October 6, 2017
Dear Everyone:
When our Mount
Diablo Chapter of ARMA International
received its reprieve from being demoted to “Dormant”, I became the
Chapter’s Past President.
According to our brother, “Richard”, who belongs to a number of trade
associations, this is the most coveted title of all.
That’s because the Past President doesn’t really have to do
anything, other than dispense occasional sage advice and words of
wisdom.
Speaking of which, “Richard” wisely advised me, “Don’t volunteer for
anything!”
Nevertheless, I did offer to take over as the
Webmaster for the
Chapter website.
On one condition:
That the Chapter would pay for its own website instead of being a “free”
subsite of the Pacific Region
website.
That’s because the price of the “free” subsite was putting up with my
old nemesis, “Clancy”.
“Clancy” fancies himself an expert on websites, including the one used
for the Pacific Region.
Until recently, he was also the Pacific Region Advisor for Marketing and
Membership. Unfortunately,
no one told “Clancy” that having the title of “Advisor” conferred upon
him did not automatically make him any good at giving advice.
It just made him a pain in the neck.
A couple of years ago, “Clancy” located a guy named “Cedric” who agreed
to take over management of the Chapter website.
I was all in favor of it, since I figured maybe “Cedric” and
“Clancy” would get along better than I had.
“Cedric” immediately dropped all of the information that I had
placed in the website, in favor of a “lean look”.
Then, after a few months, “Cedric” suddenly sent me an email
announcing that he wanted to “spend more time with his children” and
would be handing the website over to another person, “Jessup”.
“Jessup” did as little as possible, apart from adding a picture of a
snow-covered mountain that “Clancy” crowed about, ignoring the fact that
it was clearly not Mount Diablo.
Then “Jessup” announced that he was too busy “on military leave”
from his regular job and that was the last time we ever heard from him.
And how much was the Chapter saving by not having its own website?
About $7.45 per month.
When put like that, the new Board promptly agreed to strike out
on our own.
Of course, that meant that I had to set up a new website, which is
actually easier than you might think.
I’ve been running my own website for about six years now.
But I learned how to design and maintain one over twenty-some
years ago when my supervisor told me, “We’re going to have a website and
you’re going to do it.”
At which time I went straight out to a bookstore (remember bookstores?)
and bought a book on how to use
HTML.
“HTML” stands for “hypertext markup language”, which is simply a
bunch of codes that tell a web browser, such as
Microsoft’s
Internet
Explorer (IE) and/or
Edge, as well
as Google Chrome,
Firefox,
Netscape,
and others, how to display the text and graphics contained in a web
page.
When I first started, we typed all the codes in ourselves.
And it didn’t take us too long to create a document filled with
standard codes to copy-and-paste whenever and wherever we needed them.
From there, it was only a hop-skip-and-a-jump to someone creating
a number of software applications to build all those codes in for you.
There was one that a co-worker really liked called “Front
Page”. It was an editor that
utilized what was called “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG),
which plugged in the codes for you as you typed in what you wanted.
In next to no time, “Front Page” was acquired by Microsoft, whose
business model appeared to be “gobble up everything in sight”.
So, when I was ready to start my own website, I bought a copy of the
Microsoft product and used it to build the site, then plug in The
Weekly Letters. When it came
time to make a website for the Chapter, it was simply a matter of using
the same basic framework to create the web pages.
However. The Chapter already
had a Domain Name.
I had to figure out how to let the
Internet know to
look elsewhere for that Domain Name, instead of looking under the
Pacific Region site.
Needless to say, there are significant safeguards in place to prevent
any Tom, Dick or Harry from hijacking a Domain Name and sending everyone
trying to reach “disney.com” to
some porn site.
It took a few hours to stumble through various “Frequently Asked
Questions” at both the
website host
and the company that controls the Domain Name; but eventually I
uncovered the “magic combination” and, as of this morning, the Chapter
website is up and looks much better than it has in a couple of years.
This morning I sent out an email to the new Board, announcing the “new”
website, minus “Daniel’s” snow-covered mountain, but including all the
information that “Cedric” and “Jessup” had dropped as too much trouble.
The new Board pronounced its appreciation.
And promptly began making “helpful suggestions for improvement”.
On the plus side, no “Clancy” to deal with.
Love, as always,
Pete
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