Mark Bult Design: San Francisco, CA, Established 1988

New projects

I may have mentioned in an earlier post that, after the Hitchin', I was going to take the rest of the year off from working on any new projects. I needed a break so I could use my free time to catch up on things at home. Although I've been contacted recently by several people who wanted me to design websites for them (and some of them were hard to tun down), I needed some downtime.

This break has given me a little breathing room to work on a few personal projects that have been on my list for a long time (years, in some cases).

The Bay Area Action History Project



I'm happy to announce the debut of the Bay Area Action History Project, an idea which I've had for several years but never had enough time to work on. The site will serve as a historical archive of the campaigns, projects, and — most importantly — the people of BAA.

I'm using Facebook's excellent social networking functionality to invite people to join, share, and remember. I'm using Blogger's just-out-of-beta new version for the back end, while the files reside on my server. The design is a customization of a standard Blogger template, and I'll be tweaking it further in coming months.

I'll be posting lots of old archival stuff, project lists, blasts from the past, photos, news clips, and eventually articles from the old newsletters. It may take years, but that's okay. Hopefully other people will join in and help.

Ozark Handspun blog



I also used Blogger's new version to install a new section on the Ozark Hanspun website which I designed about a year and a half ago. Now Terri (my mother-in-law — yikes, that's weird to say!) can update their site with new happenings so they don't have to wait on me to do it the old fashioned HTML and FTP way.

The design is a highly customized version of a Blogger template that I made look a lot more like the rest of the existing OzarkHandspun.com pages. I'm getting pretty quick at customizing Blogger's templates with CSS and I can crank out a pretty good, custom design, plus set it all up on my server, in about two evenings.

Heinlein Society

A few months back I sent an email to the Heinlein Society volunteering to put the contents of their print newsletter online. As with most volunteer-run nonprofits, they often suffer from significant time delays between when articles are written for their newsletter and when it finally gets printed and mailed. I'm all too familiar with this from my own experience.

But I realized that they could put it online as soon as the articles come in and get edited. They don't have to wait for the print edition to be completed. Of course, hand coding it and FTPing it up is time consuming too, but if they had A) a volunteer to do it, and B) a CMS system that could streamline the process and make it nearly effortless, they'd be far better off.

So they gave me the go-ahead to set up a test run with a few articles and photos from their last issue, and then we'll see if they like the results and whether they'd like to implement such a system..

tags: work, BAA, Ozark Handspun, Heinlein Society, Heinlein, web design, blogs, environment

Posted by espd at 5:23 PM | 
Share and enjoy:  | Email this: