BarCampNOLA Hack Day: The 3rd Annual Bayou Boogaloo Website
Christopher Johnston listening intently at BarCampNOLA by Chris Schultz.
Yesterday was the second day of BarCampNOLA. We met at the offices of Voodoo Ventures to hack at some community projects for the City of New Orleans. We split into two teams. Evelyn Rodriquez put forward an idea for an art microgrant program. I put forward the The Bayou Boogaloo.
It put forward the Bayou Boogaloo because I wanted to chose a project that everyone could work on and we would each have small win, that would collectively be a big stride forward for the Bayou Boogaloo’s online persona.
This was a good project for the marketing folks in the room to consider, while the technical people could pimp the Bayou Boogaloo WordPress installation.
We’ll start with the marking side of things after the jump.
Mixing BarCampNOLA With Our City’s Social Graces
The day before, we were talking about how to get more people from Houston and Atlanta to participate in the next BarCampNOLA. The first idea is to have the next event during JazzFest, in the week between the two JazzFest weekends. David Herrold and Steven Evatt both made the point that, without the support of the Houston Chronicle, they wouldn’t be able to afford rooms because of the NBA All-Star Game. It might be an incentive to come to BarCampNOLA during JazzFest for some, but the costs of accommodation might be deterrent for others.
The Bayou Boogaloo has grown these last three years. From one stage to two stages in the second year. It will grow to two nights in the second year. It is a huge bash on the banks on the Bayou St John, with great New Orleans food and music, but it is almost all locals who attend. Why not tie the Bayou Boogaloo into a BarCampNOLA event?
Jeanne Foster of Gambit Weekly Magazine, put together a contact list of the regional alternative weeklies to contact for cross promotion, while Steven Evatt noted getting written up in a newspaper’s blog is easier to accomplish than going through the marketing ranks.
Christopher Johnston did research an pay-per-action marking to sell Boogaloo swag online.
David Herrold created icons that can be used given to New Orleans Bloggers and other websites to link to the Bayou Boogaloo website.
Technical Creations
The Bayou Boogaloo website is already undergoing a redesign, so the technical folks didn’t dive into HTML. They worked on the adding back-end functionality and front-end bling.
Spencer Hoyt and Aaron Lozier installed a number of WordPress plugins, including a the WordPress statistics plugin and added a sitemap. Also, you can now submit to Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and what-have-you with a link at the bottom of each post.
John Foster of Turbo Squid looked at how to create some Web 2.0 forms to gather email addresses for an email list. Ultimately, he’s decided to make it a Ruby project, to learn Ruby. We’ll be seeing that feature later in the week.
Matt Tritico cerated the Bayou Boogaloo MySpace, Flickr and Facebook accounts. He also added a carousel of photographs widget to the homepage.
Charles Paul arrive late while so much was underway, and decided to put time in on mapping the city’s targeted demolition list from the Squandered Heritage presentation I’d made the day before.
For the most part, I was flipping switches on the server to make sure everyone could do what they needed to do. I got started on a web shop where we can sell T-Shirts and other swag. Don’t buy the motorcycles.
Kory Twaites and David Crais watched us from the live streaming webcast of the Bayou Boogaloo side of hack day. Eli Ackerman was there in spirit as well.
Keeping In Touch
I would greatly appreciate any insight into how to continue involvement in Think New Orleans related projects. I’ve created a blog post that can act as a listserv, feed and forum (thanks to a magical mix of WordPress plug-ins). Please leave a comment in the forum to activate the email notification.
I called the page hackers. Doesn’t mean you’re a developer, just a hacker of sorts. I’d like to continue to get the input of David, Steven, Jeanne, Chris, John and Spencer who will not admit that they are computer programmers.
So, please, leave a message at the Hackers’s Forum and keep in touch.
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[...] are more detailed summaries by Brian & Alan. Thanks to everyone who participated, it was a great weekend. Let’s do it again [...]
[...] The wiki link that Brian refers to about the art micro-granting project is here and Alan blogs about the Bayou Boogaloo project here. [...]
[...] BarCampNOLA Hack Day: The 3rd Annual Bayou Boogaloo WebsiteChristopher Johnston listening intently at BarCampNOLA by Chris Schultz. Yesterday was the second day of BarCampNOLA. We met at the offices of Voodoo Ventures to hack at some community projects for the City of New Orleans. … – [...]
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