It's been more than 2 years since I've posted. Where was I?
Busy... elsewhere... One thing leads to another and before you know it, there go two years!
I had hoped to migrate the posts from this TypePad blog to a new website that integrated my various websites. But exporting posts from Typepad turned out to be a daunting task. Rather than adding more posts that would also have to be migrated, I stopped writing here and began writing elsewhere.
Enough already! I can't wait any longer for myself to get through the obstacles. Today I need a place where I can link to resources to share with the public, so here I am, back on Typepad until I get it together on the new site.
Here's a summary of what I've been doing in recent years to develop the Providential Gardener's new website....
INFORMATION SHARING ON MY OTHER WEBSITES
- What Grows On in Rhode Island! ~ the most comprehensive online calendar of environmental events in Little Rhody ~ continues to promote all kinds of interesting and important events -- all the farmers' markets, films, garden tours, hikes, walks, paddles, public meetings about environmental issues, and much more.
In 2013, What Grows On in RI was recognized by Rhode Island Monthly's Best of Rhode Island listings as "Website for Green Fun"!
- I send a weekly newsletter, and I've experimented with putting some of my newsletter articles on What Grows On in Rhode Island, but a lot of what I've written is stuck in those e-newsletters.
- Feeds.whitelilac.info continues to aggregate dozens of news feeds about Rhode Island's environment, and some of those feeds have gone to @ProvGardener on Twitter, which also posts to WhatGrowsOnRI on Facebook. @ProvGardener has more than 2250 followers today.
WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT AND MAINTENANCE
I have built all of these websites myself, plus, between 2011 and 2013, I built the websites of the Environment Council of RI and the URI Master Gardeners. More time goes toward maintaining websites. This experience should result soon in a new integrated and amazing website!
Developing a comprehensive environment-information resource for Rhode Islanders is complicated, but succeeding with it fascinates me (confession: I'm a reference librarian). Because of the indexing and range of topics, it requires a robust content management system. Because costs must be minimized, it requires an open-source (free) system with an extensive support community to watch over security and maintenance. Drupal, used to build more than a million websites, fits the bill and is my choice for building the new website. But what a learning curve! Fortunately, the Drupal community is increasingly supportive. With my growing expertise and the Drupal community's improving resources, there's a greater chance of succeeding sooner than later.
INFORMATION GATHERING AND NETWORKING
I've continued to build relationships with as many of the thousand (yes, there are at least a thousand) environment-related groups in Rhode Island as I can manage. This gives me a unique overview that contributes to the integrated website's architecture.
The Providential Gardener aims to bring as much information as possible about Rhode Island together, arranged with comprehensive indexing and search aids. It ought to be easy to see what is involved in caring for this special place that surrounds Narragansett Bay. You can find many great websites that specialize in one or another environmental topic and provide valuable resources. But there is too much out there, and some of it really isn't on the public web. Information is lost in emails, Facebook (not everyone uses Facebook), and broken links. It's scattered, duplicative, some of it isn't kept up to date, requires specialized knowledge to find, takes too long to find, doesn't turn up in web searches....
It needs some wrangling!
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