Blog -Workin’ It

I will be away enjoying the beautiful, if soggy so far, summer here in Colorado, Wyoming and Kansas from June 13 to July 13. Larry Harrell has once again graciously agreed to take my responsibilities for this month. If you have something you would like to post or other concerns, please contact him. His email is lhfotoware at hotmail.com.

Volunteer Poster. This person would post things I have been sent by people who don’t have access to post. You wouldn’t have to decide if they were post-worthy, I would decide that and all you’d have to do is format them and maybe look for appropriate photos to go with them. Perhaps one of those who reads the blog but does not comment.. a kind of in-the-background kind of person might volunteer for this. I suspect that it would take less than an hour a week. I would help you learn to post things on WordPress, as the other contributors can tell you it’s really easy, and even silver-haired retirees can learn to do it (but students might enjoy it as well!)

Additional Contributors Since at the end of this year I will rotate off my volunteer work with SAF, I will no more be on email lists with interesting topics. It would be helpful if one more person with this background would offer to contribute.. you don’t have to have big ideas about it.. just post interesting things you find. Since I am interested in the difference between local press and the national media (which tend to be on the coasts), I think it would be interesting to have a contributor from the South or the Lake States. It might be nice to have another female voice or other sources of diversity.

Note for current Forest Service employees – I’m not sure that being a Contributor is a good idea for you. Originally, we started this blog as an official Forest Service/ University of Montana collaboration. Turns out that apparently we weren’t supposed to do that, but I didn’t realize that there was a policy in development that said that. After some discussion with folks in the WO, I knew I had to stop doing it officially (somebody from the Dept was not happy), but because I couldn’t figure a way to stop it without the FS sounding bad (“shutting down communication again!”), I decided to go ahead and do it in my spare time, and have it not be official. Note: this may not have been the best idea, in retrospect, in terms of my career in the Forest Service, but I was very aware when I started the blog that I was Retirement Eligible.

While it is considered to be free speech in your spare time, it may not make you very popular with the powers that be. Around this time, I became very unpopular with my superiors, bad things happened to me, and I had to file a grievance to get the bad things reversed. Was it this or something else I did or didn’t do? Who knows? The people who know aren’t telling. It worked out well for me, as I am now on my true path, but I would not wish my experience on anyone.

My old Regional Forester used to say that new ideas attract “organizational antibodies,” so maybe now blogging is part of the landscape there is not an issue. Nevertheless, my experience makes me cautious in advising anyone about blogging, and also very careful about preserving the privacy of those who send me information. Still if you want to take the risk, we’d be delighted to have you.

It was 40 years ago this summer, that I started UC Berkeley Forestry Summer Camp in Meadow Valley, California. That program took us from various other colleges and universities and brought us together as a class for the next two years. Summer camp was my initiation to the path, career and vocation of forestry.

I thought you all might get a hoot out of these photos of us hippies in Camp ’74. You can click on the photo to enlarge and check the names in case you recognize someone.. Here’s the link if you want to find another class or more people from my class.

If you know any of the folks in the photo, please ask if they’d be interested in submitting a post reflecting on their last 40 years to this blog..

And here is a link to an entertaining camp song with Al Stangenberger. And, guess what, Cal Forestry is 100 years old this year- here’s a link to more info and about the festivities!

A happy and safe rest of the summer to all!

Somehow through various dealings with WordPress help (when I get frustrated trying to find web help, I play around with things myself), they told me for $18 I could redirect the old site to this site. This seemed like a good deal, so I did it.

Trying to get our “list of things to fix on the blog” together I decided to recheck on the broken links to photos and to links within the blog. I checked one from 2010, “Jack Ward Thomas on Tester’s Bill” and the photo was attached! (If you want to look at the post, you might get discouraged as how similar discussion topics were in 2010.)

Anyway, I don’t really want to check all the old posts if I can avoid it. If you all have certain favorites it would be helpful for me if you could check the old ones (before we moved the blog April 2013) and then we could see if it has fixed itself generally or only partially.

Blog contributors: this will be easy for you as you can look at your own posts from the past.
Other blog supporters: perhaps the easiest way is to pick a category you are interested in and look at the old posts.

PS I feel it is OK to bring our attention to a past post you find particularly interesting, relevant or prescient.

Thank you! We are getting closer to improving the blog.

As many know, I am in a master’s program in theology. It is on the quarter system. I can barely remember the last time I went to school in the 70’s. But the quarter system to me is like falling down a rabbit hole. One minute I’m leading a normal life and then the next minute there is a complex set of requirements which seem to suck up every ounce of energy; and every day is a due date for something. And it may be more difficult because my previous degrees are unrelated to this one, so the learning curve is exceedingly steep.

Anyway, this explains my curtailed presence on the blog (not a disappearance, just a curtailment) for the next 8 weeks or so. I will be keeping an eye on things and posting and commenting as the Spirit moves me (whoops, that was a bit of disciplinary cross-fertilization). Feel free to email me at terraveritas at gmail.com, if you would like to bring my attention to something.

