Baraza

Category: WildlifeDirect news | Date: Mar 03 2008 | By: admin

Dear Readers,

I apologise for this late and I’m sure much too long post, but I’m sure you’re all wondering what the heck all the problem is with the WildilfeDirect site and our blogs?

I’ll try to explain it the best way I can…..

As I hope you know, we want to host the largest community of conservationists and donors/supporters for Africa and beyond Africa. We have grown tremendously fast in the last few months and have been planning an upgrade for some time to accommodate more bloggers and greater blogging functions. We needed to upgrade the website urgently, it’s critical to the success of all our bloggers in terms of increased visitors and donations.

How the upgrade was effected was a problem. Let me start by telling you more specifically what we are trying to achieve.

The overall purpose of this upgrading project is to move our website towards being much more useful and friendly to bloggers and visitors – afterall, first and foremost, we are a blogging platform supporting a community of bloggers and donors.

We aim to provide a completely integrated forum on the Word Press Multi User back-end. Word Press is the blogging platform that we use and the Multi-User facility basically allows us to replicate the number of blogs many many times. This allows us to expand easily and quickly and at the same time, gives the bloggers more tools and much greater flexibility in how the blogs can be used.

After the upgrade, the only difference that a visitor to the site would detect would be the changed URL’s – we did this so that the blog name is simpler, and is the focus of attention not WildlifeDirect. The change was done so that even if the old URL is entered erroneously, it will be redirected automatically. Eg. wildlifedirect.org/gorillaprotection is now the simple URL www.gorillaprotection.wildlifedirect.org

Most of the changes are happening at the back-end out of sight to visitors, where new tools will be available for bloggers to see and use in Word Press when logged in. Our goal is to expand the website platform and functions to manage and share our knowledge base more easily with our bloggers who are actually conservationists learning blogging from scratch.

Some of the developments will give bloggers full financial reports and visitation statistics on the word press back end live as it’s coming in. This is enormously important for any blogger.

This upgrade also aims to enable WildlifeDirect blogs to multiply very quickly – not just conservation blogs but campaign blogs. Campaign blogs are our way of facilitating all those website visitors who want to do more than leave a comment or make a donation. Now supporters can help an individual bloggers to be much more effective by promoting that blog and raising funds. If you have seen the end charcoal blog www.endcharcoal.wildlifedirect.org you will note that Robert is in USA but he’s raising funds for another blog in the Congo. Every blog probably has a few super supporters who will do anything, even stand on a corner with a tin can begging passers by for a few coins to ‘help’ a cause. We want to help these campaigners by giving them facilities on WildlifeDirect - we’re calling them campaign blogs that will raise funds directly for a specific blog and this can be tracked.

Hopefully, these developments will be make WildlifeDirect a space where the global community of supporters can be much more involved in conservation work on the ground in a very flexible and creative way. It will allow conservation bloggers to focus on conservation while campaign blogs will multiply every blog’s effect. Well, that’s our dream anyway – if this works we should see visitation and donations multiply over coming months, as well as global involvement in conservation across Africa and beyond.

The actual website developments required are simple and to achieve all this we are working with a world class firm that has an impeccable record in developing blog platforms. Together we developed a 6 week project that would improve the way the platform functions.

So you are probably wondering why are we having all these problems everywhere else on the site if we’re only touching the administrative part of the blog? Well, in the first stage of upgrading the website we encountered a crisis – the site crashed. We lost most of our functionalities and upset ourselves and a lot of other people. It was a stupid stupid mistake and we missed it. Don’t worry, we’re kicking ourselves really hard.

The good news is that we’re sorting it all out and full functionality is almost restored. There’s one outstanding problem with the donate button which was not specifying the blog which is really upsetting. We want to reassure you that we’ll track all donations made to WildlifeDirect to ensure that the do go to the relevant blog . The problem is actually about to be fixed.

You will notice that blog URL have changed to make blogs the center of attention, not WildlifeDirect. We did this to give greater visibility to the projects.

We are still upgrading but more carefully – by keeping all further developments off the site that is live. We’re working with some pretty amazing blogging experts and we believe we will have a fantastic result at the end. So, the upgrade which is continuing in a parallel site will be migrated only once it has been tested and is proved error free (I know, of course that’s what we should have done in the first place!).

Friends and fellow conservationists, although we have moved quickly to rectify the situation and we admit that its far from perfect and this shouldn’t have happened. We know you’re all quiet upset, and sometimes we respond slowly because our internet speed in Kenya is …well, sometimes it’s far from ideal. So on behalf of the entire WildlifeDirect team I can’t express our apologies strongly enough to all bloggers, visitors, donors and supporters. This upgrade has affected all of us and we are learning new things every single minute about how not to do certain things!

I hope you will bear with us for a few more weeks as we’re sure you will find that the upgraded site is a hundred times better, more functional, useful and more informative than what it was a few weeks ago.

I know that donors have been particularly upset and confused, if this explanation is inadequate, please don’t hesitate to ask any questions or inform us of any problems you are experiencing, we are working flat out to fix everything.

With kind regards

Paula Kahumbu (Conservation Partnership Director) on behalf of the entire team at WildlifeDirect

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