This week’s Hacker Wednesday began with a quick brainstorming of our 2011 Kickstarter Campaign for the Rural Design Collective. We have some fun rewards lined up, and are planning to launch our fundraising drive soon. New Artists Productions has generously offered to contribute to the rewards pool so we can raise money for our project. More news soon!

We reviewed some new content and ideas for the site which have been added to our Wordpress Track. There are many production logistics to address, as we’ll be adding historical articles from the New Artists archives, such as analog newspaper clippings. Fortunately, most of the content is in digital format and readily accessible.

We then began our WordPress Tour, combining it with a general assessment of it as a suitable platform for our project. Wordpress 3.1.3 has a lot of features that are perfect for our needs, but it lacks some necessary functionality that can be integrated through other social- and media-sharing sites (which will be covered later in the program). Our WordPress Tour will be broken down into three parts and added to the Workspace area of our site as a tutorial post-program. This week we covered the brand new “Jetpack” (which appears to provide a seamless installation of some of the aforementioned social media functions), “Posts” (which covers the functions around making and managing a chronological post), and “Media” (which stores content such as photos, audio recordings, videos and documents).

While reviewing “Posts,” we covered a lot of ground such as basic HTML commands and why they still matter , different types of WordPress content (tags -vs- categories -vs- slugs), and how themes work in conjunction with all of what is going on behind-the-scenes in the WordPress admin. “Media” proved a bit more challenging. Although much improved over previous versions, it is evident that the WordPress Media Library does not have enough features to support a site with a lot of visual content (although it is unique in that it can store many different types of content). The primary limiting feature is that it does not have the ability to store media in collections (either by content-type or arbitrary groupings), nor can it filter by keyword.

It was definitely a productive session with a lot of smart questions, and we even got ahead of ourselves discussing auto-import of tweets and other fun stuff … which we learned is indeed possible with a variety of plug-ins. But that is for another Hacker Wednesday!

Stay tuned!

Happy Summer from #rdcHQ! The MathML Track is working remotely this week and we’re deep in research mode with an emphasis on technology and tools.

We made our first foray into MathML with MathML Baby Steps. Essentially, we used this exercise to compare several WYSIWYG editors that are available (focusing on open source), and we actively tested Amaya (W3C), BlueGriffon (Gecko), Hermitech Formulator and fMath which has a fairly active development hub at Google Code. fMath is interesting and under active development, but it lacks documentation and has usability issues on the Mac platform (which we plan to submit to the development team). It also might be more technology than we need to learn to author the equations for our project, but we have it bookmarked for future reference. We should also note that although BlueGriffon is open source, the MathML equation editor requires the purchase of a commercial add-on.

It does appear that Amaya is a winner in terms of usability and clear documentation that explains how to author equations. Our approach will probably involve a combination of hand-editing (which is always a good skill to have) and WYSIWYG tools. We also found A Gentle Introduction to MathML by Design Science to be an indispensable user guide, as the MathML 3.0 spec is quite technical and geared towards developers authoring editors and browsing tools as opposed to writing equations.

L to R: Levi, webchickbot, and hijoy1987.

Today at #rdcHQ the SVG Track had their first meetup, and it was a Rural Design Collective reunion with second-year mentee Christopher Garcia joining us virtually from Modesto, CA. Our first order of business was to do a little technology research for the rest of the crew by troubleshooting the state-of-the-art with Skype Group Video Chat. Essentially, we wanted to set up an environment where we could use screen sharing with an open video or audio feed simultaneously. This appears to not be possible in the latest versions of Skype for Mac and Windows even with a group subscription, and the video is quite choppy on a Mac when in Group mode. It is unclear if this is a platform-specific problem as Skype support for the Mac appears to be a bit behind what it is for Windows. We will be researching this in more detail; however, we may need an alternative app for our remote sessions until this feature is less buggy.

Hello, World!

Without further ado, we discussed the Title 24 project and how to best approach the material from a learning and productivity standpoint. We’ll be using an open source tool to organize the project (more information on that as the program progresses), and our goal is to update in real-time and share our knowledge and resources as we go to benefit ourselves as well as others. We are also determining the best tool(s) for the project. We believe Inkscape is at a point in development now that it can be used on a project of this nature – so we know that will be in our toolkit. It is highly likely that we will use a combination of tools as we begin working on some of the more complicated illustrations in the advanced levels.

For now, we are getting our feet wet with Worksheet 1 (Hello, World!)

Greetings from #rdcHQ! The 2011 season begins with a grand Rural Design Collective tradition – our first Hacker Wednesday! This week, Anita and Jenn made a first pass at gathering the content for the New Artists Production WordPress website. Anita provided us with a decade of poster art created for the productions over the years which will give Jenn a wealth of visual material as she gets into the nuts-and-bolts of designing the site. Much of this artwork will be downloadable from the website we create during the program! We also covered some Wordpress basics to activate our default installation, such as permalink structure and dashboard basics. Next week, we will be going over the dashboard in great detail, and reviewing the WordPress Codex which will be our reference document throughout the program.

We also reviewed WordPress themes to get a flavor of what is available as free templates. We looked for a theme that primarily serves our needs from a functionality standpoint since we have plenty of visual design power on the team (on both the #rdcHQ and New Artists side), plus we want this website to serve the needs of New Artists Productions for many years into the future. Smart Wordpress theme developers build in a lot of hooks so that a WordPress theme can be used for more than just a blog – it can become a full-blown Content Management System (CMS). We chose Suffusion based on its features, flexibility and active development cycle. We definitely think we have a winner here! Next Hacker Wednesday we plan to begin brainstorming site design ideas as we dive into the WordPress Codex.

We have decided to structure our program this year into three shorter tracks to stay focused on our individual projects while still remaining accessible to each other as a crew remotely through Skype. Our WordPress track will meet every Hacker Wednesday, with the MathML and SVG tracks meeting up on Tuesday and Thursday, respectively. We already have a rough production schedule for the MathML track – and tomorrow the SVG track begins! Go #rdcHQ Go!