Quick Update

Discovered that background images don’t show up properly in most major webmail clients; also most of them don’t like positioning. Surprisingly, AOL reads both of them correctly, but since none of the others do (hotmail, gmail, yahoo), the nifty little quote graphics Michael (new intern) made will only be used on the website for the moment. You’ll see them show up next week.

Website: You can now join our email list directly from the site, on any page, in the upper right corner. I’ve also reworked the videos, so there are 3 in the sidebar now (youtube’s interface used to not resize very well to the size we needed, but they fixed it recently), and you can see all of them on our video page. It’s just a custom player/playlist from youtube – if you want to make your own, it’s point and click, you just need a youtube account with some videos uploaded.

Last week was very busy – I was here late a couple nights getting all the materials ready for CTV’s trip to Mackinac for the Republican Leadership Conference.

James did an interview with someone for Michael Jefferies’ position last week also, so hopefully we’ll get someone in here soon.

Phillip Boggs, for those of you who know him, is coming back to the states briefly next month I believe, then planning on going back to Peru for two more years of medical work.

Outside SSI/CTV: I’ve got another website that I’ll hopefully start working on next week – I’ll give some details once I have some details. The most recent one I did was www.mickimagee.com.

I’m still trying to sell my house – if anyone knows anyone interested in purchasing a home in Lansing – 4 bedrooms, 1800+ square feet, hardwood floors, fireplace, 2 living rooms, full-size basement and attic, nice neighborhood – please have them get in touch with me. It’s been vacant for nearly a year now and I’m willing to work with people on price, financing, etc.

Changes

So, summer camp took so much time, I haven’t been keeping this up. Awhile ago, I’m not sure if I intended to – I just wanted to figure out the WordPress engine a little, see what I could do with it.

Now, I think I may start this back up again, trying hard to give people a real inside/backstage look at what goes on around here, as well as possibly some non-SSI-related work projects.

Changes:
* Emily and Michael got married and moved to Taiwan. You can read their blog (pictures, video, diary) here, and you can keep in touch with them through comments on that site, or their email (I’ll try to get Michael to put it up on his website?).
* Amy and Ashley (from CTV) have both taken on part of Michael’s responsibilities part-time, as an interim measure until we replace Michael’s full-time position with a new employee.
* Nate is now a paid part-time staff for both CTV and SSI, splitting his hours.
* I am also switching my hours to 20 a week for SSI and 20 a week for CTV, to give CTV some more manpower during the upcoming election year (I’ll be doing website/email/communications/administration work).
* And we have two new unpaid interns, Michael, who started this week – he’s in 3 days a week, and has started by helping me design a promotional email for the Ambassador League program; and Erin, who started a couple months back, and is in 2 days a week, and helps with general administration and data entry.

Big Projects I’ve done recently:
* Installed a new domain server. I had never done it before, learned a bit.
* New email list management system is up and running – now automated to save me an afternoon of work every week.

Big Projects I’m doing shortly:
* New backup system
* Upgrading user machines (both hardware/software)
* Migrating SSI website to new server