I wanted to let people who read Holly’s blog know I took a hard look at asking if people here are interested in helping with the work of putting together the systems she needs. With so many people showing such a willingness to help, I thought there must be way to put that energy to work on the systems.
ABOUT A WEEK AGO
About a week ago I kept seeing the race into the Oklahoma Territory, only it was writers racing to the aid of Holly’s systems. Then just as I was ready to open the gates to anyone who wanted to volunteer, I got a horrible feeling. Here is what I almost published:
The problem was, I could not see how this was going to work.
Writing a Guide
It’s taken a few days to work this through, but basically, I have to prepare for making something like this work. With the help of a writer, I am making a guide for the work that goes into making Holly’s systems. Once the guide is usable, it will spell out the preparations needed to train and support people who would like to help with Holly’s systems. I wish I could do more immediately.
Can’t we just go buy a guide? We can go buy a guide.
Or download a free guide from the internet? Yes, we can do that too.
I mean, can’t we just go buy a good guide? No, that is not possible.
Are you saying there is not a single good guide we can use instead of writing our own? What I am saying is, we need a guide that is tailored to our situation.
I might be able to help. I have been out of programming for about a decade but use to do web programming. I have experience in most Unix flavors too.
Annie, I am sorry for taking so long to reply, but I have a few ideas I wonder if any of these might carry be of interest to you.
1. Unix administrator for one of the servers running Holly’s.
2. If more than one server is not too much, I dream of members of this school transitioning into working on the technology that is such an important part of what this school is and how it works. I could see Holly Lisle’s Online Writing School having a tradition school system backups and restore procedures are handled by students with a student leader.
3. If you are interested in web programming, we have some wireframes that Holly made that need to be turned into bootstrap-html/css/js/jquery. The wireframes are for the new school/classroom website that will get Holly away from elements of infrastructure that are holding her back.
4. Holly Lisle’s System Development Review Board. Members of this board will receive copies of our, schedules, design, and links for viewing samples of work in progress. Board members will provide comments and questions. We also will conduct a 60-90 minute teleconference for discussing the findings and recommendations being made.
Details? What language? 🙂
Bootstrap (html, css, js/jquery/ajax) front end. Linux Ubuntu 14.04, nginx/apache, mysql, php5.6 on the backend.
To be honest, I shuddered when I read ‘download a guide from the internet’. From my experience there never is a guide that covers what you need for custom work. When I retired I took on the task to write a technical guide for my old position. That work took almost a year to get all the input, details, reviews, and approvals to complete but it replaced a 20 year old document that was no longer even close to how the job was performed let alone cover the legal changes that had occurred in that 20 years. A valid working guideline is nothing that can be snatched from the internet.