I’m posting this from my iPod as a test. When I started this blog nine years ago little did I know that one day I would be able to post from a tiny handheld computer. Oh the wonders of technology!!

Brett and I are researching plan B grad schools without much luck. Haven’t heard back yet from OSU but it’s crazy competitive and I keep hearing from brilliant people who didn’t get in. (sigh)

Yesterday’s Digital Storytelling workshop went really well so I wanted to share the presentation I put together over here.

I had to borrow Abby’s laptop because our own isn’t reliable anymore (I’m on a desktop now — it’s crazy. It’s like 2005 up in here). I wasn’t sure if she had presentation software and I’m sick of Powerpoint anyway so I decided to build the presentation online. I tried some free software and it was buggy and crashing and making me crazy. After many wasted hours, I hit on using a WordPress install. I’m extremely happy with the way this turned out.

There are a lot of advantages to using blogging software to create a presentation. One, it’s easy to make it look the way you want it to look. I knew I wanted a very simple installation with a clean, unfettered appearance. I looked for themes without sidebars and hit on Suffusion, which is easy to customize even if you can’t or don’t want to dig into code. I knew I likely wouldn’t be using any widget areas but this particular theme has a lot of widget configuration options — sidebars, footers, etc.

The other thing that was important to me for the presentation was accessibility. I wanted the attendees to be able to come back to the information without cluttering anyone up with hand-outs. Because I was sharing videos, I also wanted to make it easy for students to quickly find those videos again from their own laptops. To do this with a Powerpoint would have meant relying on a file sharing site like Slideshare, which is a frustrating site for me time-wise and design-wise. There is no love lost between me and Slideshare. Using WordPress makes it easy for anyone to go back to the presentation and also made it easy for me to share resources via the blogroll/links.

I didn’t open up comments for this workshop although I see how that could add to a workshop experience. It might be something I’d consider in the future.

If you look at Digital Storytelling, you can see how I structured it similar to a PowerPoint. We teach at Wild Goose Creative, which has wifi — an important factor for an online presentation. I made the WordPress site’s front page an actual static page. You can create that in the “reading” section of WordPress. I didn’t set a page for the blog to post to because I knew I wouldn’t need a blog page. Instead I set it up so that there was only one blog post per page. You can see this in the image below:

That gave me a front page that acts as an introduction page.

Then I started adding entries. I added each entry the way you would in any old blog but I kept things short because I wanted everything to fit on the screen so I wouldn’t have to scroll. (We use a projector and a laptop so I knew what size screen I’d be dealing with.) As I tweaked the presentation order, I changed the dates in the Publish menu so that things would show up where I wanted them to. For example, the first entry I made was Madeleine L’Engle’s quote but I needed that to happen much later in the workshop. I just changed the date to make sure it showed up between the two entries I needed it to go between — so later than the one but earlier than the other.

To make the “Start the Workshop” tab show in the menu, I installed a plugin called “Page Links To” (I use it here, too, to put Madison’s blog and Open Adoption Support in the navigation menu up there at the top). Basically this plugin adds a new field to your “Add New” Page menu. You create the title for your page, skip writing an actual entry and then scroll down to this new Page Links To field, which asks for a url. You add the url that you want the page to link to and voila! You have a Page that is actually a link. This is an incredibly handy plugin for managing your blog’s page navigation system without doing any code hacking.

So. I used the very first entry’s url as the page url with my Page Links To plugin, titled the page “Start the Workshop” and that added that nifty little menu tab up at the top of my presentation.

Because there was only one entry on each page, I then simply scrolled through my archives (another plus to the blog theme I chose is the clean, easy to follow “previous” and “next” navigation above each entry. MUCH nicer than the theme I’m using here. Makes me want to change it out. Seriously). I took screenshots of each of the videos to make those images and then linked the images to the video’s homepage. I didn’t want to embed the players because I thought it’d be easier to open up the video files in browser tabs before we got started. This way their flash files could begin loading (and so we wouldn’t have to wait for them when it was time to watch). Also I liked the way it looked. But mostly it was to make it easier to quickly scroll through the presentation and then simply click to an open tab to watch each video as needed.

Anyway. I thought I’d share both the presentation and the tech behind it. If you have questions about the install or about the content of the presentation, let me know and I’ll come back between busyness. (Like the quotes at the end? I can talk about why I chose them and what we did around them so you’ll have a better understanding of how the workshop worked.) Again, here’s the link.

