Today Ben came to my place to give me a tutorial in operating the website. I am confident that he has created a quick, operator-friendly set-up as far as the gallery and blog are concerned. We didn’t have time to try out generating XML for EOL. In any case I was hard-pressed to absorb all the information on creating gallery pages and blog entries.
Ben Sinclair sent me his invoice to inaugurate work to the website. The big project has begun within two weeks of my return from overseas. Great.
Because of Peter Hall’s work and holiday commitments, he won’t be available until the end of September. He suggested I try and get alternative quotes, which I did. I was given the contact details of a company who would have charged more than double Peter’s quote. After that I asked Steve once more if he knew of any IT expert at Bond University and this time he came up trumps. Following initial email contact and a meeting, I today received a quote from Ben Sinclair, a young computer whiz, which is half that of Peter Hall. What is more he can start the work when I get back from my overseas trip.
After a meeting and exchange of emails, I received a costed proposal from Peter Hall for the IT restructure of the website. The need for this was apparent from the moment the site became a Content Partner of EOL. In the intervening 2 ½ yers no new gallery images have been added to the site. By contrast I have over 550 frames in my facebook albums. Christina’s design will be retained, but I need to be able to upload content and Christina’s IT structure does not readily allow this to be done. I got in touch with Peter via a mutual contact. My thinking was that I had to get a grant to cover the cost and advised Peter accordingly. Today I also happened to receive a quarterly financial report which, lo and behold, revealed that I had sufficient funds in a poorly performing property trust to pay him.
I emailed Christina explaining that we need to increase the number of gallery pages on the website in order to provide EOL with more data and requesting information for Steve to be able to do this from here. In just over five years we have created 13 gallery pages totalling 156 images, whereas in less than a year I have uploaded over 300 images to my ‘One small place on earth . . .’ Facebook page. Of course I am not comparing like with like, but we do need to try and improve our productivity.
The first I knew that The Biodiversity of Tamborine Mountain had become an EOL Content Partner was an email I received today addressed to Content Partners about the appointment of EOL’s new Executive Director and another stating that I could now check last month’s usage of my data on EOL.
A quick visit to my EOL gallery revealed some long-standing errors and omissions. Still, it is a relief to at last be a Content Partner after 18 months of to-ing and fro-ing. The Content Partner page on which my website appears is here.
On the day before I left for Europe I had emailed Katja Schulz in the hope that she could arrange for the remaining corrections to the XML data to be carried out while I was away. Alas, no such luck. On October 11 I received an email from Katja stating that she could not publish my material until she received updated information. I sent this today, in the form of a corrections document which listed every error I had found on the EOL preview site, plus one or two on my website.
Dallas copied me the corrected XMLs he sent to EOL, which will hopefully be acceptable.
At long last I heard from Katja Schulz again. She told me that The Biodiversity of Tamborine Mountain is on the verge of becoming a Content Partner on EOL. She provided me with a preview of all the pages to which I have contributed images and it was a thrill to not only see the list but very pleasing to click on an entry and see my video frame on the page. I emailed her, pointing out a couple of errors and asked her if she wants me to go through all the pages before she publishes them.