Aloha! We had our final Hacker Wednesday of the summer yesterday and much progress was made on the Beta release of the New Artists Productions website. We created custom templates for Suffusion to get rid of a few features that we could not remove using the “Suffusion Options” editor, such as disabling comments in certain areas of the site and breadcrumb navigation. We also covered a few formatting basics to add multimedia content to the site such as slideshows and photographs. We also created a backup of the website to preserve all of the hard work that we have done this summer. Again, we plan to document all of this in the form of tutorials on our website, and release any code developed during our program to support other groups who want to build a site using the same tools we did. We also plan to write the developer of Suffusion, Sayontan Sinha, with a few things we discovered while working with his excellent software.

We all learned and accomplished so much working together as a team. All that is left to do between now and the Rural Design Collective Launch Party on September 4th is to finish coding the stage – at that event, we’ll be rewarding our mentees, Jenn and Oceana, for their wonderful contributions to our project and begin sending out rewards to our generous Kickstarter backers.

Thank you for helping make 2011 another incredible year!

Greetings from #rdcHQ! We had a very brief meetup at Rural Design Collective Headquarters to sync up on what is left to be done on the equations. Our goal is to complete the remainder of the equations by our Launch Party on September 4, so we decided to meet again later this week to see where things stand. Documentation and implementing the workflow has been flagged as a post-production item. We are really close at this point! We also got a thumbs up from Jacques Distler whose work on moving SVGMath forward helped us convert the first half of the equations to SVG. Very cool!

More news soon – Go #rdcHQ Go! …

Hola! This week in the SVG Track, we completed 8 complex schematics and officially moved this project into post-production mode. It is evident that we will need more time to maintain our high production standards, so work on this track will continue. It is always an ideal at #rdcHQ that we meet deliverables, but the most important thing is that the participants in our program gain knowledge from their experience and that we produce work of the highest quality. We have definitely achieved this goal on all of our tracks this summer.

As the graphics get more complex, we are encountering questions that may require a research trip to a library to clarify details of the original art files. We are flagging any graphics that are unclear and will revisit them in post-production. Fortunately, we haven’t come across a lot that fall under this category, but there is enough to merit a second look. Also, we are beginning to think about integration of these graphics into the t24 document set, and several of the charts and tables would be more easily represented in HTML as opposed to an SVG graphic. This will also be addressed in our post-production run.

In other SVG post-production news, we have the intent to contribute several of our public domain icons to the ICONATHON efforts, as we mentioned in a previous post. We plan to do so this Fall once we wrap-up our summer program for 2011. It has been an incredible season, and it has been such a great experience working with such a talented group of artists. We have one more week left in our program and then we celebrate with our annual Rural Design Collective Launch Party – hosted in tandem with “Art in the Information Age” at Point.B Studio this Labor Day weekend!

Greetings! The big news in our Hacker Wednesday Report this week is that our Kickstarter project is FUNDED! We thank all of our wonderful backers! We had some press about our project in the Bandon Western World that gives a little background on our project. We are very happy to see the website become a reality, and it is so much fun working with New Artists Productions.

We’ll be spending the next week getting the site ready for our Rural Design Collective Launch Party on September 4th. This primarily involves completing the animated stage by adding the navigation into the site and the photography slideshow. We also have a pesky bug with IE9/Windows Vista that we are trying to track down (if you view the stage with this browser combination, the curtain will not open, and even though the site is not 100% ready yet, this is definitely a BUG not a FEATURE ).

The month of September will be devoted to writing tutorials to support the transition of the site, and helping New Artists Productions create the password-protected area for the participants in their program. Speaking of which, we spent much of this week’s session reviewing Users and Roles in Wordpress, and how we will utilize this feature to build this section of the site. We have an idea how this will work, and will be setting up a test page soon to “kickstart” this really cool feature.

Thank you to our kind and generous backers again – we could not have done this without your support! Thanks for supporting another successful #rdcHQ Project!