Dad runs http://www.shelvoke-drewry.co.uk/ to “preserve the name and history of Shelvoke & Drewry Ltd., of Letchworth, Hertfordshire. U.K. who were manufacturers of municipal vehicles for almost 70 years.”

He wanted to post information about Preserved Vehicles in a place where other people could contribute their knowledge – and Wikipedia just seemed the right place.

Wikipedia, famously, is something anyone can contribute to – but have you ever tried to create a new page? It’s not all that easy, mostly because there is some rigour involved (a good thing), and that means what you’re talking about needs references and ‘notable’ ones at that.

If your page does not pass muster, then it will be removed – and if your not careful, that could be a lot of wasted work.

Any way after a good deal of work, mostly on Dad’s part, this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preserved_Shelvoke_and_Drewry_Vehicles is the result.

It’s early days, and hopefully the page will stay there. Quite excitingly, someone else has already contributed to the article.

Everything you ever wanted to know eh?

Our tweetmap

On previous bike rides I’ve normally taken a Garmin GPS device and also had a camera.  On this one however, we thought it would be interesting to try and utilise the GPS capabilities of my Nolia E71 phone and use my Twitter as a means to collect data.  The end result could/would/should be a map and timeline of the bike ride…

Knowing that we could manually read the lat/long from my phone and then tweet this out was useful – and so we made a couple of tests.  However, we also knew that to effectively aggregate the tweets, it would be easier to look at delivering the geo coordinates via the specific Twitter fields and functions, rather than the 140 characters of the message.

The first step was to install a Twitter client to the E71 that could do this.  I had tried Gravity before at conferences and found it really useful – so looked into that.  Gravity has a neat function to enable the GPS coordinates to be sent with any particular tweet, along with photos and images via Twitpic and other services.  Finally, we figured that a hashtag was needed to group the tweets together – hence the very particular #ull2arwich term.

So – with the platform and device together, onto the ride!  As you can see from the map, I managed to send messages out, with pics, along the way.  A couple of tweets seemed to misplace, which was a bit annoying – particularly for the final one at Harwich quay!

Overall, the experience of using the phone/Gravity/Twitter was pleasurable.  In a few remote (or cloudy?) areas, the GPS didnt seem to locate, but generally it was all OK.  Just don’t ask about that headwind in south Lincolnshire

My favourite photo along the way – roadside art

Our app idea hatched along the way – egg-o-meter

This evening we did a bit of accommodation planning, after booking our train tickets out to the start in Hull, and back from Harwich a couple of weeks ago.

A platform is something to build upon, but shouln’t be the only one in town.  We found inspiration in the work of MuseumInADay, BCCDIY, Bashmash and the growing list of social media surgeries.  After this weekend, maybe TWDT will be something else.  Maybe some people will pull their own together.  It’s all good.  And possible.

Good luck to everyone this weekend. The food wiki looks delicious btw!

We put Salford Lads’ Club website live (in between guitar lessons, getting ears syringed, collecting children from school, etc).

Once again our progress, problems and triumphs can be seen on the wiki page we made for this project: http://twdt.bluwiki.com/go/Slc

There was quite a lot to do in terms of registering for external services (google analytics, sitemaps, flickr, disqus, etc).

We also took the decision to re-add all the photos manually on a post by post basis – really as a way of also editing and checking the posts as went and to make the images look more uniform in the pages.

Oh, and the picture above? I’ve been playing around at http://superherosquad.marvel.com/ far too much recently!

Our task for the day was to move the existing Salford Lads’ Club website over to a more modern Wordpress installation, incorporating some of the technology that allows us to display data shared around the web (e.g. Flickr photos).

We’d already set up some hosting with the lovely people at EcoHost and had Wordpress installed.

We had a ‘wiki’ page set up with tasks and ideas: http://twdt.bluwiki.com/go/Slc

Go!

We got to the club around 10.30, and after getting the guided tour, we got started. First Steven did a massive copy and paste job of getting all the data from the old site onto the new. I investigated plugins and looked a ‘better shop’ option over the solution currently in use.

Many of the services we want to use require registration, so we needed to set up a Googlemail account to handle that.

Just before lunch Steven pulled down half a dozen themes to look through. By lunchtime (chips!) we’d installed a bunch of plugins, tried a few things out and got all the content over.

First task after lunch was to choose the theme, we spent a bit of time looking at different possibilities, and decided on the ‘Techified’ theme from http://cheon.info/en

With 3 columns, it had plenty of space for content pulled from other places, and we liked the ‘Featured Post’ option (but would perhaps want to hack the javascript a bit.) In the end we reduced the number of rotating posts to 2 by hacking line 8 of slider.php in the theme files.

We stumbled across the fact that categories would show up as a set of menus with drop down lists, and Steven set of to categorise all 80 or so posts into the areas that seemed appropriate – thank goodness for the ‘Quick Edit’ features of Wordpress.

I played around with Flickr Gallery to pull in all photos on Flickr that are tagged ’salford lads club’ – again some registration required for API keys and the like. Just a bit fiddly, but the Gallery is nice.

Now, we’re running out of time, so it’s tidy up time. We left the shop as it was, ‘cos there’s lots to do to understand the back end of that, tidied some HTML, and most importantly, showed Leslie (very briefly) what we’d done, and how he could post the latest news items. (In turn he showed us the latest Fifa 2010 add, featuring Wayne Rooney, that had recently been shot in the club! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcV6×9mIFtU)

Then it was home (on bikes) to  a pasta dinner, and discussion of what still needs to be done.

We didn’t get it done in a day, but we did do all of that.

Existing Site: http://salfordladsclub.org.uk/
New Site: http://salfordladsclub.net (to be moved to existing address soon!)

11th November, and we agreed that the small matter of moving the Salford Lads Club web presence to a more social world.

It should be fun. It might be a tad cold. It won’t take more than a day…

I started a wiki page to get things moving…

The plan next Wednesday is to get the existing content over into a wordpress install, but then also start to snap together some social media plug-ins, such as Flickr, Twitter and anything else ending with an r!

One thing I have found though, is that the club is well documented on the web already :

- A comprehensive Wikipedia article

- Several photos from people on Flickr

- Lots of tweets…

There is obviously a Smiths angle / interest with some of this, but also testiment to the great work done by the volunteers at the club already – there is always something new taking place or planned.

Photo: markhillary

Whatever we make, we redistribute, because life is too short to hold onto stuff.