2020 Permaculture Technology Jamboree Brainstorming

Here I noticed:

Regular Price: $2,60
Permaculture Tech Jamboree (PTJ) +
Permaculture Design Course (PDC)

June 14th-27th and June 29th-July 10th, 2020

Nicole Alderman wrote:I've been trying my hand at making a website for the Permaculture Technology Conference. I'm new to Wordpress (and web design!), so input is well-appreciated.

https://wheaton-labs.com/permaculture-tech/

Questions:

-- Should we have the Header at the top that says "Permaculture Technology Jamboree"? It seems a bit harsh compared to the graphic, and maybe a bit redundant. But having the text is good for search engines, I'm sure.

 -- Are the words lovely? Are they interesting and explanatory? Anything you would word differently?

 -- Does it flow well? Are you interested in scrolling further, or do you get bored?

We are in the early stages of shaping this page.  I think it is looking pretty good!

I think we need to make a whole different page for accommodations.  

Note that in the section for buying a ticket we need the words:

Note: 80% refunds up to two weeks before the event starts. If you are not comfortable with being recorded, please do not attend. Tobacco free and drug free site.

And below the ticket stuff we need a section that says "A note about food" and in that section it says:

Meals are not included. BUT attendees will be invited to join Paul at his table. If you have any special dietary needs/desires, you might want to bring your own food and make use of our rocket cook stoves, ovens, solar ovens and other interesting contraptions for cooking.

Note that the 48 hour window will start when we send an email out about the three events (PDC+PTJ+SKIP).  Probably on the monthly-ish.  But if anybody that is active in the forums bought a ticket now, I would honor that.

paul wheaton wrote:
Note that in the section for buying a ticket we need the words:

Note: 80% refunds up to two weeks before the event starts. If you are not comfortable with being recorded, please do not attend. Tobacco free and drug free site.

And below the ticket stuff we need a section that says "A note about food" and in that section it says:

Meals are not included. BUT attendees will be invited to join Paul at his table. If you have any special dietary needs/desires, you might want to bring your own food and make use of our rocket cook stoves, ovens, solar ovens and other interesting contraptions for cooking.

Done! I think the URL just got changed to https://wheaton-labs.com/permaculture-tech/

I think it's 50 shades of beautiful!  Text size and color are very nice, "click here" at the top works well, I didn't get bored scrolling and the pictures/collages are neat.  

Hmm, maybe a FAQ section at some point?  I'm assuming someone could copy/paste stuff from past events.

I see some typos, scroll down to TRACK EIGHT.  It goes like this:
TRACK EIGHT - HOMESTEADING
(some info on track 8)
(some pictures including one very handsome man)
TRACK NINE - BOOTCAMP
(the exact same pictures as above, handsome dude and all)
TRACK NINE – SPONTANEOUS INNOVATION:

Thanks Kyle, what typos are you seeing?

We just added the extra track and copied the section down so that's why the photos duplicated.  Thanks for saying I'm handsome!

it goes track 8, track 9, track 9 (should be 10)
also it uses the same pictures twice in a row, maybe by mistake.

Oh, gotcha.  Typo to me means a misspelling.  Thansk!

Ah yes! I'm still working on that section! It needs a new collage and I need to publish the changes to the words. Let me get that published, and I'll go make the new collage.

*Scurries off to find cool pictures of wheaton lab innovations...*

(Edit, ignore the hideous menu on the top. I'm amazed it actually appeared after so many failed attempts, but it's hideous. And the links don't work yet. )

WOW! That is a well done and really engaging (first) draft. I wish my first effort at something like this was as brilliant.

I would suggest the title (words) get axed, 2020 added to the center of the graphic...and tons of keywords and meta tags get added for the search engines (SEO) maybe along these lines: https://www.wordpress-web-designer-raleigh.com/2015/04/9-places-to-insert-keywords-on-your-website/

Positive you have already covered this aspect, but by eliminating the "title", the graphic IMHO would be not only sufficient, but eliminates the "eye stutter" of going from the text to the graphic that your eye is immediately drawn to anyway

Hopefully that ramble makes sense.

Suggest some "out of the box" keywords/meta tags might be added: "appropriate technology", "sustainable technology", "regenerative", "green tech", "eco tech", "eco tourism", "tech glamping" etc....

That title at the top bugs me, too. The worst part is, I keep changing it to "Amatic SC" which is a websafe font that the offer, and it keeps changing to a different one. I'm thinking that when you look at the 2020 Permaculture Technology Jamboree, it does NOT have a font that matches the graphic?

