Sunday, February 12, 2006

Now it REALLY starts...

I've been worrying about this for some time. The Earth Day Groceries Project is now swinging into gear - this year marking it's 13th year on the Internet. Dozens of extra hours for me each spring. Lots of hard work, but much joy as well. With all the blogging - personal and classroom - already asking for much more time from me, I'm worried at this point about even a little bit more added on. But alas, alack, there is no choice, so here we go...

The first thing I did for the project, outside of updating dates on all the web pages I could quickly find, was to set up a blog - of course! Last year I started a discussion list for the project on Yahoo! Groups, but it basically went nowhere. I'm hoping this blog will be useful for many. I know it will be MUCH easier to update the latest info. And I'm also hoping it will reduce some of the email I get every year - which is basically the single biggest time sucker of them all. Got all the rss feeds set up, posted a couple of articles, got it linked from the project home page, etc.

http://www.earthdaybags.org/blog

One near disaster. Decided to use the blogger.com front end and host it on the project server. I managed to overwrite the project home page with the first test post! Aaargh. Now, I did have a backup - but it was a couple of years old, so it required a fair bit of html reconstruction to get the home page back to where (I think) it was. One little extra "/" in my blog publishing settings - yikes! A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Eventually, I think I'll add an rss feed from the blog to the project home page, to give it a much more dynamic look. I do have a good feeling about all of this, in spite of the worries. And I'm quite sure I'll have a couple more web 2.0 influences on the project web site before the spring is over.

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