Thursday, September 22, 2011

Blank calendars on meal program-related sites

Well, a couple of places have been trying to use the 'net to connect with their people. Maybe trying to connect with the wrong people. Maybe just trying to "get something up" and then fill it in later. Which of course, never works out.

Here's some of the carcasses:

Toronto Christian Worship Center (they run the evening dinners at Bellevue and College)

The Christie-Ossington Neighbourhood Center's events calendar ...but their meal schedule (which takes like four really careful clicks to find) says otherwise!

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Meal times corrections

A few things have been corrected:
  • For a couple weeks there's been an item in the calendar about Sanctuary womens' only meals on Tuesdays. It's not going on and it's corrected!
  • Sanctuary's meal programs on the calendar have been updated to reflect the times that meals are being served.
  • CONC lunches on fridays were mistakingly added to the calendar - that's been corrected.
  • Sketch Working Arts is closed until October 4th - that's a two-week closure. The calendar has been corrected.
  • The Church of St. Stephen-In-The-Fields hosts weekend breakfasts and sunday dinners, which have been added to the calendar. Exact start and end times are still being researched.
The information on this site has never been 100% accurate, but it's always been more accurate than that provided by #311 (now #211), the sheets put out by the Queen West Health Center (which are now being updated using this site), or any of the guides linked from the city of Toronto website.

The big goal is to engage more with program users through this website to approach 100% accuracy. At this point, leaving comments to posts like this one is the only way that users of this site can offer feedback and information. Hopefully at some point that can change!

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Hungry poor VS the PDF file format

Seems like the people who put together meal program information just love the PDF file format, even though the PDF file format really hates the poor and homeless. Just hates us. It wants us to go hungry. It wants us to suffer. The 311 information site as well as the city hall website is all about dishing out useless, badly-formatted, often-garbled, heavy-as-fuck PDFs that don't work so well on ghetto public computers.

So if you're in the dubious position of having to publish a schedule for your meal program or other services, do us a favor:

1. Make a Google Calendar with your schedule.
2. Use the Embed code that Google Calendar gives you to place the calendar into your website.
3. Use the Calendar print function to bring up a print-out, and then use the Print To PDF command thing in your print thing. I'd love to provide better instructions, but every single print box is different. If you don't see any "print to PDF" type things in there, get the newest Acrobat installer (they have a new version about every ten minutes) and install it with all them shitty options on - prepare for reduced performance all 'round.
4. Someone in your organization will complain about the increased accessibility of your schedule. Tell them you were having to waste too much time getting back to people by e-mail about the programs because people are "too badly-educated" to be able to deal with PDFs.

Getting Free Food Scheduling info from Toronto's Meal Programs

Although most of the websites put out by Toronto's meal programs are out of date or difficult to interpret, the staff are generally very quick to respond to e-mailed requests about scheduling! So if you can't find info on a program online, try e-mailing the staff!

Taoist Chicken!

Now this is a mind-blower: Monday afternoons at 4pm, behind the liquor store on Spadina, near Kensington Market, in the back-alley parking area of the Taoist temple, they serve Chicken, veggies and rice, and you can go back for seconds. What a meal! This is the first non-christian, non-government thing to make it on this site and I hope it'll be the first of many.

St. Felix $1 Dinners

The sisters at St. Felix on Augusta do a great job of lunch, providing internet, clothes and other basic needs, but last year they started doing these $1 dinners, and they're pretty good. It's about at the same level as their lunches - maybe a notch up.

They do it monday to thursday, starting at 5:30. Seems like 6:30 is the latest you want to show up.