Edited to add screen shots of what the font is supposed to look like

You're absolutely correct - the fonts don't match

The Amatic font is declared correctly and the browser wants to use it ... but Amatic isn't standard on devices so it has to be downloaded from somewhere.  I don't use wordpress so I'm not entirely sure where/what module that happens in... but it need to be done.

Its available at Google : https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Amatic+SC

But you might need something like: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-google-fonts/ to access it.

Some (entirely debatable) Design Thoughts

The Tracks ...e.g. "TRACK ONE – SOLAR GLASS RECYCLING"
- first, not all of the tracks are labeled...e.g. four, five, six
-second ... you have a <strong> tag on otherwise normal text.  I'd suggest trying <h3>
-third - the list items under each track are preceeded with a check mark.  Stylistically I prefer a simpler bullet here (and less space between lines) - the checkmarks are often used to indicate completion or relative inclusion.  The inner-most css span sets a line height of 2.3em which seems kinda big

each track also has a top and bottom margin of 20 px, I think that could be removed as there is enough padding built in.

Eliot Mason wrote:The Amatic font is declared correctly and the browser wants to use it ... but Amatic isn't standard on devices so it has to be downloaded from somewhere.  I don't use wordpress so I'm not entirely sure where/what module that happens in... but it need to be done.

Its available at Google : https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Amatic+SC

But you might need something like: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-google-fonts/ to access it.

I'm really new to this, so this is probably a stupid question. Do everyone who views the website need to have Amatic installed (this seems like a good reason to not use that font), or do I somehow have to upload the font to wordpress? The Thrive Architect program that we're using with Wordpress gives the option of using that font, so I'd assume it's already instealled. But, maybe that's a wrong assumption.

-third - the list items under each track are preceeded with a check mark.  Stylistically I prefer a simpler bullet here (and less space between lines) - the checkmarks are often used to indicate completion or relative inclusion.  The inner-most css span sets a line height of 2.3em which seems kinda big

This bugged me, too. We intially had a dot, but then switetched to a different mode of bullets. I searched for a dot, and couldn't find one. Finally, I tried searching "circle" and found some nice dots. Now we have dots instead of checks. Yay!

-second ... you have a <strong> tag on otherwise normal text.  I'd suggest trying <h3>

Could you explain more which ones have the strong text? I don't know what strong text is. Is H3 header 3?

- first, not all of the tracks are labeled...e.g. four, five, six

I noticed that, too. But, I couldn't quite think of ways to summarize those tracks. The activities don't seem to have a unifying theme. Maybe someone can summarize them?

Here's the nameless tracks:

TRACK FOUR:

​spring terrace: shape dry land to be able to extract 400 gallons of water per day

​passive garden heater: a technique to help grow citrus, outdoors, in Montana

​dry stack moon gate: correctly stacking rock to have a wall with a 2-foot round hole

​rocket forge: a metalworking forge that does not require coal, propane or electricity

TRACK FIVE:

​roundwood timber framing pavilion

​two styles of innovative deer/chicken fencing with a per foot price that is less than 10% of normal

​add a night mode to the giant solar food dehydrator

​a cob sink. Using clay and sand from the land a sink will be formed and then made waterproof with natural materials

​trombe wall. Move air 24 hours a day without electricity

TRACK SIX:

​create an electric tractor hayride tour

​install a heliostat: A sun tracking mirror to add light and heat to a house

​add permanent solar power to a tiny house

​repair cafe

​better crockpot: cook triple the food with less than 10% of the energy of a standard crockpot

​window quilts and harvesting winter window condensation

The H tags are not formatting tags. They are document header tags. <strong> is when you want to make the text stand out. H1-H4 hould only be used to denote document sections.  

They should also be nested in a normal format. With only a single H1 per page. Think of the H tags as forming your document outline in Word. You should never use H tags to get bigger or bolder fonts. Google indexes pages with H# tags as document section descriptors. If you have H tags all over the place, it will think your document is trash.

<h1>PDC</h1>    <h2>Schedule</h2>         <h3>Day - 0</h3>              On day Zero we will dance.         <h3>Day - 1</h3>              On this day, we will <strong>WORK</strong>    <h2>Instuctors</h2>        <h3>Marty McFly</h3>            Marty is a swell guy.        <h3>Suzy Smith</h3>            Suzy is a good dame.    <h2>Tickets</h2>

Nicole - web stuff is a whole bunch of bits of technology held together with some old bubble gum.  Its a mess and kind of a camel - in the sense that its a horse designed by a committee.  I'd kinda like to burn down html and browsers and java libraries and php libraries and... just start over.  So don't feel weird about not understanding some things!

