The
Free
Web
Project

Sadly a minor technical glitch that we were unaware of prevented one of the Kenyan's (Boniface) from participating, and posting a blog entry yesterday. This has now been fixed and we're looking forward to what Boniface has to say.

I've just got to say that this is honestly the fastest I've written stylesheets ever, with Kaizers on the speakers to block out the discussions in the room, I sorted out my IE problems without having to use any swear words (which I would've translated to norwegian, of course!). Howay the shortcuts!

With about 40 minutes to spare. We're done. The site is 'live' http://www.teamkenya.org.uk.

It's been a tremendous success, both for us and Team Kenya. The guys and girls over in Kenya (Vincent and Lisa) have been involved, posted to their blogs and warmed our hearts with little comments like this

"I realy appreciate the good jod being done by the orangebus group. Infact the blog is wondewrfull keep it up." - Thanks Vincent.

The very first post from over in Kenya.

Lisa at the University of Nairobi has logged into the site. The first access from our African friends.

Well in a raw form we are. It's not finished yet. A little bit of functionality still to be added.

We've pushed it 'live' so that our Kenyan friends can post their very first blog posts. We understand that Vincent, Boniface and Lisa are waiting near machines, ready to get involved.

http://www.teamkenya.org.uk

I'm more or less done now, except for minor things to adjust once we start moving content around the site, which Val and Gordon from Team Kenya and myself will be doing in the very near future. Once the structure is all there we'll be going through the many many pictures they've provided us with, pick up the best ones and upload them to the site. I'm sure it'll be a difficult task as they're all great photos.. a luxury problem..

I'm so hungry you wouldn't believe it! This working non-stop for several days in a row, certainly gets in the way of eating patterns.

Well it's here, we've got about 9 hours remaining until the end. Vincent, the current IT trainer on the project out in Kenya is hoping to be able to post something to his blog on the site at 12:00 UK time.

We're still aiming to launch the final thing by 18:00 UK time.

It's the end of day 2. Up on our dev server is what we've achieved so far. There's a few bits not included, but most of what we've done is there.

Day 2 and for historical value Day 1.

Check in tomorrow 18:00 to see what we've managed to achieve by the end of the project.

We're now approaching the 24 hours to go mark. I'm starting to feel very tired, and there still seems like so much to do. At the same time it still feels as though, if we needed to, we could launch in the next hour. Perhaps that's just one of those mirages in the dessert of web development.

One of the stipulations we put down for entry to the Free Web Project was that all (or most) of the content required for launch would be available to us in advance.

This has been something of a luxury for us as we are able to put pages together and know how they are supposed to look, rather than guessing where images or content might go. We also get a nice buzz each time a new page is styled and the content added as its done - rather than being part finished and something of an anti climax.

27 hours left, we've still got a long way to go but we're all pretty happy with the progress so far!

The past few hours have really seen us start to work together. Until then we were all working on our own separate parts of the site. Sure there were interactions, there was dialogue, but we were still working in semi-isolation. That's no longer the case. We're passing bits and pieces back and forth and pulling things together.

We've got a few hours of work left today, we're aiming to be at a point where we can confidently say we can finish this off tomorrow, by about 19:00. So head back down, and on with the coding.

We've decided to go for a width of 800 pixels for this website so that people with low resolution monitors won't get a horisontal scroller. We all know how annoying that can be!

I spend most of my days at work wishing that I took the time out to name my photoshop layers properly. I'm now up to 'Layer 89 copy 56', and it's growing.. grr..

We've pushed some of the work that we did yesterday to our development server.

It's a site, not polished, not designed but it is a website. We've built it using Drupal, a great Open Source Web Framework, or as they call it "Community plumbing". It provides in our opinion, some of the best foundations for building a great website.

It's almost the end of the first full day of the free web project. Torunn has just arrived back with a big smile on her face after sneaking off to watch Newcastle thrash Reading 3-0. Julian who hasn't snuck off anywhere is equally pleased with Sunderlands 3-1 beating of Fulham. All-in-all a good day for North East football.

So like I began, we're almost at the end of work for today. We have so far:

• A working skeleton site
• A partial design - which is looking very sweet
• And finally...

We have just integrated Flickr. So we're going to be using the Team Kenya website to upload images, these images will then be automatically be sent off to Flickr for hosting, and using them to distribute to their user base, as well as pulling them back into the Team Kenya website along with any other relevant pics that we can pull from Flickr.

Big smiles all round!!

Quick update from me then, head tea boy and biscuit supplier for the weekend.

It's all gone rather quiet in here now, Torunn is off to the football for a couple of hours so the styling of the site has stopped, although it looks pretty cool so far! Mike and Kwok are doing site structure and mechanics which is all fairly boring stuff, from a spectators point of view, so I'm busying myself preparing some videos for upload to youtube sometime tomorrow/ monday and generally trying not to get in anyones way!

Colour scheme is set, I'm going for red, orange, dark and light green plus an offwhite with a tint of lime! It's uploaded to kuler.adobe.com - you'll find it if you search for Team Kenya!

I'm aiming for a playful and fun looking website for Team Kenya, it's such a great charity and I want the look of the site to be something quite special.

I decided to bring sketch pads, crayons, pastels and chalk this morning, to make some rather interesting little graphics. I'm now sitting here drinking tea with chalk on my face waiting the scanner to make itself useful.

It's Saturday morning and we've already had our first round of technical problems.

First Torunn's MacBook wouldn't come out of sleep, eventually we woke it from it's slumber.

Then the web server (apache) on my local machine wouldn't start.

Now it's 10:28 and we're all powered up and moving along.

We're here. Shacked up in the Niche hotel, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

There's 72 hours to go. We've thrown around some ideas, had our photo's taken, been interviewed by 21st Century Media, and now we must begin. In 72 hours time (fingers crossed) we'll have given Team Kenya, an all singing all dancing presence on the web.