Part of the jankiness involves the sudden and unpredictable loss of style attributes. I can open the HTML window, set a bunch of subheaders to style="font-size: 12pt;", save the changes, make some more edits, and out of the blue the font-sizes revert to 10-point. How in the name of Tim Berners-Lee does that happen—multiple times in one editing session?
Jankiness aside, NationBuilder is important because of its interactive architecture.
- It provides opportunities for people to sign up with the Party, including pledging to show up at next March's conventions.
- It interacts with social media platforms, capturing likes and shares, adding likers and sharers as Contacts.
- It interacts and shares contact information with the state and national websites, which are also built on NationBuilder.
- It makes sending email blasts to specific audiences easier than the list-serve we have used since 2000.
- Perhaps most importantly, very unlike the Dreamweaver dinosaur that Art Browning has been maintaining since the early '00s, it adapts to tablet and smartphone screens.
Work on the site progresses. Just before the Art Car Parade, with help from Harris County co-chair George Reiter and treasurer David Wager, I have set up two different donation pages: one for one-time donations, one for monthly sustainers. I have also performed a thorough link test. So most of the important components of the site are good to go, and I informed George of that fact yesterday.
I had hoped to have all this work done at the website switched over to NationBuilder by the beginning of this month. Not meeting that deadline is only a minor disappointment, but really, the sooner, the better.
Having the new site in operation is one of the most important steps toward lining up our proverbial ducks for next March. The precinct conventions scheduled for Tuesday, 13 March 2018, mark the beginning of the battle to regain ballot access in Texas. Even now, we are laying the foundations for getting thousands of Greens to show up.
While we're maintaining our focus on next March, we Greenfolk have some annual meetings in the nearer future. As briefly mentioned here, the Green Party of Texas will meet in or near Corpus Christi the weekend of 10-11 June, precise venue to be determined. Then 13-16 July brings the Annual National Meeting in Newark NJ.