Do everyone who views the website need to have Amatic installed (this seems like a good reason to not use that font), or do I somehow have to upload the font to wordpress?

Browsers do their best.  If the page code calls for a font that isn't present on the local device, the browser (reasonably) finds some other font to use so you can, you know, actually read the page.  But no one is going to have Amatic on their local machine - that's why the code needs to tell the browser "psst... get Amatic from here...".  I'm not a Wordpress user so maybe I'm missing it, but it looks like that little "psst" isn't being sent.

Could you explain more which ones have the strong text? I don't know what strong text is. Is H3 header 3?

Sure.  The code literally ends up as:
<p><strong> TRACK ONE – SOLAR GLASS RECYCLING:</strong></p>
The <p> is the paragraph and <strong> is generally used as "bold".  Why don't we use <bold>?  See above...
<h1> is generally the biggest header, followed by <h2>, <h3> etc.  They are generally all the same font and color, and reduce in size (but... they can be defined however you want so the hierarchy doesn't necessarily hold). But the idea is that the font, size, color differentiate the header from normal text and make it easier for us monkeys to scan the page and get of sense of what's going on.  Elsewhere on the page, "Event Track Schedules" is using <h2> and Our Jamboree Format is using <h3>.  Hmm, ok don't use <h3> unless you can get into Thrive Architect and change the settings for (it looks like...) the "Landing Page."  If you can't ... just ignore me and we monkeys will survive and register for the event anyway.

Naming is hard (ooh!  Can I drop in a Name of the Wind reference?).  Anyway, Paul will probably have some better ideas but I'll start the ball with (respectively):
Earth, Rock & Steel
Using Wood
Electricity & Efficiency

This is great info! I went and made the headers logical. So, there's only one H1 (2020 permaculture design course), and the H2s are Schedule/Instructors/Tickets. Then those weird two headers at the top get H3 (they're excactly the same as H2, except they don't get underlines). And the bios and ticket titles all got H4. Nice and consistent sizing now. Yay!

I also reworked the bios a bit, and aligned everything with faces on one side and bio and collages on the other--that way it's easier to scroll through and looks better on mobile. Took a bit of work to figure out a way to get the collages of people's work to fit into their bios, but I think this works pretty well. Thoughts?

And, Bill did magic on the menus to make them work. We might need to fiddle with them further since I added in the titles for sections, but maybe this is good enough. I think Bill also managed some magic that made the font work right. Does it work right now on everyone else's computers?

Paul wanted some words bolded. Wordpress wanted to bold the whole text box or nothing. But, by button mashing at it, I think I managed to get the "TEN" in "Attendees can wander among all TEN of the tracks " and the "BUT" in "Meals are not included, BUT Paul says he will feed you "Paul food" at his table." to be bolded. Do these show up bolded on everyone else's computers?

Woohoo!  Progress!

Bill is, of course, totally correct about the proper usage of H tags.  None of my clients care about Google so I don't either and I relapse into seeing them as formatting tags.  But Paul does care, so listen to Bill...

I'm still not getting the font in Safari or Firefox.  But the BOLD words are coming through.
The menu isn't quite right ...  It appears at the very top of the page and again between Jamboree Format and Track Schedules, and again before Instructors.  Or did you intend for it to repeat?

I like the reformatted instructors!  But is Chris an author on Scrounging?

In the Instructors section, Paul's bio is incorrect :)

As to the formatting, I would reduce spacing and make the page more "compacted"  if possible. For instance, at the end of each track section there is a bigger than "normal" empty space that can be recovered.

Ah, yes, I need to find a bio for Paul that fits. Havent' gotten around to that yet.

Thank you about the book! James and Chris have very similar formatting for their books, and I stuck a boarder around them all in photoshop, and wanted them to match...and long story short, I forgot to get the layer order right on that one. I'll do that now! (Edit: DONE!)

The bios are all really rough...and there's a good 8 more of them to come! Thank you very much for double-checking my work!

I'd love to get rid of those extra spaces between sections. I'm still trying to figure out how. Text and pictures go into pre-sized content boxes, and those boxes add space below the picture, and each picture box adds space. Maybe if I play with the layout controls, I can shorten up those annoying gaps...

