'When I have something important to say....'

The next sixty days are going to be some of the most important for me and Voterheads.  A lot of things going on:

• We're performing user testing of our interface design on Friday.  
• On 3/7, we're giving our pitch to the USC Tech Incubator as what I see as our 'final' step before the serious pursuit of funding. 
• We presented to Richland County last week, are presenting to the Town of Blythewood on 3/10, and are setting up meetings with additional local government entities over the next few weeks to present our plans and get support.
• We've recently discovered a potential addition market opportunity for the system.  If we can validate it, we're looking at an additional significant revenue stream, so we're reaching out to a lot of our contacts to get interviews with potential customers.  This will also require significant additions/revisions to the business plan.
• We plan to expand the current site to include content targeted towards each audience.
• Finally, we hope to present at Innoventure on 5/7.

All this means that, between my work on Voterheads and at IT-oLogy, I'm going to be heads down for about the next 60 days.  We've got a lot of development work to do to tie together all of the great back-end work already done by Eric onto a user interface that I really think is going to be quite exceptional.  Don't expect  to hear much from me for the time being!

CodeYear: Month 1 and meetup thoughts

Well, the first four weeks of Codeyear lessons are in the bag, and we had our first Meetup last night.  Some thoughts:

1. 
   The Meetup was great... A shout-out to IT-oLogy for providing the space!  We're hoping to link up Charleston and Greenville next month via videoconferencing, so we can provide both a space and share in expertise.  This could be very cool.
2. ...and there's room for improvement
   
   .  I'm sure, like most meetups, we have a wide range of participants, both in experience and level of completion.  It'll be exciting as we evolve so we keep it interesting for everyone.  Does any of the other meetup organizers have thoughts on this?  Are you breaking up into small groups during the meetup and are you trying to match them up by progress?
   
3. The Codeyear mission is great and I'm planning to keep going.
4. The Codeyear interface has some bugs:  
1. It doesn't always check work accurately, either focusing more on a result even if I put in invalid code (I think that was in the blackjack project), or focusing on specific code sequence even if the results are valid.  The second one I'm okay with, for the record.  :-)  
2. 
   I now have several modules that I've completed that aren't showing up as 100%.  This normally seems to happen when I just click on the 'Next Section' button at the bottom of the screen.  Even though I completed everything, it shows up as 97% and says I missed one lesson.  I go back in, re-complete it, and though it marks my lesson complete, it doesn't mark the entire section complete.   
3. 
   Session state in the browser is a problem.  There are a specifically a couple of lessons early on that depend on keeping the 'name' and 'lastname' variables from previous sessions.  Some of our meetup participants stopped working on that session between lessons, so when they went to start back up their browser, the lesson she was on wouldn't work because it couldn't call up the variable state from the previous lesson.  A good workaround right now would be to state very clearly when someone shouldn't leave the lessons or will have to start back over.
   
   
5. The lessons could use some more writing revisions.  While I get it all, some of the wording could be clearer.  I'm working with someone at IT-oLogy who is very new to coding and some of lessons have been confusing.  There are times that people feel they need to go to the Q&A to figure out what's happening, and the inhibits learning.  We also got some of that feedback in the meetup.  It would also be great if you could refer back to previous lesson text and code in a separate window while you're working on the lesson.   A lot of people are keeping notebooks as a workaround.

Having said all that, I sincerely admire what the fine folks at Codecademy are attempting; it's a great program and I look forward to staying involved and seeing it evolve!

See everyone next month!

Voterheads Site Design Update!

I'm excited to announce that early today we officially published our new site design for Voterheads!:

This is a preview of our new integrated design that will continue into the application itself.  Take a look, get signed up, and after you sign up, remember to 'Like' us on Facebook and '+1' us on Google+!