About Me

undergrad RN
I'm a twenty-something Canadian student. After stumbling through a few years of college, I finally managed to get into the nursing school of my dreams, where I hope to graduate in 2012 with a nursing baccalaureate degree. I want to offer an honest look into how a modern nurse is educated, both good and bad. Eventually I hope to compare my education to my day-to-day career and see how it holds up. Whatever happens, it should be somewhat entertaining. Find me on allnurses.com!
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Saturday, February 26, 2011

You can tell when you love something...

Because working on it consumes your thoughts entirely. I have been working on the CNSA website, forums, and social media pretty much non-stop since I got admin rights. I just LOVE it. I love playing with the code (although, admittedly, I am entirely self-taught and barely know anything), I love improving the site nav and content, and I LOVE seeing the numbers climb after I installed Site Meter Pro.

I had some struggles with the old forum software (phpBB 2.x) and not having access to the database so I could mod the registration page to at least semi-prevent spambot registrations. I ended up manually adding approved posters to a group, and then giving that group permission to post. It's not ideal and I am worried I may have killed the forums, but they were pretty much dead anyway. One page worth of posts in a year...

I sent emails to the CNSA web host, Director Communications, and President of CNSA to try and persuade them to upgrade the entire site platform to vBulletin. From what I've seen, people either love it or hate it, and the people who hate it seem to be developers who are looking for ++intensive modifications, which doesn't affect me. I played with a demo version of the admin panel and I am pleased with vBulletin's community-centric nature. I WANT Regional Executives to be able to upload their own content and maintain a web presence for their community. I want the BoD to maintain blogs and reach out to the members. I want people to visit cnsa.ca and want to BE a member.

I'm also intrigued by the calendar functions, the events manager (hugely important for an organization which exists primarily through conferences), and social networking integration such as Facebook Connect. If we make it easy for our members to get involved and stay involved, they might actually take an interest in it - particularly those members (such as myself) who live in areas where CNSA has no physical presence.

Anyway, Reading Week is drawing to a close and I am scrambling to finish the major adjustments to the website so that, by Monday, I have my head back in the clinicals game ;)

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is awesome, so glad you got it. I know you are going to do amazing things. This is why I love this organization, full of passionate students working very hard to raise the bar of the profession before they enjoy it. I admit there are times I got frustrated by the pace of change, or politics, but at the same time I really respect everyone how actually takes part. It takes guts to step up, and no matter what role you take there is a lot of work to do.

Also, did you install Google Analytics yet? We can do some fun data work if you don't have it yet.

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