Other discussion topics

Now looking at four possible new parts to this project.

www.brotton.org.uk Brotton
www.northskelton.com North Skelton
www.forcem.co.uk Friends of Redcar Cemetery
www.hfhc.co.uk Hemlington Family History Club

This means I have to go into those pesky MX records again to set up google apps and create an email account system. I'm going to open up several tabs in Firefox and try to do it as a job lot (gasp !!)

The most imminently needed is Friends of Redcar Cemetary with a meeting next week closely follwoed by Hemlington Family History Club.

Nobody managed to do their homework ie send me an email. A tale of forgotten passwords and things not working on home PC's like they do in the village hall. Everyone has USB's - I couldn't give a good explanation of memory sizes other than a 2GB USB stick is twice the size of a 1GB. We ended up ojn a website looking at coversion rates for MB to GB.

We looked at scanning again as well as another peak into second life. I think they view it as entertainment. We scanned and edited a police poster and created a generic poster template in word for Marian to make regular posters (I'm frogotten why)

On a similar front we looked at "overtyping" onto forms using a programme called Form Pilot. Both Peter and Marian were keen on this and we just had a quick look and made sure it would do what they wanted. Copied the prog to their USB's and they seemed happy to just poke about with the prog at home.

They seem to have a recurring prob with moving files around their PC's and USB's so we looked at this in depth. They were each given a screen grab of the process (see below)

The all seem dissapointed that the sessions are drawing to a close and the poor turn out. They have done a leaflet drop and say neighbouring villages of Bossbeck and Skelton Green would like to attend.

Starting this week’s session (blogging live). Marian said she had all kinds of problems with the videos I gave her on USB last week. Before we get to that we're looking at creating a poster for the @margrovepark email accounts.

Poster made and printed. Click Here

Now we’re looking at the problem with videos. The problem arises when inserting the USB stick and Adobe (photoshop) automatically opens up. The problem Marian had was that she tried to negotiate the Adobe browser. This is often a problem when various softwar’s fight for dominance over your system. Maybe Adobe is trying to be helpful but it's a complete hindrance. At the same time windows opened a microsoft window with a daunting range of options. We closed down the window and the Adobe interface and coined the phrase "when we want help from Mr Adobe or Mr Windows we'll let them know"

We moved on and looked at:

Scanning into photoshop.
Scanning into picssa.
Image manipulation

We got talking about meditation which reminded Trish of a Moody Blues song entitled OM. We looked at I-Tunes and discussed how we could download one track at a time rather than entire album. Did not find OM there but found it on YouTube and Trish added to the Community Pages

We created a new @margrovepark email account for Trish as she wasn’t here last week and Marian got practice making a new account. I made screen videos (screencasts) of all these activities using some free software called screencam. Eventually it would be nice to put these on the website but they’re large files at present. Last week Peter had expressed an interest in using a computer to fill in paper based forms.

We also had a little visit to Second Life.

I had some free software with me to do that but Peter didn’t show up. Marian said she’d like to sell her car on e-bay so we may look at that next week. I told them that their homework was to contact me using their new email accounts.

Starting this weeks session. Marian said she had all kinds of problems with the videos I gave her on USB last week. Before we get to that we're looking at creating a poster for the @margrovepark email accounts.

Poster made and printed.

Now looking at the problem with videos. The problem arises when inserting the USB stick and Adobe (photoshop) automatically opens up. The problem Marian had was that she tried to negotiate the Adobe browser. This is often a problem when various softwares fight for dominance over your system. Maybe Adobe is trying to be helpful but it's a complete hindrence. At the same time windows opened a window. We closed down the window and the Adobe interface and coined the phrase "when we want help from Mr Adobe or Mr Windows we'll let them know"

We moved on and looked at:

Scanning into photoshop.
Scanning into picassa.
Image manipulation

We got talking about meditation which reminded Trish of a Moodie Blues song entitled OM. We looked at I-Tunes and discussed how we could download one track at a time rather than entire album. Did not find OM there but founf it on YouTube and Trish added to then Community Pages

Low numbers again for the MyWeb2 workshop. This week we:-

Created a spreadsheet for the Village Halls finances.
Looked at some YouTube videos.
Added a story to the website showing how all the houses narrowly escaped demolition.
Shot some video fottage using a small hand held video camera that gave people the idea of a Margove Park "walkthrough" video.
One new @margrovepark.com email was created to go through the process of new account creation.

All the tasks were recorded as a "screencast" so that participants could refer back to the processes they had learned. These videos are quite large and we are still wondering how best to use them. Too large to get many on a USB stick. Maybe we need to compress and add to the website.

A couple of people expressed and interest in being able to electronically fill in forms that can at present only be filled in on paper. We'll look at a simple piece of free software to do this.

I know I said there was no plan but the session didn't even go as NOT planned. Small numbers again but at least different people. The're still dead keen to add stories to their website.

I had been downloading a widget to resize images and they jumped on the idea of "what's this downloading malarkey".

so they went thought the process of

1) downloading a Microsoft powertoy
2) Downloading Picasa
3) Installing both

[name] flapped about her lack of success with image downloading/uploading and we discussed htat the proper terminology had to be "transfer" (from camera to PC) I showed her how to treat the camera as an external drive and forget about the camera software thus taking charge of your own devices.

the END product is this:

http://www.tvcm.co.uk/ecol/index.php/mp_com/2007/08/09/high_veiw

We start tomorrow at Margrove Park. There's no plan. We'll just react to what atendees want to do and provide the vehicle. For the next 6 weeks there'll be an informal drop in between 4pm and 8pm.

They're sure to want to recap on how to edit their website www.margrovepark.com but we can now also offer email accounts of name@margrovepark.com courtesy of google apps. I've made this a link from the website called "Intranet". I couldn't thing what else to call it and if people personalise it to utilise document sharing etc then it really will be an Intranet.

After the early frustration with Google Apps I've now found it much easier to set up new accounts. Perhaps too easy, I manage around 200 domain names and they're all just pointing to community websites and projects with no email associated with them.

I just set up a new instance for www.saltburn.org.uk but I only altered the MX records so google apps is only providing email on the domain name. The domain name is still pointing at the original website. This means that email accounts can be provided for project staff and it also creates a kind of "Intranet" of apps e.g. http://partnerpage.google.com/saltburn.org.uk that each user can customise.

This opens a whole range of possibilities - for instance what could we do with www.skinningrove.tv -|- www.margovepark.com -|- www.ts3.org.uk -|- www.hfhc.co.uk (and many others) At first my intention with this pilot project was to pull all the participants together under the google app running at www.myweb2.org.uk - now I don't know, perhaps it may be better to introduce different groups to stuff running under their own community domain and find some way of linking them up.

Some sessions are due to start in Margrove Park. They're I'm trying a new approach there which is even more informal than before. It seems to me to be the most likely to work. I blogged that proposal here

Those sessions are now going ahead so we could introduce participants to a email@margrovepark.com concept.

Hey, google apps finally verified the domain MyWeb2.org.uk - I remain slightly unconvinced. It's a convoluted mess of stuff - slightly kludgy. I do somewhat prefer the iGoogle approach of bring google gizmos together. I'll stick with it a while. Guess I need some early testers to give it a whirl. I think the problem with this "make it easy one size fits all" is you lose the ability to give your users custom vehicles put together with HTML etc. I may be wrong about this and I'm currenly experimenting.

(expensive) typo when registering the domain name. I registered three but two have the typo and (surprise surprise) they have all since been snapped up. However this tells me why the domain has not been verified yet. Sorry google. The Google Apps part of the project will now run on myweb2.org.uk