SPAUG Website Maintenance

Around the end of the month:

• update www.pa-spaug.org/NewsLtr.htm (archive) and create the next newsmmyy.htm;
• update www.pa-spaug.org/Share.htm (archive) and create the new dommmyy.htm;
• update www.pa-spaug.org/toc.htm to point to the new Current and In Progress newsmmyy.htm and dommmyy.htm.
• Make sure to update all the dates, and also the filename at the bottom of the pages.
• Remove all the unused extra links from the previous month newsletter.
• Confirm the filename and validator address match, and validate at W3C for errors by pasting the commented address http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.pa-spaug.org/filename.htm;ss=1;noatt=1 (errors are usually caused by unacceptable characters, like &, curly quotes, fancy (em or en) dashes, etc., or unbalanced tags)
• It's time to send the email a reminder to the spaug_list to look at ShareWhere. But before sending the announcement, you have to be sure you've updated the toc.htm, NewsLtr.htm (archive), Share.htm (archive), main.htm, and activities.htm. The toc.htm should now point to the ending month (yymm) as Current for the Newsletter and ShareWhere; NewsLtr.htm and Share.htm had the comment moved up one month from the ending month, and the "under construction" moved to them (yymm+1).

After the General Meeting,

• update www.pa-spaug.org/main.htm and www.pa-spaug.org/activities.htm for the next general meeting. Be sure to match the pre-meeting dinner venues in two locations when you copy the new meeting info from the activities page!
• Enter notes etc. from the meeting to the "In Progress" newsletter. Upload the MP3 file and provide a link, if there is one.
• If you've created the activities.htm future meeting info in the proper format, it's just a matter of cutting and replacing the obsolete Main info with the current info, and remembering to synchronize the pre-meeting dinner venue with the matching JavaScript restaurant code. We'll need to update the possible restaurants once we move to Los Altos)

After the Planning Meeting,

• update www.pa-spaug.org/activities.htm for the next planning meeting date and confirm location (usually Bev's, and Jim's is commented out; if at Jim's, copy/past the correct address from the commented addresses).
• Enter the planning meeting notes to the In Progress newsletter. I usually take notes on my laptop in Arachnophilia in the Newsletter HTML document so I can just upload the file later, don't have to transcribe anything. Jim could provide the club computer for that purpose
• Be sure to update any changes in speakers or venue on www.pa-spaug.org/activities.htm; the newsletter links to the activities.htm page for future speakers.
• Periodically update www.pa-spaug.org/speakers.htm with who the presenters were/will be for the corresponding months. This list is useful to reveiw who previous speakers were, and their contact info. There is also information for speakers that can help them better plan and present at a meeting.

When you get the proofs from the Newsletter editor, or other submissions

• copy the Prez message to the "In Progress" newsletter and paste it in the reserved location. Add HTML tags as appropriate, and links to the referenced products or websites, if you want. John Buck usually adds formatting to my notes, and sometimes suggests changes (look over the PDF version); it's usually good advice & info, so I try to incorporate his efforts into mine. Jim Dinkey is usually the source of presenter info. They both usually look over the web version, and give feedback on errors or problems.
• Periodically people will "submit" items for the ShareWhere, Fun Pages, or News items. Often it's just email, not indicated as news or sharewhere, so you'll have to use your discretion what to publish and what to delete. You'll have to proof, edit, spell-check, apply HTML, etc. to make it look decent and work properly.
• Bev Altman sends info on new and removed SPAUG members, and changes to email addresses; these get posted in www.pa-spaug.org/mail-lst.htm using the format. For removals, I move the address to the bottom section rather than delete it - never know when you might need it.
• The speakers bio/program is an important item to watch for, usually from Jim. The next speaker gets put on the main.htm page; future speakers go on the activities.htm page in the order of their appearance. Just follow the format.

Some cautions for transferring the PrintScreen proofs to HTML

The Prez message is usually inserted into the Newsletter in the area reserved for it, for that month (which is the month before the PrintScreen date). That way, the Newsletter Table of Contents links don't need to be edited so they point to a different page; they refer to "anchors" in the same document. I find that's easier than creating separate files for the Prez, the General Meeting, the Planning Meeting, and any News items. It's also easier for John Buck to get the information for PrintScreen, since all the newsletter is in one file.

Generally what I do is copy the text to between the <p> </p> tags under the Prez pre-labeled H2 and H3 headings. Then I apply the necessary tags to format the text. By the time you get the Prez message, the "In Progress" current month should have already been created from the NewsForm.htm template. The General Meeting Notes and Planning Meeting Notes should already be filled in. And hopefully there will be several news items, too. So it's just a matter of adding the Prez message.

The advice on tags is to use lower case. I don't think it's a validation issue, usually just a stylistic convention. However, XHTML is more fussy, so it's best to standardize on one way or the other. (www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1). So all my tool bar and keyboard macros insert lower case tags, and that's what I use exclusively.

You may remember our WebSIG discussions (www.pa-spaug.org/websig/tags.html, www.pa-spaug.org/websig/CSS.html) that some tags are being deprecated (phased out). These include <U> (underline), <I> (italic), <font…>, <CENTER>, and are replaced with the CSS formatting (<span style="font-weight:bold"> or <strong>, <span style="font-style:italic"> or <em>, <span style="text-decoration:underline">, <div align="center">, etc.

