Set up new RailsBridge blog

[lilliealbert]

• Make new wordpress blog - https://railsbridgeblog.wordpress.com
• Point blog.railsbridge.org domain at it
• Have lunch with new blogger / make posting plan
• Migrate old RailsBridge posts from other blog

Alternate proposal by @ultrasaurus:

• Use current instance and just switch domain name back?

[ultrasaurus]

Rachel talked to me about this and if we are changing the decision that was made earlier this year, we felt that having a jekyll blog for Bridge Foundry would make sense.

Please loop in Beverly Nelson who had been working to recruit bloggers and may have some RailsBridge posts in the works. As far as platform, maiki has been providing free hosting and setup help for our wordpress instance. It would make sense to continue with the same kind and enthusiastic hosting provider who has been helping us for the past year or so.

[lilliealbert]

This is a separate blog for RailsBridge. In our last board meeting, @sarahmei, @rachelmyers, and I decided that we would be able to produce enough content and had separate enough concerns that we would set up our own blog, separate from the one that is now the Bridge Foundry blog. I'm sorry that we didn't communicate that back to you prior to making this issue.

As for hosting, I am super grateful for the hosting we've had, but having the theme be a fork of a thing we had to do PRs on to change felt like a major barrier to updating anything, and I want to do something simpler. Again, this doesn't affect the Bridge Foundry blog at all.

Will get in touch with Beverly about any RailsBridge-specific content she has in the works. Thanks!

On Nov 22, 2014, at 10:56 AM, Sarah Allen [email protected] wrote:

Rachel talked to me about this and if we are changing the decision that was made earlier this year, we felt that having a jekyll blog for Bridge Foundry would make sense.

Please loop in Beverly Nelson who had been working to recruit bloggers and may have some RailsBridge posts in the works. As far as platform, maiki has been providing free hosting and setup help for our wordpress instance. It would make sense to continue with the same kind and enthusiastic hosting provider who has been helping us for the past year or so.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[ultrasaurus]

The point is that this was a RailsBridge blog for the past 6 years. It has only been a Bridge Foundry blog for a few months. If RailsBridge wants its own blog, can you please use this one, rather than creating a situation where Bridge Foundry must maintain the old + new content without help from RailsBridge.

I'd be happy to discuss if that is easier. It would be helpful if we could create some communication channels between the new board and the on-going RailsBridge activities.

Really appreciate this new excitement!

[lilliealbert]

I don't want Bridge Foundry to have to maintain RailsBridge content, either. But getting a blog up and running that is separate was the priority here, so we were planning working on migrating the old RailsBridge posts in the future.

The hosting issue remains true for me: it's much easier to customize the blog if we host it via Wordpress.com than through maiki. If we take the blog back over as the RailsBridge blog, we still have that as a hurdle. Perhaps it is a smaller hurdle than migrating the posts over, but given that we want to make announcements soon, it seems really challenging to me to take the current Bridge Foundry blog over.

Agreed that figuring out the communications channels between Bridge Foundry and this board is needed. It seems like since @rachelmyers is a member of both groups she's been a good bridge so far, but we should figure out other ways of coordinating, too. I think that having this repo should help a lot!

On Nov 22, 2014, at 1:30 PM, Sarah Allen [email protected] wrote:

The point is that this was a RailsBridge blog for the past 6 years. It has only been a Bridge Foundry blog for a few months. If RailsBridge wants its own blog, can you please use this one, rather than creating a situation where Bridge Foundry must maintain the old + new content without help from RailsBridge.

I'd be happy to discuss if that is easier. It would be helpful if we could create some communication channels between the new board and the on-going RailsBridge activities.

Really appreciate this new excitement!

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[lilliealbert]

For more context, this is the process that maiki originally outlined for me for updating the theme:

For the theme, there are many ways to develop a theme, but I am gonna let you know how it will work for us. Because I run the site on a network with lots of other sites, I can't just let anyone activate or upload themes (they could insert security issues). Fortunately, that part is really simple, since I just need someone to let me know that a version of the repo is ready, and I will pull it in (it is technically a submodule in my repo). So you work on your fork locally, push changes to the repo hosted at GitHub, tell me, and I will deploy it to the site.

For actually developing/designing it, the way most folks do it is by running an instance of WordPress on their local machine. You can always do a content export if you'd like to work with the same posts. However, I suspect that you won't need to do that. We chose that theme because it uses the same framework as the main site (Bootstrap), so I think most of the changes you want to make can be done with CSS. You'll still probably need an instance of WordPress to check it, though.

