PortSide seeks IT help! pronto!

* getting internet to a ship, web design, linking social media portals, Twitter advice *

PortSide has been running a hurricane Sandy Relief pop-up at 351 Van Brunt Street where there was cable internet, but we are now moving back onto the tanker Mary A. Whalen, and IT issues on the ship are going to impede our Sandy digital work as well as our other operations.

MARY A. WHALEN

Having our offices on the ship has presented chronic internet access challenges.  There is no cable internet in the port near us, so we have tried various alternative strategies over the years.

1. Our internet speed on the ship dropped in September and plummeted after Sandy.  Our Clear modem signal is now down to one bar (container stacks in the way? We don't know!). We know we need a new hardware solution.

The galley serves as our conference room

2. We could use some help finishing the redesign of our website.   The new design will help us continue and improve our Sandy-related messaging on Twitter @PortSideNewYork and blog www.bitly.com/RHSandy.  We are part of the new Red Hook Coalition, formed to do Sandy Recovery work, and improving this social media stuff would really help us help Red Hook.

Half of the main PortSide office

Before Sandy, (that feels like years ago) we were transitioning our website to Wordpress. We've run into glitches, and on top of that want to customize the template; but we don't have enough tech saavy on our team to whack through this fast enough.  Urgent goal is to make our Sandy tweets, blog posts and Facebook updates visible on the home page, and we want a better design for other reasons and in other ways.

We could use advice to take our Twitter skills to a higher level... hoping there is a way to sort followers and followed into lists.

Please get in touch if you can help. Thanks!