Stirfry Revolution! March 14-15 2009

Stirfry Startups meets again, this time in San Francisco at the DS, Rowena’s wonderful and cozy home near Dolores Park. There is a grill! On the deck! Within walking distance: Muni, bakery, Philz Coffee (you *need* a Philz coffee. Trust me.), even a dry cleaners if you need to kill more than one bird.

Ben has promised kale and peas, fresh (presumably) from a Fog City Garden.

Here’s our list of topics, combining both personal and collaborative activities:

• Ben:
  1. Collab21 redesign. Get back to basics. Figure out what I need, draw it out. Maybe start redesigning in WordPress.
  2. Business Plan. I won’t finish, but I’d like to put a dent in it.
• Walter: Do my own html-in-a-weekend:
  1. Finish working thru html / css manual (Visual Quick Start Guide series) prior to Incubation
  2. Conceptualize website
  3. Load WP Journal theme for WP sites
• Dave:
  1. Retheme and redesign the Stirfry website
  2. Create content for Website-In-A-Weekend.
  3. Help everyone else solve WordPress problems (and write up the solutions at the same time). Specifically, look into Sean’s questions regarding moving Only The Valiant to WordPress from Drupal.
• Sean plans on revamping his entire Only The Valiant site:
  1. Saturday – Get the site up, and structurally correct. Configure WordPress and hack and slash the wordpress code to create the data structures and website hierarchy I want. Integrate the libsyn hosted files into the website.
  2. Sunday – Design the visual presentation of the site. Lotsa Photoshop and CSS.
  3. Time permitting, write an alternate CSS file for handheld devices, so people can access the site and listen to episodes easily with their iphone/blackberry.

  Sean also needs these questions answered:

  What WordPress plugins should I be using? What SEO and other features of WordPress should I be using that I am not? Can WordPress do the following:

  1. Edit the loop displayed on the home page so that only the most recent post of a certain type or catagory shows up on the front page.
  2. Create custom post types with additional fields, the presentation of which can be automated and customized.
  3. Display abbreviated posts of a certain type or catagory as a list in the sidebar.
  4. Create a page which is a list of posts of a certain catagory. I think this question boils down to: can I create pages that contain PHP code, rather than just text? (The difference between this and the built in catagory view is the URL, which is important to me)

• Rowena will be providing a big screen TV for plugging in laptops, and would like to lead a discussion on web site design. She’s also in charge of the food… she makes an amazing meatball and linguine dish!

  More tasks on her list include:

  1. Some thought as to where I want www.manprowler.com to go. I may not find the answer this weekend but some ruminating will be good.
  2. I have a wordpress app on my iPhone but don’t know how to use it or get it hooked up.
  3. Take care of this akisment thing on my wordpress
  4. Take away some good info on what an attractive website means to different people.
  5. Be Inspired!

We won’t get all of that done, but we will get a lot of it!