Aloha and thank you for letting me be of service.
Website Changes
During the five months since our last assembly here is a brief list of changes to the Area 17 website.
- Immediate rewrite to XHTML 1.0 Transitional standards. Essentially this left the website looking as it had in the past but removed Microsoft Frontpage markup from the HTML. If you don’t know what this means, just think of it as a Spring cleaning behind the scenes.
- Reset and restarted our online calendar and began putting events up on it.
- Rewrote the website again with a new layout that incorporated a menu system for ease of navigation, a new look, standard headers and footers, and a link check.
- Finally, this January, I rewrote the site once again, this time moving to a CMS (content management solution). The reasons for this are manifold:
- Consistent look and feel across site
- Can be updated from any web enabled computer
- Minimizes manual coding
- Entire site can be changed by using themes
- Future webmasters will not have to rewrite entire site as I did
- Upgradeable with use of plugins as needs change
- Next I installed a new calendar system which improves the interface for the user. The new calendar has both a sidebar widget and it’s own page on the site. Both use “pop-ups” when you pass your mouse over a given day, the page also has a full listing of events for the month. Both types of calendar allow the visitor to change dates.
Request Response Times
I was able to respond to most requests to put something on the page with 24 hours of the request, often within hours. The exceptions to this were those times I had to get in contact with the author of the document/event and ask for clarification or a different sort of file.
Communication with Area and Others
Besides the on-going rewrite of the of the site itself, I contributed my thoughts to the last Committee Meeting where the direction of the site was discussed. I also responded to a half dozen request for information from outside Hawaii about upcoming events, some Area sponsored, some not. Some of the requests came from as far away as Ireland.
Problems/Maintenance
It was necessary to take steps to insure that the site would be available 24/7. It seems that from mid-November into December the Google robot, responsible for indexing sites on the web, had entered a looping cycle that was checking our site so often we were literally was kicked off-line by our provider, Netfirms. By configuring our sites permissions (robots.txt) it was possible modify Google’s behavior and this problem should not reoccur. Here’s a graphic representation of the problem.
Within the last week were hit with another problem, our email host was disallowing email attachments. I contacted support and was told that they were working on the problem which was larger than our own installation. Within a few hours I received notice that the problem had rectified and subsequent testing on my part confirmed that we could again send attachments. As soon as I discovered the problem I put up a notice on the website, first of the problem, later of the solution. I encourage everyone to check the website as part of any planned document distribution.
Some Visitor Information
In 2007 we had some 60,000 visitors to the site according to our hosts statistics package. Here’s a graphic of the distribution by date:
Unique visitors came from:
Visits Country
9228 United States
366 Canada
351 China
100 Germany
93 France
63 Norway
53 United Kingdom
34 Korea, South
31 Ireland
28 Japan
25 Uruguay
24 Australia
23 Sweden
18 Singapore
18 Italy
14 Netherlands
11 India
11 Austria
9 Poland
The numbers don’t reflect the stats on total visitors but do show the correct geographic distribution.
The Future
Because our webmail system does not allow us to email all forty (40) current @hawaii-aa.org email addresses I am looking into several different possible solutions.
- Using “mailing list” software configured to broadcast emails to sent to the list to everyone
- Installing “forum” software that would allow everyone to participate in discussions without the need for email.
- Both!
Things to Keep in Mind
In addition I have some requests from this community in order to keep the things running smoothly…
- Think about the size of the document you want to put up on the site. Large documents load slowly and frustrate visitors. If you want an image file on the site, use a lower resolution. If you want to put up a PDF, see if you can save it using the option to keep it smaller.
- If your program puts a file extension like .doc, .txt, .pdf, or something else on your file name, please do not rename it. This is one way our computers know which program to use to open the file (this varies by operating system and age of the system, but it’s a good rule of thumb). If you rename the file extension it may get the message saying your system doesn’t know how to open the file, even if it’s plain text. In addition try not to use spaces or punctuation in filenames:
This is from our super!!!! meeting & party.doc
should probably be:
super-meeting-party-minutes.doc
- Think about the format of the document you want up on the site. While you may have and love GizzardSoft PretzelGraphics which puts out .prtzl files, not everyone does. There are lots of options for common file formats and while I won’t go into them here I encourage you to contact me if you want some assistance in this area.
- If you send something you want put on the site, please, please, please check your email for the next couple of days. I was sent a request to put information up on the calendar but the person did not actually attach the list so I could do nothing. I responded immediately, but never heard back from the person. I hope they don’t have a resentment because their information was never posted, but there was nothing more I could do. You might double check that mail from webmaster@area17aa.org isn’t going into your spam folder, however much you might like it to do so.
- Keep in mind that flyers look great in color on the web, but they may be very ugly when printed. Color printing is expensive so think of others when you make a flyer.
- If you think there’s a problem with the website, or our webmail, there may be one! Please let me know so I can look into it. So far the two big problems we’ve had were not found by me, but by someone who noticed something “wrong” with either the site or our mail.
Once again, thank you for the opportunity to serve.
Aloha! area17 webmaster
This page available at http://www.area17aa.org/?p=70
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