Video Page On Deck

Next up in the website's continuing saga: the video page. Right now my computer is uploading some videos Mark pointed out to Google Video, so we'll have Flash-based players we can embed on the page. I'll also add the files to a /videos/ folder on the website where they'll be available for download via links on the video page. I might even go find a converter and create a second or third format (such as MP4) for people to download (even though Google Video provides a download option, it's low-quality). Some of the videos are sourced from a site that licenses them under a Creative Commons CC-by-SA license, and we'll have to show that on our site, but I'll take care of it. Hopefully, the page will be up in the next week or two (depending in part on how long these uploads take...).

Photo Albums Done!

At Mark's request, I sped up the release timetable for the photo galleries on the website. They're now live, and are accompanied by a new sidebar link to this blog. I tweaked styles, resized images, generated thumbnails, transcribed filenames into PHP files... I hope you all like the galleries!

Photo Albums Nearly Complete

On the website side of things, work is coming along well on the initial photo gallery updates/uploads. I've gotten all the files checked, resized, and sorted into folders, and I have all the thumbnail images. With an extensible directory structure that can continue easily for the next century without changing the folder naming conventions and descriptive image file names, all the galleries need now is a final check of the captions, which will hopefully be done by the end of the weekend, leaving the albums to be uploaded and published by the beginning of next week. Whether you're a returning member eager to relive last year's excitement, or a new member looking to see what sort of stuff we'll be doing come January, make sure to stay tuned for an announcement of the launch.

Announcement: New Author

Hi, readers! I'm writing to announce that I'll be taking over much of the writing for this blog. My name is Daniel, and I designed the team's website this year. In addition to writing here, I'll also be taking photographs and administrating the many planned features on the new site. I hope you like my writing!

Also, as a shout-out to all interested members, there is an open invitation to contribute to this blog if you like. All you have to do is draft a sample entry about something that happened within the team recently and email it to both Mark and me (you can find email addresses in the swrobotics Gmail account). If you pass our (quite informal) test, we'll invite your email address to contribute. If you don't already have a Google Account, you'll be asked to create one, and then you can start writing immediately, hopefully starting with posting your sample. Hope to see some submissions!