Also note, the theme on GitHub is a child theme, so you will need the parent theme in your WordPress instance as well. You can read more about child themes at http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes, and if you use a Mac you can follow the directions at http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress_Locally_on_Your_Mac_With_MAMP to install WordPress locally (sorry for the presumption you use a Mac product). I use Ubuntu Gnome for a laptop OS, and I just install a LAMP stack locally for my WordPress development.

I have so much stuff going on that getting Wordpress running locally to change the theme is just not an option for me, and when I put out a call on the mailing list about reskinning it to actually look like the RailsBridge website, there were crickets. Having the blog theme be so far outside our control also feels kinda bad to me, too.

[ultrasaurus]

Whoever is active with blog content (you, Bev, new volunteer, whoever) can decide to host it elsewhere.

What happens to the historic RailsBridge content is independent of hosting. I just don't think it makes sense to start a new RailsBridge blog and have the Bridge Foundry blog be 98% RailsBridge content.

I didn't respond to the call on the mailing list, since we had decided to make it a combined blog named Bridge Foundry, but for all the *Bridges and other projects, and I agreed with your thought that it should be colorful, but I was prioritizing content over prettiness.

@sarahmei had agreed to be on both boards and be the liason to both of them, but if the board wants to appoint @rachelmyers that is fine too.

[sarahmei]

Ultimately, we'd like to have separate identities for BF and RB, and separating the blogs is one easy way to get going on that. It gives us at RB more control over when and what we can publish, which seems to make sense given that we do want to start separating the two orgs in the public eye.

Also the hosting difficulties are an issue. We're super grateful to maiki for hosting for so long, but we're at the point where we need more flexibility than they can easily offer, so it makes sense to start moving over to a paid service.

[ultrasaurus]

@sarahmei does it really make sense for the Bridge Foundry blog to maintain 5+ years of RailsBridge history? what do you want to do with that content? If the goal is to have more separate identities, keeping RailsBridge history in a Bridge Foundry blog is very confusing.

[sarahmei]

If you'd rather not hang on to those articles, we can move them over at
some point. There is some BF content mixed in there, so either direction
it'll be some work to separate. Want to give us a database dump of all the
old articles and we'll get started? The good news about old articles is
that they don't change much. =)

On Saturday, November 22, 2014, Sarah Allen [email protected]
wrote:

@sarahmei https://github.com/sarahmei does it really make sense for the Bridge
Foundry blog to maintain 5+ years of RailsBridge history? what do you
want to do with that content? If the goal is to have more separate
identities, keeping RailsBridge history in a Bridge Foundry blog is very
confusing.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1 (comment).

[ultrasaurus]

We changed to blog.bridgefoundry.org on 6/1 and there have been no blog posts since then. There is a lot of content that I think has a lot of great articles: http://blog.bridgefoundry.org/archives/

I think we should do the work to keep all the URLs the same, which should be very easy if it is WordPress -> WordPress. I think all of you are admins, so you have the same powers as me.

I still think it would be worth having a phone call that includes Bev and me to figure out a content strategy. ...everything that is there is actually RailsBridge, except arguably for the post about hiring a finance person, which we don't really need to keep... unless you are arguing that we want to retroactively re-categorize posts that were non-Rails-workshop posts as Bridge Foundry. That was the original idea, which was simpler to consider doing with just categories.

[ultrasaurus]

More historical context on blog.bridgefoundry.org (nee blog.railsbridge.org)

Earlier this year, we established a unified content strategy as a result of having very few writers — we created a plan where we would start to separate history blog posts by category, then skin each category differently. I’m sorry we weren’t able to execute on the plan this year, and I’m totally open to changing it, but you all need to be aware that there are a lot of areas where changing RailsBridge will change Bridge Foundry — the blog is one of those.

For context, here’s the content strategy we came up with — some blog posts may be in the works but Bev hasn’t been able to inspire guest bloggers to write much or often. I still like these ideas:

Goal of one blog post a week, but we’re coming off from a bit of a quiet time, so at least once per month would be great. We plan to cycle through the following topics:

• Resources for
  • Organizers
  • Students
  • Teachers
• Stories / Highlight unsung heroes
  • Coaches
  • Students
  • Organizers
• Illustrate the trend
  • stats
  • Goodwill in Ruby Community
  • international

You can read more in the notes from outreach committee meetings

I still think the above content strategy works fine for Bridge Foundry if there are separate blogs, but the content itself would be written differently with separate blogs. I do think it is important to retain the historical posts. I look through them some more and thing about what I think might make sense if they were two blogs.

[lilliealbert]

RailsBridge has a blog at http://blog.railsbridge.org with all the historic RailsBridge content. 🎉