New look for visual essays and videos

I spent the last week reformatting pages on the Tutor/Mentor website where I have shared videos, visual essays and concept maps in the past.

This is the revised format for my video library.  I'm showing page 1 of 3 pages. 

Below is what the page looked like before.

The new format is two columns wide.  Each image is larger than on the previous format. Where this really makes a difference is when you view the page on your phone.  Instead of seeing the whole page scrunched onto your phone screen, you see one image at a time as you scroll through the page.

Below is page 1 of 5 pages of the reformatted visual essays page.

Below that is the first page of my concept map library.

I also reformatted pages showing visualizations and videos done by interns between 2005 and 2015. I posted this article on the intern blog to share those. 

As you look at my collection of visual essays you'll see presentations like this, where I've encouraged high schools, colleges and universities to create a Tutor/Mentor Connection study and action program on their own campus.

The interns who worked with me spent time reading my blog articles and looking through my website, then created their own interpretations, using various forms of visualization.  They were building new skills while learning new ideas. They were actively helping share ideas that could help more youth living in areas of persistent poverty get on-going tutor, mentor and learning support that would help them through high school, college and into adult lives and careers.  

Their articles focus on Chicago. The last were done in 2015, 10 years ago. That means there is a lot of new content that could be reviewed.  Any university in Chicago or any other place could have students doing this same work, and could soon have a page on their website showing student work, just as I do.

A few years ago I wrote an article titled "Tipping Points: Growing and Supporting New Leaders". In it I showed how universities could be building a new wave of leaders who work directly in youth serving organizations while training others to become more proactive in supporting nonprofit and social benefit organizations from their roles in business, professions, policy makers, etc. 

It's the type of article student learners could review and reproduce in ways that might influence more people to actually adopt the ideas!  Many might continue such work through their adult lives.

That's the goal.

I can be found on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and Twitter (see links here).  I hope you'll connect with me.

If you appreciate what I share on my blogs and in the Tutor/Mentor library, please consider a contribution to help me pay the bills.  click here

New look for my website.

 Below is a view of the home page of the www.tutormentorexchange.net, which serves as the resource library for the Tutor/Mentor Connection (1993-present) and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC (2011-present).

This is not a rebuild, or re-design, but the result of upgrading my Joomla package from the very first version of Joomla, used to create the site around 2007, and the most recent version of Joomla, which is the update completed this week. 

That work was needed since the control panel at my web hosting site was out-of-date and would shut down at the end of this year.  I had to move to a different hosting, and find a developer to help me.

I started working on this in late March 2025 and while the new site is on-line today, there is still work to be done on the site configuration.  Then, there is a huge amount of work needed to reformat content, since the new version spreads the text wider than in the previous version, which creates too much "white space" and too many fragmented text paragraphs.  Plus the tables that I built to host pages such as https://www.tutormentorexchange.net/conceptmaps don't format well when you view the site on your phone.

The phone version. That's the big change.

This new version has been created to work better with phones.  I hope in the end, that is true.  

The difference is that in the previous version the home page fitting onto your phone screen meant that everything was very small.  Unless someone went to the effort of enlarging the page, they might not open the various sections.

I created this PDF a couple of years ago to show all the information on the site.  On the old version you'd see that entire home page on your phone.

The opposite of this is now you can easily see sections, but all of the elements of the home page now "scroll" on your phone.  If you're used to the site on the computer, this should not bother you. However, if someone visits the site for the first time, using their phone, they won't see the "big picture" of how all of these sections are part of one big information-based strategy. I've added a "for phone users" element that will show up first on phone versions. 

In addition, those pages built using html tables do not format well on the phone at all. There are many other text formatting problems as well. You'll see sentence fragments on the PC and Phone versions for a few months to come. Please be patient. 

All the content is the same, so once the site is fully reformatted I'll update the PDF, switching out images, but keeping most of the text the same.  

As these changes have been made, the site has been shut down for one, or two, weeks at a time. 

The major hosting changes are finished.  Now fixing the formatting begins, along with adding new links to the library that I've been holding for the past three months.  The formatting changes will take much longer since I must do this work myself.  I'm finding out that there are huge differences in how the first version enabled me to create and organize content, and how this new version works.  It looks like a steep learning curve. I'm figuring things out by trial and error.  

Note: If you're a VOLUNTEER with Joomla experience and want to help edit the pages on this site so they format better on the PC and on a phone, please reach out to me. You don't need to be in Chicago.

I want to thank two donors who made gifts of $2,000 and $1,000 over the past six months. Without these, I could not have hired the developer who did this work for me.  If you want to make a similar contribution I could hire a writer/editor to update the website.  Visit this page to donate (note, it is reformatted from previous website version). 

One feature of the new site design is this "Who's Online" feature, which is on the lower left side of the home page.  My analytics for the previous version never captured all of the traffic that I felt the website was getting.  This shows "570 guests" on-line, at 2 pm, 6-23-2025.  

I checked this again at 8:38 pm, 6-23-2025 and it shows "4058 guest on-line".  I don't know if this is cumulative, or the number on the site at that specific time.  It's a new feature with the Joomla upgrade that I'll need to learn more about.  

At 4:04 pm on 6-24-2025 the "Who's Online" shows "14713 guests".  

I'll keep you posted. If you've been trying to access the site and it's been not opening for you, I hope you'll return again and keep using the site as the resource it is intended to be.

The "fund T/MI" page is still working and I hope one or more people will make generous contributions to help me keep paying the bills. Thank you!