Editing the Sonoma Wings Web Site

Background: The sonoma wings web site was created by John Blacet and solely maintained by him up until this point. To relieve John of some of the work load and to better utilize the talents of other club members, it is proposed that most of the web site editing, maintenance and design chores be delegated to other members of the club. John will be in charge of the web site and serve as contact person for the web hosting and domain name accounts. He will assume payment duties for now although we should shift this over to the treasurer in the future.

The Plan: This is intended to be a team effort with maintenance of web site areas to be divided up according to club officer duties. These assignments will be added to the job descriptions in the by laws. Major changes in design, layout or structure, shall be worked out by the team at the executive meetings. No individual shall make major changes without the team process.

A preliminary list of responsibilities is show below:

President: (Albert) meeting info, Map, Calendar, Links

Vice President: (Ernie) Bulletin Board and below

Site Director: (Leo) Site Info, Story Time, WX info

Safety Officer: (Jon) Site Info safety information, XC Reports, Dealers & Training

Secretary: (Kurt) Meeting Minutes and minutes Archive, Contact Info, For Sale

Treasurer: (Matt) Member List (add dues paid column), Officers ,  How to Join, Pay Pal payment processing for dues, T-shirts, and Fly-Ins.

Newsletter Editor: (Ernie) newsletter web page (new page with link to main page with teaser -- “February Newsletter with a thrilling account of Leo’s XC from St Helena!” -- for example. Ernie could also continue his fine job as photo page editor, if willing.

Web Site Director: (John) guidance, troubleshooting, contact and bill paying
 

Procedure

Here is one way to do this with an iMac and Netscape 4.7. The procedure should be similar for PCs and Internet Explorer has a web page editor also.
I can answer Mac questions and Ernie is better for the PC. Those of you without modern browsers might think about updating if you have any memory left. The web page was orignally designed on a Mac Peforma with a measly 32MB of RAM, using a free AOL web page design program and Fetch for transferring files back to the host computer.

The editors work like basic (slightly weird) word processors and they are WYSIWIG. Don't let anybody talk you into trying to edit raw HTML.

• The most important step is to download the page you want to edit onto your computer. Since more than one person will be editing the same page, it is important to get the latest version off the website, not out of your own files!
• Go to the web site and the page to be edited. Copy the URL. Go to File, Open, Location in Composer. Paste in the URL, hit enter.
• Now you have a copy of the page and can add or delete info. You can go off line or stay on if the job is a quick one. I won't go into all the aspects of the editor. Check it out and see what you can do. The main formatting tools are lists, tables, headings and of course links. You can insert pictures in the .jpg or .gif format. Try to stay within the style formats of the existing page.
• When you are done, it's time to send the page back to the web site. Go to File, Publish. In the resulting window, enter "ftp://sonomawings.com/sonomawings.com/pagetitle.html". (No, you don't use the quotation marks...). Note that the web address is duplicated due to the filing system created by the remote computer. Fill in "pagetitle" with the actual name of the page.
• Enter User Name and password. Click on Save Password. Next time you edit this page, you can select the info from the Use Default Location button, which brings up a list of previous locations and automatically remembers your password, etc.
• In The Other Files to Include box, generally you want to make sure that you have selected none.
• Hit the Publish button and if all goes well, the page will be sent to the host computer and can be viewed on the web immediately. (Hit reload on your browser window).