I’m very happy to announce my latest project, the migration and restoration of Littlearchers.com.
Little Archers Learning Center is a school with branches at Paranaque, Makati and MOA Pasay (Facebook page here). It’s owned by my friend Noni Odulio who I met when he would very graciously invite me to play basketball with his regular DLSU die hard regulars at their village nearby back when I still could.
Back in 2018 his self hosted WordPress website crashed and so he had to put up a free website at the free blogging service WordPress.com and redirect visitors to that. Tired with the ads that comes with that service and feeling that the redirection didn’t give a professional vibe he reached out to me recently to help fix it.
After discussion I emailed the initial scope:
- Littlearchers.com should not redirect anymore to littlearchers.wordpress.com. It should load its own website, using wordpress self hosted.
- Create a demo website using wp self hosted on littlearchers.com/staging
- Migrate as best possible all content and appearance of .com site to staging.
After I put up the staging site Noni logged in and converted it to make it look like the site he wants with pictures, fonts, and content he preferred. He then told me he was finished last night and this morning I did the following:
- Created and downloaded separate backups of staging, previous 2018 wordpress and current backups to google drive. Shared google drive link with Noni.
- Deleted 2018 littlearchers.com
- Transferred files of https://staging.littlearchers.com to https://littlearchers.com.
- Removed redirect to wordpress.com
- Changed some urls in pages from staging.littlearchers.com to littlearchers.com.
- Increased ram to max 512m for best performance
- At this stage it is now LIVE at the proper domain https://littlearchers.com
- Fixed basic security issues:
- I deleted the staging site
- Noni will now put up a new front page on his free wordpress.com site to announce that people should now visit https://littlearchers.com instead. This is for anyone who might have bookmarked it or continue to go there.
I’m happy not just because it was a very quick project with minimal fuss but I especially want to do this for Noni. He is a school owner and educator and EXACTLY the type of person I want to help make the most out of being online.
The ‘new normal’ is requiring that education and learning change the most. It’s not enough to just use the ‘net to promote a school. Schools, teachers and students now have to reach out to each other and initiate a classroom scenario outside of the traditional walls.
As a tech I am filled with ideas. I recognize for example that his audience is not limited to the kids near his school anymore. Noni himself told me he has students in Kuwait and Tacloban attending his daily Zoom classes – so that traditional limitation has already been breached.
Our next stage would probably be to implement standard business ideas like quick and simple registration forms, a hiring system and potentially a payment system to sell services or merch, etc., but I conceptualize a lot of non conventional ideas ie. student login systems that allow access to materials, separate teacher, parent and student profiles (ala facebook but used in an education setting), grading systems, etc. all measured and paid via micro payment systems. Those are all completely doable.
Noni’s job is to tell me, given his on the ground experience of many years what may or may not work. Let’s admit it he will probably say no to 90% to those. Running a business is hard enough. Trying to introduce fancy new stuff to him and his staff then revert back if it fails is costly and might negatively impact an otherwise smooth organization so it can get tricky.
But having him around to bounce off ideas and potentially employ them is a start. The ‘net is not the big bad world everyone is made to believe it is. I myself learned almost everything, 99% of EVERY USEFUL WORK SKILL I KNOW, via the web. My job now is to give back.
Gary
