Digital Arts Service Corps - ruby on rails

End of April at CMC

Colleen Beach — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:05:15 +0000

Haven't done a field report in a long time (again). The password to this thing always seems to get funky and then it gets put off until later. That's the best excuse I have at the moment.

CMC is just starting to get it's first email newsletter together using the civiCRM. That will go out on Wednesday if everyone gets their pieces for it in on time. In reality it'll probably go out next Monday, but I'm telling everyone to get stuff to me by Wednesday.

I cannot recommend CiviCRM highly enough. It's free and relatively user friendly. Although some of the admin type set up (especially for using CiviMail and having it send out email blasts) can be a bit of a headache. But it's really helped everyone at the office get all their contacts in one place so we can actually see who knows who and find them easily.

The budget we had for updating our Ruby on Rails site for the after school program turned out to be mostly imaginary so that site has been sitting mostly stagnant since I got here. I'm trying to learn some Ruby on Rails in between other stuff, but it's sort of on the back burner.

It's allergy season here and making me somewhat miserable. I had to go to the doctor the other day because my lungs were apparently only working about half as good as they were supposed to be. So they have me on some inhalers now so I can breathe again. Although I'm still sneezing and all that good stuff. Good old valley pollution.

I also just got myself promoted from fresh meat to Rock 'n Rolla Girl on my roller derby team (http://www.ccaderby.com/). Our first bout is in June so I'm looking forward to that. I have my very own Union Jack helmet now and lots of bruises.

And through my derby team I've found a circus arts fire troupe and am teaching them hoop dance (they've got a fire hoop on order) and they're teaching me poi. I even got to play with some fire fans the other week.

I also managed to snag a low-income ticket to Burning Man! That's not until August but I'm already super excited! (Applications for low-income tickets are still open until the end of May it'd be cool to have other VISTAs there).

Mopeds and web stuffs

Colleen Beach — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:48:18 +0000

Whoops, it's been a while since I've done one of these things. So my car was unable to pass smog and I'm currently trying to get the guy who sold it to me to give me my money back and he's dodging my calls. Thankfully my boss knows someone in Marin (where I got it) who used to do lemon law stuff and now does legal aid, so hopefully she can put the fear of God in him. But now I have a moped, which is exciting and insurance is only $9 a month, so you can't beat that.

Project-wise things are still in early stages yet. I'm looking at applications to hire a programmer for one of our sites (californiavoices.org if you know anyone who's good at Ruby on Rails and wants a low paying job you can send them my way). And moving the rest of them around so that they all are on joomla instead of a mix of random CMSes.

It seems like up until this point there hasn't been much standardization in the way they do web things. Everything is in different languages, hosted by different people in different places. So it's a little crazy making, but I'm slowly trying to pull everything together.

Thankfully I haven't had the food stamps issues a lot of people seem to be. Other than my mail seems to be super super slow so I got a letter the other day saying that because I hadn't turned something in they were going to cut me off, but when I called they said they'd gotten the paper work.

Still Working on CMS

Jack Waugh — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:46:26 +0000

I am still working on the CMS.

I am investigating how we can accept uploads of Microsoft Word documents and extract the content from them to convert to our format.

Most recently I contributed some test cases to the tests that get run repeatedly to defend against breaking the code.

In my last report, I didn't say what areas of the code I was contributing on. Since the previous report to that one, I have worked on the editable pages. I also added code that lets an administrator compose their own menu, and code that generates a menu automatically based on the context of a page within an hierarchy of pages. I added the code that lets the administrator choose from among a few predefined layouts for a given page (this choice being inherited, by default, by the page's descendants in the hierarchy), and choose the menu and sidebar for a given layout to include.

I posted at http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2606 a comparison of programming languages Smalltalk and Ruby.