Regarding links the style that comes from PrintScreen's PDF or Word version, (e.g., RegClean 4.1 <HTTP: www.regclean.com />is free; another version is $29. [N.B.– the site advertises a free download <HTTP: www.regclean.com download.php>; it may be a trial, ) don't show up in the online Newsletter, and would not work even if they did. You have to use the HTML format (e.g., Another member says <a href="http://www.regclean.com/" target="_blank">RegClean 4.1</a> is free; another version is $29. [N.B.– the site <a href="http://www.regclean.com/download.php" target="_blank">advertises a free download</a>; it may be a trial, ;)

The file from PrintScreen needs to be closely checked for "funny characters", such as in <P><B>PrintScreen</B>|John Buck|the President's message is expected soon, and the Newsletter will be coming out shortly thereafter. </P>
The long and medium dashes in the Word document do not translate to HTML and appear as a vertical bar (|) or question mark (?); you have to replace them with &mdash; or &ndash; (e.g., <p><b>PrintScreen</b>&mdash;John Buck&mdash;the President's message is expected soon, and the Newsletter will be coming out shortly thereafter. </p> and I'd also replace <b>PrintScreen</b> with <span style="font-weight:bold">PrintScreen</span>
Other characters that will appear as a vertical bar or question mark are "curly quotes" (use &ldquo; [text between curly quotes] &rdquo;) and most important, replace & with &amp;.

I record and post the meeting notes because I get added value out of organizing and reviewing the meeting information. If you don't have the time or inclination, ask for volunteers. If none step forward, the feature can be discontinued. You can then just provide a link to the PDF version of the newsletter, and a link to a recording of the meeting. The size of the MP3 recordings limits you to one general meeting at a time online (I don't record or post the planning meeting, just take notes on the template). You could break the MP3 into the admin part and presentation part, or not.

Maury Green will be able to help out for any problems. I expect to receive and send email while in Europe (from the Stan.hutchings@gmail.com account), but not on a daily basis.

A lot if information that is used in several places is in www.pa-spaug.org/spaug_util.js; you only have to change the JS file to change the information everywhere. Particularly if an officer, volunteer, or board member changes, the info should be updated in the JS file and also the Whom to Contact list, www.pa-spaug.org/Contacts.htm. You'll probably have to generate a whole new list of pre-meeting dining venues around Los Altos. Use the same pattern currently used in the JS file, main.htm and activities.htm. While in activities.htm they should be short, so have a p- prefix; when they are on main.htm I remove the p- prefix and use the verbose version.

Refer to www.pa-spaug.org/websig/maintain-website.html for more help monitoring the condition and useablility of the website.
Another source of advice is www.pa-spaug.org/websig/intro.html.

I use Arachnophilia 4.0 (www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia) to create and edit web pages, and WS_FTP www.ipswitch.com to transfer them back and forth to the SPAUG website. I'd recommend not using the FTP functionality of either version 6 or 7 of Windows Internet Explorer (there are reported security issues). You could use another full-featured FTP client instead, like the free FileZilla (http://filezilla-project.org/).

Website Resource Management Guidelines

Webmasters must continually monitor and maintain their website. Here's an excellent article: Maintaining a Website by Steve Franklin. "Link Rot" is a particular problem - you find an good site, link to it, then the site disappears and your link give the 404 not found error. And yet you're not allowed to copy the webpage to your own ISP because of intellectual property issues. Frequent use of the W3C^® Link Checker will alert you to the problem. (You can also use the direct address http://validator.w3.org/checklink?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pa-spaug.org%2Filinks%2Fwww.htm&hide_type=all&depth=&check=Check into a browser window, being sure to put in the URI of the page of interest - the example is for www.pa-spaug.org/ilinks/www.htm) Then you have to decide what to do: remove the link, try to find it, recreate it, or perhaps extract it from the Internet Archive and copy it to your own site.

As managers of a websites' resources, webmasters must determine how much storage is available and how to allocate it. If you are not a personal site webmaster, you may want to publish your rules and guidelines so your contributors and audience will know what to expect. It is frustrating to Bookmark or link to a site, only to find later that the material was removed, moved or changed. SPAUG is currently given ~100 MB space by the SVPAL, which so far has been adequate for almost everything we want to post. Some day we may reach the limits of our resources, and have to decide what to cut. Images and audio generally take up many times more space than text, so greatest size reduction would come from compressing or removing images and audio (MP3) files. Many images can be displayed at full resolution for a while, then compressed, and finally after they become obsolete, removed.

The SPAUG Webmasters have responsibility for conforming to the directives of the Board of Directors and Planning Committee. These groups will mediate questions of priority, content and resource allocation. Lacking direction, the Webmasters use their best judgement of how to allocate resources. Here is SPAUG 's philosophy (proposed by John Buck), barring other directives.

Perhaps the fairest statement we can make regarding images and articles on the website is that --

1. Club-related items have highest priority.
2. SIG-related items have second-highest priority.
3. Club-member-related items have third-highest priority.
4. Non-club-related items have lowest (that is, no) priority.
5. New items have a higher priority than older items. [We can decide whether a newer low-priority item has a higher priority than an older higher-priority item.]
6. If necessary, for fairness, we may limit the number of items from, or space available to, any one source (#s 2-4, that is, any source other than SPAUG). We may limit the size of any one item.
7. We may remove any one or more items from any source without prior notification that the items will be removed. We may let a contributor know we intend to remove one or more items so they can put them in their own webspace; we may provide a link to the moved material.
8. We may reduce the size of any item.

The webmaster should ensure that removals do not result in broken links. The web pages that link to a removed item must be edited to remove the link and document the removal, and current location (if any).

We are a member of Project Honeypot. Our login is stan.hutchings@gmail.com and password is the same as the SPAUG website password (that you use to FTP)