Sunday was our final day of Ann Arbor Give Camp, the day where we turned over our projects to the charities. Once my teammates Brian and Kevin arrived, we worked on the finishing touches of the site - minor CSS changes and template updates.

John came by Sunday afternoon to see the site, and we ended up passing the final documentation to him. However, our group wants to see this all the way through, so we'll probably be following up with him over the next couple months to make sure that the site is working for them.

Golightly Academy of IT is a school in the Detroit area where high school students spend part of the day in traditional classes and part of the day in IT-related courses. For something technical, I was surprised to hear that they didn't have a web presence. This weekend, our team helped make that happen.

We used Telerik's CMS package Sitefinity to provide both a public-facing side and an administrative side for their website. Currently, we have them set up with a Flickr stream for their pictures. Special thanks to Verio for providing hosting for them.

Once the domain is set up properly, I promise to link to it here, as I'm happy with what we put together. It's a great foundation for them to change and expand on.

And for those who were asking about my shirts from this weekend... the blue screen of death shirt is available from Errorwear, and the Geekette shirt came from Telerik.

Labels: Ann Arbor Give Camp, Golightly Academy of IT, Sitefinity, Telerik, Verio

It's day 2 of Ann Arbor Give Camp, and I'm running on almost 41 hours without sleep. Between working on our project and chatting with many talented people here, I've been distracted and excited enough to not really feel a need for sleep. Not only have I been working with an awesome team - Mark Gilbert, Brian Kriesel, and Kevin Shin - but I've also met a lot more people and have had a lot of laughs.

We had two meetings today as a gathering, to make sure that all the teams were on schedule. If we had any issues, we let them know and other people came out to help us. We helped the SDL EQ team today with some Telerik Sitefinity issues and got them up to speed with the rest of us in the Sitefinity boat. John Hopkins has been a great Sitefinity resource for us this weekend, and if you ever have to implement Sitefinity, I'd recommend you talk with him. He has been so patient with all of us, and even though there are still some outstanding issues, we know that we can count on him to help us out.

Special thanks to Matt from Verio and the other guy (whose name I can't remember offhand) who stopped by and helped us work out some CSS issues. We managed to get a great foundation in place, and I hope our charity - Golightly Academy of IT - really likes our work. We'll get to show off our final website on Sunday to our charity contact, John Mullinax.

Thanks to the sponsors of Ann Arbor Give Camp - Microsoft, Domino's Pizza, SRT Solutions, Verio, Infragistics, TechSmith, Telerik, Washtenaw Community College, Dunkin Donuts, Arbor Brewing Company, Aubree's, Busch's, Trader Joe's, and DevMavens. From providing our meals to helping in other ways, this event couldn't have happened without their help. Check out the Ann Arbor Give Camp sponsors page to see how they contributed.

Thanks to all of those who worked to put the event together - including Jennifer Marsman, Josh Holmes, Mike Eaton, Greg Campeau, Todd from Domino's, and everyone else who helped them in the planning. Planning an event takes a team; pulling off one this successful takes a great team!

This has been a great experience, and I am glad Mike Eaton talked me into coming up here this weekend. I look forward to showing what are team came up with and blogging about the weekend overall.

Labels: Ann Arbor Give Camp, Golightly Academy of IT, Jennifer Marsman, John Hopkins, Josh Holmes, Mike Eaton, Sitefinity, sponsors