Playasophy Camp

As of 2012, Playasophy Camp has been to the Burn as a ‘real’ theme camp three times now. I’m extremely proud of the way the camp has grown and matured over the years: we have a solid infrastructure, a maturing organizational structure, and a great group of Burners making up the core membership. However, one area where we’ve consistently (and almost comically) failed as a camp is having an online presence. The camp website — or rather, lack thereof — has been an albatross around my neck in particular.

Originally hosted at playasophers.org, we had a very basic CMS and some rudimentary forums. The site was hard to use and hard to maintain because no one understood it; something obviously had to change. We’ve since moved to using Google Groups for communication, resulting in the near-complete abandonment of the old site. During the 2011 Burn, we decided to do something about the problem — after all, we had web developers, a designer, and some software engineers — we could build our own site! I registered playasophy.org and set up hosting and some basic software, ready to go!

Alas, despite our good intentions, actually creating the site was delayed time and time again until I eventually shut off the server and let the domain sit unhosted. (This had some interesting consequences when I finally checked on the domain again — it was pointing to some Japanese website about bees… don’t ask.) This past Burn reinvigorated my motivation to at least put something consistent up — how could we claim to be a real camp if we didn’t even have a website? The result: the site you see before you!

For those curious, the site is extremely basic — it uses Octopress to compile a set of Markdown files with some templates to produce static HTML content. The result is simple, but extremely robust and easy to work with — something history has proven to be very important. I’m looking forward to adding more information and content to the site, so stay tuned for future updates!

Greg