04 First Meetup

Post date: Jun 19, 2014 6:48:40 PM

Tech Scouts Josh (new!) and Shaggy met Bram and Evan at Greenfield Coffee today. Above, Shaggy is documenting how he and Josh helped us translate the Recovery Learning Community's Defining Principles into four easy bullet points for our new Tech Scout Pledge.

Once you take the pledge, you qualify for a Linux laptop. Josh had his own, but Shaggy took home a lovely Toshiba, pre-loaded with Linux Mint, courtesy of Josh Finkel of Tech Foundry in Springfield.

We were joined by Donna DuSell of the Franklin Hampshire Regional Employment Board. She can help students find jobs, and connect us to other agencies (maybe even help with grant funded partners!). But what was most exciting of all was that she is a new customer!

Her website, FHYouth.org, which she maintains, was once a Dreamweaver site (with templating) but she has been updating pages directly through her CPanel file manager. The task is to convert this to Wordpress and add an appropriate customized theme.

There is no shortage of inline markup cruft to remove by our HTML coders:

<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">

<span style="font-size: medium;"><em><span style="color: #4a3bad;">

Click on the picture to learn more</span></em></span>

<strong><span style="color: #4a3bad;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">

<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></span></strong></span></p>

And as we apply the design principles from the Basics of Web Design MOOC (see "Important Links" at left, which we explored a little today) we can see a lot of potential to make this site much more meaningful and attractive. Woo-hoo!

Our next pow-wow is Friday, 1:00pm, also at Greenfield Coffee.

-Bram