Sunday, May 25, 2008

Partnership with The Bakken?

"The Bakken is a center for education and learning that furthers the understanding of the history, cultural context, and applications of electricity and magnetism in the life sciences and their benefits to contemporary society."

This summer our team won't have access to the Southwest Wood Shop, but we might be able to work at the nearby workshop of The Bakken Museum and Library. This is an exciting new opportunity for our team.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Site Enhancements In Progress

This blog has been pretty quiet for a long while, but we're not asleep. We're still having regular meetings, planning things for next season, and learning new tools (example) that will hopefully help us build a better robot for the next regional.

More specifically to me and my job, though, there's been some development going on with the website. I'm working on some enhancements to existing features, cleaning up the code a bit, and streamlining a couple things behind the scenes. It's nothing too major -- and given the amount of development time I have it's surprising to me that I even got that much done -- but it's progress nonetheless.

Before launching everything, I have to test on our new server. And before that, I'd like to figure out a video page, which has been on hold for a long time. (Come to think of it, I'll probably get another email about it now, having reminded the rest of the team about that shortcoming.)

See, our website downtime last month prodded Mark to commission a dedicated server, built and installed by one of our mentors (Tim F.), where we can hopefully do more things, more easier and more better (common expression). There's a convenient database system installed now, along with a Web-based server administration panel that I can actually access because it's not a shared hosting account. So there's stuff to do there, as well.

Combined with being busy for much of the summer, I have a lot to do. My goal is to finish everything, tie up the loose ends, and launch on the new server before I leave home at the end of June. So there's stuff coming; it's just going to take several weeks. But it's in the pipeline, as they say.

Meanwhile, I'll see if I can get other people to post more frequent updates so this blog serves its intended purpose.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Videos

One of our teammates, Malcolm, made a couple of videos about our team and posted them on YouTube:

2008 Season, and
A Tribute to Lisa, our former team coordinator.


Thank you so much, Malcolm! You truly did a great job.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Blog Issues Resolved

Sometime around April 29, this blog's DNS entry was mysteriously messed up and the site became inaccessible. It's working again now; sorry for any inconvenience. A simple email to our server admin (no, not me; I just make the site) got it fixed a couple days ago.

The main site was unaffected by the problem.