April 10, 2015
Dear Everyone:
Doesn’t it just figure? As
soon as I got the air conditioning in my condo fixed, winter roared back
into California. The
temperature plummeted into the 40’s at night.
I put heavy down comforter back the on the bed.
It even RAINED for a bit.
Seriously, half an inch of rain and people were dancing in the streets.
For a bit.
However, the Infamous Drought persists, and water rationing has begun.
In other news…
A couple of months ago, “Clancy”, our
Webmaster for the
Mt Diablo
Chapter of ARMA (Association of Records Managers and Administrators),
dropped said Website in my lap and scampered away to do something “more
important”, like maybe run his actual business.
I had, more or less, volunteered for this as I have some
experience with designing and running a simple website.
After a few weeks of dealing with the hodge-podge that was the existing
website, I made a clean sweep.
I used my website software, which has lots of dandy tools, to
start a completely new structure, based on a template for a “small
business”.
One of the things the template includes is a place to put your business
logo. You just replace the
“generic” logo image with your own.
Problem: We didn’t
really have a logo.
So I took the original ARMA International logo, which individual
chapters are allowed to use within certain parameters, and inserted it
into a Word document. Just
below the logo, I added the words, “Mt Diablo Chapter”.
Then I copied the whole image into Microsoft
Paint, cropped it,
and pasted it into a new image and saved it as a “jpg”.
When I replaced the generic logo with the new “MD” logo, it only took a
few minutes to resize it until it looked just fine, sitting in the upper
left corner of each page on the website.
I figured that was it.
Until the Chapter Board Meeting last month, when
some people thought it was a
little too discreet. Why
couldn’t “we” place the words “Mt Diablo Chapter” in gargantuan letters
along the top of the page where there was a lot of “empty space”?
I pointed out that not all the pages would have that “empty
space” and said I would “look into it”, which is webmaster-ese for
“forget about it”. What I
did do was put “Mt Diablo Chapter” as a large header on the landing
page, the one visitors first see when they visit the site.
Meanwhile, “Clancy”, who is still the Pacific Region Coordinator for
Membership and Marketing, and which may be one reason why he doesn’t
have time to maintain the Chapter website anymore, “suggested” that I
come up with a “Chapter Logo” that he, and others, can use with the
other Bay Area Chapters (Golden Gate,
Silicon Valley, and sometimes
Sacramento.)
I suspect “Clancy” knows that this is not quite as easy as it looks.
I have lots of pictures of
Mt Diablo, many taken from where my mailbox
was before the Postmaster made us rearrange the mailbox positions
throughout our complex. Now,
instead of a panoramic view of the Mountain, my mailbox boasts a
panoramic view of the parking lot and the gate to the “smaller” swimming
pool.
So I found a picture of Mt Diablo, actually taken from the entrance to
the Pleasant Hill Country Club, which shows the Mountain, framed by
evergreens, against a brilliant blue sky.
I plopped that into a new
Word document.
Then I wrestled with the
Text Box feature to create the words,
“Mt Diablo Chapter” in a nice script, superimposed over the picture.
Copied that into Paint, cropped and pasted it into a new Paint
image and voila!
What I got was a tiny image in the upper left corner of a huge white
field. This does not a logo
make.
But I emailed it off to “Clancy” who mischievously replied that it
looked “great” and that I should use it to create a “real” logo for the
Chapter. Back to Square One.
But I had one more trick up my sleeve, I hoped.
Some time ago, I was drafting some instructions for something, complete
with small illustrations, in a Word document.
Then I tried copying the whole thing into a web page.
That’s when I discovered that my website software has what some
people call “an undocumented feature”.
When I copied text and images into a web page, the software
automatically gave each image a name, like “image-001”, and placed it
into an image folder along with the page.
The software even displayed a little pop-up window asking me if I
really wanted to give the image that name and parking space, with the
option to change it if I wanted to.
So this time I created another Word document, inserted the picturesque
Mountain, with the words over the image, and so on.
Then I added some generic text and copied the whole thing into a
new web page. Sure enough,
the software promptly created a new image file for me.
All I had to do was copy it into another space and there was my
logo.
Ta da!
I kept the improvised ARMA International logo on the landing page, but
substituted the new-and-improved Mt Diablo Logo on all the other pages.
Anyone who is interested can find it at
www.armamtdiablo.org.
Now if we can just find a Speaker for the June meeting…
Love, as always,
Pete
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