The mainframe project team is into week two of grinding on logistics and scaffolding for the archive. Our weekly meeting focused on two efforts: (a) identifying some missing non-technical dependencies and (b) setting up local development environments. The good news is we’re still within range of our Phase 2 milestones:

• Decide which materials (photos, articles, books) needed for project and how it will be organized
  • Assign: Both
  • Deadline(s): 03/30
• Zine/Documentation revision (1)
  • Assign: Connie
  • Deadline(s): April 6th

One encouraging fact about the archive is that there are 500+ images that will be available! As far as we can discern, that is a legitimate archive size to begin with! In the midst of collecting images, we weren’t entirely sure we’d have enough.

There are some desirable parts of the archive that we may need to reconsider.

For example, while the images have been curated heavily, we haven’t review enough video material yet to make those a first class part of the archive. We need not eliminate video content we’ve found. We do plan on creating a ‘resources’ page with helpful books and websites, and embedded videos could be a compromise to get the videos included, even if they aren’t curated and surfaced in the same way as the images.

As a part of the revised proposal, we suggested that some or most of the archival material would be collaged and/or under go deformance. We’re still exploring this option under the deadline for this semester.

To Do This Week

• Fix broken images – there are a subset of images that aren’t rendering for some reason
• Upload last half of images – we’ve uploading only half of the images, which is a time/concentration consuming process; the rest will be uploaded this week
• Set up local dev environment – we did this last night
  • Generating and adding an ssh key to our repo
  • Cloning the repo
  • Installing ruby, non-ruby dependencies, and then installing ruby gems
  • Walking through the commands necessarily to generate and serve the website from your computer before pushing and publishing changes
• Develop color palette / design – we have only made small changes to the design thus far; some colorblind people may not be able to see text using the current color scheme
• Build out the navigation – this will flesh out what contextual text is missing, and where we need to fill in the gaps
• Remove wax project cruft – there are some textual and code references to the wax project’s demo site that we need to replace 😉
• Finalize (?) logos maybe – we have a logo, but it wouldn’t work well for say a social media avatar; we’re exploring options; maybe we don’t need to use the logo for social media?