The menu is annoying. We want links part way down so people can go quickly to different sections, but as far as I can tell, the menus aren't really customizable. I can't even figure out how to change font size or color. It might be better to just do a string of links...or ignore it all together.

And, frustratingly enough, the menus don't show up in the preview, and so I have to publish the page to find out how ugly they are.

You should be able to edit a file on the site : base.css (located at wp-content/plugins/thrive-visual-editor/landing-page/templates/css/base.css).  See if you can find and edit that file (and if so, you the power to pretty much change all of the formatting!  With Great Power comes Great Responsibility!).  I'm not sure how long it will take WordPress to absorb the changes in the file.  You might need to wait up to 15 minutes depending on cache refresh settings.  There's some way to flush the caches in WP but I don't recall.

Add at the bottom below all other text:

/*take away excess margins between the tracks */ .thrv_wrapper { .margin-top:none; .margin-bottom:none; } /*optional - try it!*/ .thrv-content-box { border-bottom: 3px solid green; }

Eliot Mason wrote:  I'd kinda like to burn down html and browsers and java libraries and ...

(cough)javascript(cough)

Java is rather magnificent.  One could even argue that some of the older stuff is even better than some of the newer stuff.

Here's a link to the awesome web page Nicole is making:  https://wheaton-labs.com/permaculture-tech

My latest thoughts:
Is there a need for a Home button at the top?  Wouldn't that just take you to that same spot?

Possible names for sections:
Track 4:  Earth and Fire

Track 5: Wood and Cob

Track 6: Shock and Awe, or Zappity Zap, or Current Events (get it?), or Electricity

If a section is 90% one thing and we can move a topic to another track to make it more pure, that's a possibility.  Depending on instructor schedules and a bunch of other moving parts...

Mike Haasl wrote:Possible names for sections:

Track 4:  Earth and Fire

Track 5: Wood and Cob

Track 6: Shock and Awe, or Zappity Zap, or Current Events (get it?), or Electricity.

I like

Track 4:  Earth and Fire

Track 5: Wood and Cob

Track 6: Zappity Zap

Nicole, if difficulty is experienced with editing CSS in a Wordpress theme, some inherent proprietary nonsense can be mitigated by choosing a theme that most suits a need without compromising important aesthetics.  At which point controlling small stuff can feel like a bigger issue than it should be.  There is often a catch with inability to manipulate what should be simple changes, that Wordpress tech support inevitably advises will be resolved by using one of their handy dandy developer/programmers to edit CSS (which by itself is really neither developing or programming).

Negative Wordpress sentiments aside... you may be able to more easily resolve the font problem by looking for a 'mobile first' theme, that looks like the current one, that uses common fonts (compatible with mobile devices and most browsers) in proprietary areas (boxes, headings, etcetera) that otherwise must be edited in CSS, which then usually impacts compatibility between mobile devices and browsers.  Editing CSS is easy when the guidelines are understood, however there is at least a small learning curve that can interfere with getting a project done in a timely manner.

As if you don't already have enough on your plate at the moment ^.^ here is a source that might help understand the mini-challenge of UI (user interface) mobile first fonts that are compatible with common browsers.

https://medium.muz.li/top-5-ui-fonts-for-website-mobile-apps-d78829e58f7e

If you decide to look for a more suitable theme, you may get lucky and find one quickly, however it usually takes an hour or so to try different themes to find the ideal.  The most useful tip with utilizing Wordpress is learning how to work with what is without changing a theme.  It is changing a theme that introduces all manner of butt pains.

I thought I might get a reaction...

paul wheaton wrote:

Eliot Mason wrote:  I'd kinda like to burn down html and browsers and java libraries and ...

(cough)javascript(cough)

Java is rather magnificent.  One could even argue that some of the older stuff is even better than some of the newer stuff.

I've not had opportunity/reason to dive into javascript.  All I know is that I hate the new version of Drupal, I feel ever more an Old Dog and when I'm really cranky I start to wonder if those really gray-hair guys who used to argue against a GUI were maybe right.

Catherine is absolutely right that the canned theme in WordPress is being difficult.  They lure you in with sweet, sweet promises of features and ease of use and then, instead of riding your web based steed through the magnificent scenery as the the wind blows your hair you discover that you have been saddled, hobbled and tied to a post and you cannot possibly change that one little thing.

I'll suggest that, at this point, perfection is not required and the page is good-enough.  If Paul starts offering a variant of the PDC for Engineers, a PDC for Graphic Designers and Marketing Experts say, then the page would need a whole boatload of work.  Its a little rough here and there, but I don't think people who are willing to put their hands in cob, scrape bark, etc are going to be upset.

