Hi all!

I hope everyone had a great weekend! This last week was my most productive week yet! Beginning over the weekend and continuing into Monday and Tuesday, I practiced some of the things I learned in Drupal Bootcamp using my Drupal training site. Although I knew I would have to transfer everything to the marine sciences site after I got my web space, I think this was still a valuable use of time because it allowed me to apply some of the things I learned so I didn’t “lose it before I used it.”

After meeting with Jenna, I learned that my marine sciences development site was finally up and running! It was time to start shifting my focus to the real site! I scheduled a meeting with Pat Kight (Sea Grant web communications), and she helped me out with a few of the Drupal stumbling blocks I was having, and finished off by giving me the URL of the new site.

I spent the rest of the week building the site (getting all menu items and tabs in place, searching for feature stories, and picking out pictures). My pride and joy so far is the feature story rotating banner that I was able to import into the site! Unfortunately this feature is not built into the system and requires importing specific HTML code. I was very excited to have achieved obtaining this module with little difficulty! I also managed to figure out how to incorporate a “Marine Science and the Coast” RSS feed as well as a highlights section into the website.

I also had the opportunity of meeting my other mentor, Dr. Brandt, this last week. He has been out of the office for much of the summer, and so I was glad to have the opportunity to update him on my progress. One thing my mentors really emphasized this week is the need for a calendar. Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of experience using calendars in Drupal, so this week I plan to work with the OSU communications team to get a calendar installed and running. I also have another meeting with Pat Kight so that I can learn a bit more about how to dress up my website so that it looks more aesthetically pleasing.

This week, aside from my meeting with Pat, I plan to focus on adding content to the website (and there is definitely a lot of content to be added). I will also be attending a meeting with the Marine Council this week and will need to present to them what I have so far. So I will be also doing a little work in preparation for that meeting.

Overall, I am very excited about the direction this website is going and it has been extremely satisfying to finally see some of my work up on the web! I also had an amazing weekend which really put the cherry on top of my week! There are three groups of REU interns living on my hall, and I had the opportunity to do an overnight at the coast with one of the groups! We managed to find a place to stay at HMSC in Newport, and we got to see several different beaches as well as some seals and tide pools. As excited as I am about my project, it was really nice to get away from the computer for a short time – very fun weekend!

Until next time,

Shealyn