I mean you might be but if you clicked in here to comment on a post that showed up your feedreader and found the post gone, you’re not imagining things because I removed the post.

Well, I don’t remove it; I just made it private. I had second thoughts about it so I came back to put it in draft and then remembered that in WordPress you can now make posts private so I made it private. I have some stuff I need/want to write about but don’t need or want to share so I’m going to do that more only what I plan to do is put ‘em in private in the first place so you need never be bothered. I’m used to thinking things out by typing them here and I also use this site as a baby book so I’m glad I figured out that this is going to work because it’ll be a lot easier to organize.

Anyway. There’s a lot of adoption processing going on in our house and it is most decidedly NOT EASY. That’s what the post was about (only with details that I thought better of sharing).

I’m finding a new balance is all.

Madison is mad at me because a few weeks ago I told her we were going to go meet some other black kids who are adopted and have white parents. Only the playgroup got rained out.

We went last year but hadn’t been back since. You know how it is — Saturdays get busy what with soccer and playdates and family dates and, well, they get busy.

Like that’s an excuse.

Madison is still mad and she has every right to be.

“I don’t like being the only black person in this family!” she’s been saying. “It is LONELY!”

She’s tired of not matching us. She’s tired of being the only brown person and not just in our family.

“At the pool?” she told Noah after a trip to the swim club in Clintonville. “There were NO OTHER BLACK KIDS!”

Then the other day while playing with her Fisher-Price people she suddenly came over and thrust one into my face.

“There are no black people in here,” she told me. “Get some!”

We’ve been driving to a park where there are only other black kids and Hispanic kids and she has been in heaven. It’s not as close as the track but it’s near enough and Brett and I can take turns running on the trails while the other one watches Maddie plays tag and hide-and-seek.

The last time we were there I pointed out to Noah that he was the only white kid on the playground.

“Well, that feels weird now that you said that,” he said. “But I hadn’t noticed it before.”

“Madison notices,” I told him. “Imagine how it feels to be her.”

He grimaced.

I emailed the Daisy Scouts people and asked about troops in the neighborhood over the way where my sister lives and where her white family is in the minority. They said they’d get back to me as we got closer to fall. Madison doesn’t want to wait.

“I want some black friends now!”

But she really wants black friends with white parents because she needs other people who get it.

Which is why we’re writing the next IFIF meeting in ink on our calendar. I think five years is a long enough time to fail her, right?

The old site was so clunky, so hard to get around and so difficult to maintain that I have long wanted to move it to my beloved WordPress. Also I know WordPress would bump our google ratings so that more people who need us could find us. I was holding out for BuddyPress to come out of beta but the more I read about it, the more I knew that it would be a huge new learning curve and meanwhile the hosting account for the old OAS install was about to come due. So I had to do something.

I decided to go ahead and make the leap figuring I could do a lot with plugins that would give the community functionality and hopefully up our participation. So the new site is here: http://www.openbookblogging.com (the OAS.com domain will go live there on Valentine’s Day).

Anyone has the ability — nay, the RIGHT — to post on the blog. Logging in will take you to a truncated WordPress dashboard and you can add blog posts and events. You can’t edit anyone’s posts but your own (and no one’s comments but your own) but you can see them all there. Don’t freak out — you’re not on the true backend and you can’t break anything. Also when you login, you will automatically have access to the forum.

The forum is for members only. I thought about making it read-only for folks outside the community but decided against it to encourage greater sharing. I can create more forums if people need them but after talking to Brandy and Jenna, I decided not to break the forums up by triad members. (I think this makes things more divisive and Brandy & Jenna, who have much more adoption forum experience, affirmed this.

Things still left to do:

1. I was able to bring over all the content but when I imported it, it came in with me as the author. I’m working on fixing this. It also stripped the names from comments and that I can’t fix. Anyway I need to remap the posts.
2. And I need to add the links.
3. And I need to write some how-to info for members.

Those of you who are members can login with your old username and password but you should edit your profile details. If you have trouble getting in, let me know. (If you have trouble with anything, let me know.)

I’m using an alpha (not ready for the wild) version of BBPress, the forum software, because it’s the only one that integrates so well with WordPress 2.7. Which means it may have some bugs and it doesn’t have some functionalities I wanted (private messaging). I hope this will change as the software improves.

Anyway! Try it out. Let me know what you think!