Anyone who knows me well will know about my dislike for litter. I can often be seen wandering around Bathgate of an evening or weekend, litter picker, hoop and bags in-tow, trying to tidy up our beautiful countryside. I don’t understand why people litter in such a beautiful part of the world but that’s an entirely different blog post!
I joined West Lothian Litter Pickers (WLLP) Facebook group when I realise it existed back before the pandemic. We are lucky in West Lothian that the council are very supportive of the litter picking community and we can leave bags by bins and they’ll pick them up with the street bins – totally different to other places I’ve lived. WLLP work closely with the council and I found from the moment I joined the group that it was a supportive community of like-minded people. Although I’ve only actually ever been on one group pick, I usually just do spontaneous picks when I have time, the community support each other and it makes you feel much better about it all. I sometimes despair when I see litter (ie 10ft away from a bin or I once found a whole box of used needles in the park which frankly terrified me, council were excellent that day!) but knowing there are 4,000 people in West Lothian that feel the same, makes me feel so much better.
Recently WLLP advertised for a social media manager (volunteer). I didn’t volunteer straight away as I was worried that working on the social media would eat into the time I had for tidying up the countryside near me, and that’s obviously why I do what I do. However, being between jobs, I felt I had a bit more capacity than normal so I volunteered and have been working on a few things. I have been working on a website for the group – the Facebook group is ace but it requires someone to have a Facebook account to access it, and not everyone wants to be on social media. I wanted the website to be the place folk go for instructions on how to pick, how to organise an event, information about the group’s governance and to point the various social media we will spin up. The key requirement for me is that the website has to be easy to edit – so I read some reviews about which platforms allowed people to create and edit websites most easily and I found that Wix seemed to get the best reviews.
I’m not going to lie – as someone who knows a bit about IT, using Wix seemed quite counterintuitive at times. I’m also not sure it’s built things in the way I would if I’d done it by hand however we have a website now and I am pretty confident others will find it easy to change words or rewrite paragraphs. Not so convinced that changing the structure would be that easy but it won’t be impossible. The one thing that did give me the rage was trying to line up the text on each page so the margins were consistent. There didn’t seem to be a site wide way to do that, and despite me googling furiously and even asking the Wix AI Helper, I ended up doing it manually on each page. I got AI to help me write some of the content in an informal and helpful tone, I asked permission to use existing photos of litter picks from the Facebook Group.
I also thought I might be able to pull out the events from Facebook and embed them into the website but apparently Meta shut down the APIs for groups back in January 2024. The WLLP group is very active on Facebook and I don’t want to disrupt that with anything I do so back to the drawing board on that one.
