We’re knocking off work for the day. We’ve made a significant amount of progress on the theme, which is looking pretty excellent. It’s not quite ready to go live yet, so we’re reverting back to the normal one, but it’s almost there. I think we will be able to finish it entirely in one more session.
Things are moving along as far as themes go. A semblance to our old site is emerging. There are plenty of links that we are currently lacking, but most of the basics are there. Right now we are trying to figure out the galleries.
We’re doing some work on the WordPress theme. We’ve got the basic template structure created, and we are working on populating it with some skeleton content as we start to do the layout. This is extremely exciting.
We’ve decided to move the entire site to WordPress. This requires redesigning everything from the ground up. We’re in the process of moving the content we put up last night to some WordPress pages. The next step will be building our own template from scratch. I haven’t done this before, although I’ve done a lot of modification work on the template on my own site, so it’s going to be a really interesting experience. In a way, it may be easier than what I’ve done, because we need invoke only the functions and objects we actually want. I don’t have to deal with someone else’s idea of how the site should look, just our concept.
Stay tuned as we get the theme running. For the moment, the website is probably going to continue to look pretty bare as we develop.
Last night Harpo and I spent some time on adding content to our site. We have a steady but slight stream of traffic, which makes sense; we are unique, but do not really have that much showy stuff to show for it on the web right now. As we got going, developing our theme throwing Wiki links all over everything we were writing, we got to thinking that it might make sense just to have everything on our site run through WordPress, in which case, as far as pages go, we would pretty much be starting from scratch…
Well, we’ve explored our options. But they don’t work. Both Will and I devised separate systems for transferring the torque from the “gears” (which we are now referring to as the “quote-gears”) to the differential. Both systems were hampered and ultimately made useless by the actual geometry of the pieces. Axles stick out and interfere with perpendicular gears and axles, the “weird-gears” (the gears that are of a different measurement set than the standard ones) are called for in strange situations, making our lives much more difficult, and the chassis frame is completely non-static. We have redesigned it several times, and each time find new problems.
We’re stopping work for the day, as I have to go into work and Will has to leave. Hopefully when we meet next, we will have some new ideas for how to fix this. For the moment, though, we haven’t really made any significant progress beyond discovering things that don’t work. Which I suppose is a type of progress, but it’s still disappointing.
Several major redesigns later, we’re still having problems. Although the “gears” we installed are pretty much the burliest thing ever, the gears between them and the differentials are not. On the side of the car that has an extra gear (so that the two pairs of wheels turn in the proper direction), the whole gear system tends to be forced downwards, separating from the bottom of the car. On the other side, the single intermediary gear is just pushed out of its socket along its axis of rotation.
These are difficult problems, to be sure, and we can’t go on without fixing them, but they are of a different nature than the ones we’ve been facing. Our intrinsic design is inherently better than before, and we just need to overcome these difficulties in its implementations. I am confident in our ability to do so.
We’re putting the car back together, slowly but surely. We’ve just completed one major redesign of the central chassis frame, and are working on another. It is rather agonizing, but we’re hopeful that the car will be in much better shape after we’re done.
Harpo and I have been considering applying to become a nonprofit organization. The LC(A) has a bright but expensive future; we plan to upgrade to the NXT system eventually, and there are other costs such as pneumatics that might arise.
There are twenty eight kinds of 501(c)(3)s, and although they are the most common kind of organization exempt from taxes they are not the only one.
Unfortunately, we would need to pay a $300 application fee, which would make the venture financially impractical.
Donations to some nonprofits, such as the 501(c)(4), are not exempt from taxes – also impractical for our purposes.
On the application form there is a checkbox for “regularly scheduled religious services” that we would need to check, as MegaBlock sacrifice is a ritual tradition.
On a side note, it seems that Coda can share documents remotely, most likely through the “Connect to” button located at the bottom left of the screen.
We’ve created an experimental implementation of the new bevel “gears”. As of now, the car is in two large pieces; Will had to remove one of the ends, including the shock arms, wheels, and steering assembly, in order to install the new system. It looks like it may work very well, but we will need to do some serious work on the chassis to get the thing together and fully functional again. Redesign of the central chassis frame is also a viable option.