On Monday evening we had an Ubuntu US Teams over in #ubuntu-us on freenode (logs, minutes) where we did final discussion on the relaunch of our website. We were running Drupal5 on a Linode (thanks again for the donation, Linode!) running Hardy and I’ve been eyeing an upgrade to Lucid. While considering this I spoke with other writers on the site who tended to prefer the WordPress workflow to that of Drupal for blog/news style sites, considered the RAM limitations (Drupal is a bit heavy) and the upgrade path. In the end it was a number of things that pointed in the direction of WordPress being the proper option, so I tossed together a test environment last month, kept the mailing list informed along the way and took time at the meeting to take final considerations on the site.
I was able to launch the site Monday night.
Thanks to everyone who helped out, the Washington DC folks for forwarding along the redevelopment effort to their list and offering to help find a theme to suit our needs, Paul Tagliamonte, Nathan Handler, Robert Wall and Neal Bussett who offered constructive criticism of the design and offered design tweaks. Now we just need more volunteers to write articles! Amber Graner has been doing a great job with the interviews but we could always use more content creators. If you’re interested just drop me an email: lyz@ubuntu.com
On Tuesday I approached Martin Owens to ask if he’d be willing to put together a flashy generic Ubuntu advertisement that we could print and display at the Linux Picnic (Picn*x 19) this weekend at the Ubuntu California Team tables. Lucky for me he was happy to assist and came up with this excellent design:
You can grab the image and the source over on spreadubuntu:
http://spreadubuntu.neomenlo.org/en/material/poster/reasons-love-ubuntu
And be sure to check out his blog post about it: http://doctormo.org/2010/08/18/reasons-to-love-ubuntu/
Today I headed over to the local copy shop and got it printed up along with one for the California Team:
I also received the Ubuntu California vinyl banner in the mail today (thanks again Neal!) and we’ve got Grant Bowman and Mark Terranova bringing other items. We’re almost set for the picnic! If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and want to help out at our table, or are just interested in hanging out near our table while we eat some burgers and vegetarian goodies, check out the Ubuntu California Picn*x19 wiki page and be sure to RSVP for the picnic to be sure you get some food!
Thursday, Aug 19th, 2010 at 18:41
The site looks pretty good. Although, I was a bit surprised to find that the link I had in the /topic of my LoCos IRC channel no longer worked due to the changed URLs of all of the posts – URL rewrites are good. (Updated it to http://ubuntu-us.org/2009/12/06/what-individuals-can-do-for-their-loco-team/ once I figured out what was going on.)
Thursday, Aug 19th, 2010 at 18:53
Yeah, sorry about that, WordPress’ ?-based rewrites are eating my redirects (and rewrites!) from the old Drupal site, still looking for a solution.
Thursday, Aug 19th, 2010 at 23:58
Hey the print looks awesome. I think we should get some of those holding things.