make my website somewhere people want to visit again and again

i’ve been failing dismally on this goal. and my bad conscience hasn’t been helping. so i’ve just had a drastic clearout of my inbox, filing all the stuff i haven’t acted on away. it hardly helps having it there and much of it will be well out of date/unactionable. i need to start where i am. which is with 8 mails in my inbox. supexellent.

made on one of the sites today. it was originally constructed by a professional who’s now abandoned us, and i’m only just figuring out how some of it works. made all the little bitty changes and worked out how to delete two whole sections that we hadn’t been using. ha. easy peasy. plus did an ok job of changing a misleading label even though i’m such a photoshop dork. might ask for help in optimizing that on the list tonight. then again, i might just leave it the way it is…

1312 to do:
remove country information and guestbook?? DONE!
get all incs in the right language bzw. internal links linking to the right language! DONE!

worth taking a look at—may be an alternative seeing as i don’t have a vista-worthy version of dreamweaver.

check other cogroup websites: have they relaunched yet?

have really fallen behind on this, what with work and holidays and everything. is much easier when i keep at it bit by bit as it comes up. otherwise my bad conscience counterproductively stops me from doing anything.

• check home mails for any ready-made letters on UAs posted
• CR’s OT stuff
• anything else in home mails that needs attending to?
• continue going through London’s August update
• same with London’s July update
• same with London’s June update
• have any other co-groups relaunched with new CI??

i’ve been working with the program for years, now, but pretty much making it up as i go along. someone once gave me a half-hour guided tour, and i just made do and mended. there have been things that i’ve never really worked out (and couldn’t be bothered to look up), so i thought a basic course would be a good idea. and i learned loads. not necessarily what i was expecting to learn, but i now feel a good deal more masterful, and am almost looking forward to the website relaunch, where i will be working with divisions, like a proper modern web designer, rather than crappy little tables and rubbishy placeholders. ha! our instructor has written a book on dreamweaver (which he very kindly copied for us) and was generally extremely helpful. and though i was already familiar with a lot of the ground we covered, the ladies on either side of me were completely lost most of the time, so i could help them, meaning that i didn’t get bored, and probably learned more by answering their questions.

our instructor also recommended a top notch german book on css, a second hand copy of which was delivered to my door today (excitement!), and got me thinking about the possibilities of php.

actually, i have to admit i got really excited about what you can do with css as illustrated on this page—you can choose between hundreds of designs, all of which are based on exactly the same page of html code, but with different styles (you can look at the css of each design). it’s all so beautifully parsimonious!

anyway, i do feel progress is being made on this goal. now to read the css book, think about the php course, and look into the possibilities of rss.

how does rss work? would it be worth trying to set sth up when page is relaunched?

is it worth doing the php course? 2 nights a week for all of april seems a bit much, given that a lot of our urgent actions can already be taken via the amnesty uk page. then again…

edit: http://www.feedburner.com
Firefox (via “Live Bookmarks” feature)

making this a place that people will keep coming back to … and that will keep prompting them to take action.