Thanks all for the gifts to the blog! For a small fee, I found out I could redirect traffic from the old address to this address. I should probably have been able to figure out that such a thing is possible.. but better late than never! Now, on to hiring someone to get all the old links to work…

One of our problems to be addressed on the blog was that if a post referred to “ncfp.wordpress.com” it didn’t automatically change to “forestpolicypub.com”. I know examples are out there, but I couldn’t find one through a couple of searches. Does anyone have examples I could point to when trying to get them fixed? Thanks!

Bob put this as a comment, but as draft prioritization it deserves its own post.

PS Thanks to everyone who contributed to our Blog Improvement Fund.

So far as a needs priority committee is concerned, that was my virtual intent with the “What’s Wrong With this Website?” post. Some of those concerns have been addressed, and a few others added, but no real priority list was determined: this was before we knew we had a budget to work with.

So far as needed blog improvements, I’d put some of the cheap stuff up first, just to check the skill level of who I’m (“you’re”) working with, and also to get some of the cosmetic stuff out of the way. Here are my suggestions:

1) Now that we’ve fixed the Comment list topics, we’ve sacrificed our Avatars, which are also very helpful sorting and place-keeping tools. Should be a quick and easy fix, maybe involving a widget or two at most. This was the most common concern of commenters, and it’s mostly fixed.

Note to Bob.. do you mean getting avatars back on the Recent Comments widget in the right hand column? or somewhere else?

2) Improved (“same as before”) statistical and user summaries, maybe with a few add-ons. Maybe just more widgets, or cut-and-paste the old code.

3) Making the bulk of the statistical studies available to all readers (or at least registered subscribers).

4) Now something difficult — restore the older (“pre-upgrade”) posts and comments so that they properly display graphics (including stats back to Day 01) and so they can be readily searched, sorted, and displayed. Just like Google or Excel or somebody.

5) Install a functional search engine so that past posts and comments actually can be searched, sorted, and displayed. If we can get these 5 things, some basic WordPress payments, and Derek’s spa suggestion covered for anywhere near $1000, I think we will be very lucky people.

Another question for Bob. is there a difference between searching in 4 and 5 or is 4 just saying graphics should be searchable in the same way as 5?

6) Categories and Tags. Probably need to design an explanatory page for this and demonstrate its utility to us non-users. Maybe after the next fundraiser?

Other ideas?

Here’s my question to users who are not Bob.. how much do the site statistics interest you? Bob is very interested, I am not particularly interested, and it would be good to get the pulse of the rest of you.

As to categories, I think the point is to be able to find all the posts on a topic. When you do a post, you get to check off all the categories that you think apply. Since I developed them over the last 4 years, chances are that they may not mean anything to others. But if we changed improved and reorganized them (volunteers?) then we should probably recategorize all the 1800 or so posts.

I just updated the contributors page, sadly removing some former contributors (seems like there should be a ceremony for that) and adding Guy Knudsen.  Many of you comment enough to be “Contributors” and it seems useful  have a place for folks to learn about you.  If you feel like it, please send me your info.. click on the tab to see the format. terraveritas at gmail.com.

So far (almost 4 years to the month) we have run this blog based on the “Blanche Dubois” business model- depending on the “kindness of strangers.” It has been a great thing; I have asked for financial contributions toward the hosting service, and so far I have received nothing from anyone. We agreed to not try to develop a 501c3 as the work for us would be more in terms of forms and accounting than we would probably get in donations. And up until these particular issues (blog programming), it worked just fine.

These issues are things to do with programming the blog. First folks wanted more than 15 comments in the “Recent Comments” widget. So I asked around and found that the only way to do this was to move the blog to be self-hosted. Our model worked, as Eli Sagor volunteered and did a great job moving it. I paid for the rent on the new server from my personal finances. I even played around with the support forums in WordPress.com to fix some things in September right after we moved. I ordered books on CSS from our library, and tried to reach out at the SAF convention to find some volunteers knowledgeable about design. I also tried getting a graduate student intern, but was told that since we are completely virtual and don’t have an office, that we aren’t a great environment for interns.

So reading the comments in Bob’s post here, the problem (for once!) is not that we all don’t agree on what needs to be fixed, but that THERE IS NO ONE TO FIX IT. Maybe I haven’t been as explicit before about having reached the end of my technical capabilities.

So if people want changes made, here are some options:

1) Send me money and I will hire someone- there are plenty of places where this could be done. I would put out the desired fixes and ask for bids.

2) Find a volunteer. Ask around at work, in your other volunteer work, or leave a note at local coffee house (I tried this, so far unsuccessfully).

These are the only two ways I can think of, but am open to others’ creative ideas. Anything you all think of can be done, but someone has to know how to do it.

On another note: the widget for categories had gone missing when we changed themes, it is now on the right hand side. It helps search when you identify the category that a post fits under when you author a post. You can also click on the categories on the widget when you want to find all the posts under that widget.