The page works fine (excepting that stupid font problem) on my mobile.  Well, the menu appears in its retracted form and it looks weird - but again its good enough.

Mike Haasl wrote:
Possible names for sections:
Track 4:  Earth and Fire

Track 5: Wood and Cob

Track 6: Shock and Awe, or Zappity Zap, or Current Events (get it?), or Electricity

If a section is 90% one thing and we can move a topic to another track to make it more pure, that's a possibility.  Depending on instructor schedules and a bunch of other moving parts...

Yeah, those are better than mine.

I'm a stick in the mud on some of this - so you might choose the opposite of my preference just to ensure a fun-loving crowd.  I'd use either alternative over Zappity Zap (sorry Paul...) because that phrasing makes me think of getting zapped.  : (

richsoil.com is mostly static HTML pages.  I think they are pretty easy to edit - just make sure to look at them afterward.   But a lot of the people that are helping us make changes cannot spell html and are not interested in learning.  So last fall when we started talking about creating wheaton-labs.com, it was agreed to go with the flow:  wordpress.    And with way, way, way too much stuff about CRO we were pointed strongly in the direction of "thrive themes".   So here we are.   This is the tool we will be using.

The text for Track seven has a typo, "with" should be "will": Everything in this track, attendee with do themselves

The first instructor's name is spelled two different ways: McClellan, McClellen.

Thanks Jerry, I broke into the back room and found the buttons to push, hopefully in fixing that I didn't mess up all of Nicole's great work...

Sometime on Sunday perhaps, we can schedule a zoom meeting, and perhaps record it, for some of the WordPress stuff.  There are 500 ways to get rid of spacing, and all of them will work, but only 5 of them are the “Right” way from an SEO/HTML perspective.

I always feel like a fraud with WordPress because they try to make it easy for graphic designers, but I suck at that.  My Wordpress GUI editor knowledge is only +2 weeks more than Nichole’s and I suspect that her practical knowledge already eclipses mine.  But... bullshit CSS spacing and margin shenanigans... I got you covered...

paul wheaton wrote: So last fall when we started talking about creating wheaton-labs.com, it was agreed to go with the flow:  wordpress.    And with way, way, way too much stuff about CRO we were pointed strongly in the direction of "thrive themes".   So here we are.   This is the tool we will be using.

Nichole could crap out better designs 1/2 asleep in WordPress, than I could make with 4 weeks of raw HTML... WordPress/Thrive already “paid” for itself.

Bill Crim wrote:There are 500 ways to get rid of spacing, and all of them will work, but only 5 of them are the “Right” way from an SEO/HTML perspective.

I always feel like a fraud with WordPress because they try to make it easy for graphic designers, but I suck at that.  My Wordpress GUI editor knowledge is only +2 weeks more than Nichole’s and I suspect that her practical knowledge already eclipses mine.  But... bullshit CSS spacing and margin shenanigans... I got you covered...

Thanks for volunteering Bill!

But seriously, Drupal 8 has me very angry and I need to learn WP - even though it feels like I'm trading in a convection oven with induction stovetop for an easybake!  But maybe with the easybake I can actually make something...

I need to sit out this round, but I hereby volunteer to be roped into a future WP project.

Today I had two important thoughts:

thought-1:   next year, maybe the name of the event should be "permaculture mad scientist jamboree"

thought-2:  maybe with a bit of push, we can do it this year?  Do we wanna?  


I like the name, for lots of reasons.   It's the rug that really pulls this room together.  Anybody else have opinions on doing this name change for this year?

Click on the thumbs up for this post if you like the idea of this name change.

With the name "permaculture mad scientist jamboree", it makes the name of "wheaton labs" about ten times cooler.  

I think it depends greatly on what the core vision of the event is.  

To me, when I hear:

Appropriate Technology Course - I think of a class on some sort of technology that is appropriate (not sure what that is but it's likely cool?)

Permaculture Technology Jamboree - I think of a big shin dig where people are showing off, making or learning about permaculture technology (proven and experimentational)

Permaculture Mad Scientist Jamboree - I think of a big shin dig where it's focused on the bleeding edge of experimentation and could be a bit crazy (fresnel lens powered humanure to drinking water machine)

Of the current 10 tracks, I'd guess that most of them align with the PTJ concept (as it sits in my head at this moment).  I'm thinking only tracks 1-3 and then parts of 4-6 fit the PMSJ label.