Developing OTFA

In the run up to our first session at Craignish we have been looking at expanding the functionality of the OTFA project, particularly increasing the levels of interaction we are able to accommodate through the site.

First off the blocks, and for the most part due to a suggestion by one of our team-members, we have set up a wiki. This area of the website will be used for the dissemination of information and tutorials, particularly those for the WordPress and Wiki installations. At the moment it holds the website stuff, but eventually it should have material on recording, producing and marketing all sorts of media – a lot of it contributed by the teams themselves.

Next, partially inspired by the inclement weather which has disrupted our training days, we have implemented a Live Help centre which team members can use to interact with the website team. The plan is that whenever we’re at the web face mining html, we’ll have the Live Help up on our desktop. This will represent an available timespan somewhere between 8 and 12 hours.

We’ve also implemented an instant messaging system on all of the blogs so that authors can chat to one another through the admin end. To find it users should look under the ‘Manage’ link.

And finally we have finished tweaking our use of Google Maps so that all participants in the OTFA project can add locations and have them display on the same map in the ForArgyll.com site.

Next on the agenda is a partially complete project to create a social networking facility through the Profiles section of the admin end. We have already got author feeds, profile info and (an imperfect) friends-link app., but now we need instant messaging through the profile, and enabled only for friends ….