I had a great time on Saturday helping out with the Archer Project website for BashMash. We all had a great time and the charity got a great looking customised web site.
The day started out at 9.30am and the website went live at around 11.45pm. The results are worth the effort though. The guys did a great job with the custom widgets for Wordpress. I helped out with testing and I was told, although I think (hope) jokingly that I nearly had a couple of the developers in tears. Sorry guys.
The site is built on the Wordpress framework, three custom plugins and 2 feeds were created which allow the contributors to the site to enter details of donations they require such as sleepeing bags and pot noodles. The site also allows the contributors to enter statistics to show things such as the number of breakfasts served on a particular day, or the number of showers taken. The third custom widget displays the current weather conditions and based on business rules defined can show a message to indicate how these weather conditions affect the homeless. The two feeds on the site were links to provide the statistics and other information to a Facebook application and to post to the charities Twitter account automatically.
I look forward to helping out BashMash again in the future and hopefully next time get to help out with some development. In the meantime I will have to start learning how to program in php, etc.
A big shout out to all the BashMash team: Jon, Ian, Martin, Ed, Ant, Jag, Chris and Marc. I look forward to seeing you all at the next Geekup Sheffield in March.
admin bashmash archer project, bashmash
I thought i’d like to add a word about GeekUp Sheffield. GeekUp is a community of like minded web designers, web developers and other tech-minded folk all over the country who get together once a month to discuss topics, listen to presentations and see how they can make a difference in the community. The Sheffield GeekUp sessions happen every month on the first Wednesday at the Showroom Cinema Cafe/Bar. GeekUp Sheffield has been happening now for nearly a year and has a great turn out each month.
At the February meeting @ianibbo provided the second part of his presentation on Semantic Web and @Stubbs provided an insight in to linking in to the TheNextBus to provide bus information in a more readable format. These wre both great presentations and gave us lots to think about. Although I’m not a web developer myself, it’s great to see what these guys are doing and to see if there is any way that I can use this information in my line of work, which is Airport Management Systems http://www.airport2020.com
Another side of GeekUp is getting together some of the people who attend to use their skills to help out local charities. I think that this is vey worthwhile and is really making a difference in the local community so a big shout out to #geekupsheff for making this happen.
Also to come out of Geekup Sheff has been BarCamp Sheffield. This is like GeekUp but with people coming from all over the country, and even some from abroad, to spend a long weekend talking Geeky stuff. Of course there is the social side of these meetings which is also a great way of networking and meeting new friends.
For more information on GeekUp around the country please visit http://geekup.org/
admin GeekUp
