Fires.com

Fires.com Is Officially Under Renovations

Starting last Monday, the Gracie and I began fixing Fires.com which has been fairly broken and ugly. We will add a page that links to the TOADS site, a page for who contributed, a contact page, and a archive of the Fires.com story. Going forward we, and the rest of the TOADS team have started planning our next Fires.com project — though branching from just fire survivors.

Currently we are in debates between aesthetic, impact, and tastefulness. We have decided to do what many mainstream charities do and pull less punches, being more willing to directly show the problem. This is mainly due to coming up on the one year anniversary of the event. I will be donating my personal photos into the photo archive is currently up but empty. We also are planning to include other teen works.

The debate seems to be on whether we center it around the teenage experience or not. With a place to show art, or as a barely trafficked site that is more loyal to the original Fires.com.

Despite being the main admin of the website mechanics for both TOADS.com and Fires.com I am yet to figure out why Fires uses number IDs in its URL whereas Toads uses the individual page name. I learned this due to struggling to change the heading color on just one page. Ultimately I used CSC to do so. I was warned “it would crash all the sites”. It seems to be working fine so far though.

It is unclear how much the TOADS team should have sway over Fires.com. Despite toads meeting twice a month at a minimal Fires feels to be a separate group. Though it has a lot of overlapping members.