Monday, February 14, 2005
Links
A "link" is a direct connection between two web pages. You will notice it as text in a different color, underlined. Put your cursor over it and quickly double-click. After a moment's pause, you should find yourself at the other site. These things make footnotes completely obsolete.
Try the following:
Lake Mohonk Mountain House
Google Maps
Right Angle Club Electronic Newsletter
Philadelphia Reflections
Hall Watch (City Hall gossip)
Philly Fun Guide
If you like any of these, drag it to your desktop by holding the clicker down when you are over the favicon (little jigger to the left of the URL). When you later click on the favicon on the desktop, you will go straight to the website without intermediate steps.
Try the following:
Lake Mohonk Mountain House
Google Maps
Right Angle Club Electronic Newsletter
Philadelphia Reflections
Hall Watch (City Hall gossip)
Philly Fun Guide
If you like any of these, drag it to your desktop by holding the clicker down when you are over the favicon (little jigger to the left of the URL). When you later click on the favicon on the desktop, you will go straight to the website without intermediate steps.
Lake Mohonk Mountain House October 14-15
We're trying something new, an out-of-town get together of the Right Angle Club. The idea is to build sociability among the members and their wives, and to explore just what it is the members would like to get out of their club.
The first event is at Lake Mohonk Mountain House, in New Paltz, New York, October 14-15, 2005. That's usually the peak of the fall leaf-color season, and is the most popular time of the year at the lodge. So, even though there is snow still on the ground as this notice goes out, you need to call ahead to make a room reservation right now. 1-845-255-1000 You'll need to make a $400 deposit.
What is Lake Mohonk Mountain House? Well, it's a Quaker-run resort on the top of a mountain right beside a lake. The water in the lake actually comes from another mountain that's higher but out of sight. The lake is full of trout, very large, rather well-fed and tame. There's golf and tennis, and horses, carriage rides, and all that. Until a few years ago, you had to leave your car at the bottom of the mountain and go up to the resort in a horse-drawn carriage, but now they let you drive up to the top. The resort has been owned by the Smiley family of Swarthmore for 150 years, and several of the Smileys are experts in botany, horticulture, display gardening, etc. Each season of the year has its attractions, in October it's fall foliage. Because of the Smiley family, the resort has always had a big Philadelphia following, with people going there as children and years later going in wheelchairs.
If you are into the Internet, you can take a look at the web page at www.Mohonk.com. Much better, just ask some old Philadelphia folks.
At one time, the big attraction was fresh food, right out of their own gardens. The supermarket has made fresh fruit and vegetables less of a novelty, and when everybody started going to Europe for vacations, the Mountain House sort of fell out of favor. But now they have got the idea of gourmet cooking, and they even serve wines of noble vintage. For distilled products, however, you are advised to stop in the liquor store in New Paltz, as you go past. If you just have to smoke, you maybe should stay home.
For driving directions, we advise going to www.maps.google.com, which has just about the best map arrangement you ever saw, including a satellite picture if you choose. It's 90 miles from New York City on the New York Thruway, and takes 2.5 hours from Philadelphia. You go up the New Jersey Turnpike and over to the Thruway, and the transition is the only difficult part. Bob Reinecke is the world's expert on which lane to get in at which point, and we'll try to get him to be explicit when it gets closer to October 14. When you think about it, it's perfectly remarkable that you could be in this Quaker mountain retreat when you within binoculars distance of the Empire State Building, and just a few miles from the Catskills.
So -- ask your wife, get approval, and then call for a reservation immediately.
The first event is at Lake Mohonk Mountain House, in New Paltz, New York, October 14-15, 2005. That's usually the peak of the fall leaf-color season, and is the most popular time of the year at the lodge. So, even though there is snow still on the ground as this notice goes out, you need to call ahead to make a room reservation right now. 1-845-255-1000 You'll need to make a $400 deposit.
What is Lake Mohonk Mountain House? Well, it's a Quaker-run resort on the top of a mountain right beside a lake. The water in the lake actually comes from another mountain that's higher but out of sight. The lake is full of trout, very large, rather well-fed and tame. There's golf and tennis, and horses, carriage rides, and all that. Until a few years ago, you had to leave your car at the bottom of the mountain and go up to the resort in a horse-drawn carriage, but now they let you drive up to the top. The resort has been owned by the Smiley family of Swarthmore for 150 years, and several of the Smileys are experts in botany, horticulture, display gardening, etc. Each season of the year has its attractions, in October it's fall foliage. Because of the Smiley family, the resort has always had a big Philadelphia following, with people going there as children and years later going in wheelchairs.
If you are into the Internet, you can take a look at the web page at www.Mohonk.com. Much better, just ask some old Philadelphia folks.
At one time, the big attraction was fresh food, right out of their own gardens. The supermarket has made fresh fruit and vegetables less of a novelty, and when everybody started going to Europe for vacations, the Mountain House sort of fell out of favor. But now they have got the idea of gourmet cooking, and they even serve wines of noble vintage. For distilled products, however, you are advised to stop in the liquor store in New Paltz, as you go past. If you just have to smoke, you maybe should stay home.
For driving directions, we advise going to www.maps.google.com, which has just about the best map arrangement you ever saw, including a satellite picture if you choose. It's 90 miles from New York City on the New York Thruway, and takes 2.5 hours from Philadelphia. You go up the New Jersey Turnpike and over to the Thruway, and the transition is the only difficult part. Bob Reinecke is the world's expert on which lane to get in at which point, and we'll try to get him to be explicit when it gets closer to October 14. When you think about it, it's perfectly remarkable that you could be in this Quaker mountain retreat when you within binoculars distance of the Empire State Building, and just a few miles from the Catskills.
So -- ask your wife, get approval, and then call for a reservation immediately.
Friday, February 11, 2005
My Yahoo
Well, somehow you got here, so we won't give you instructions about that. We're going to lead you through some of the crevices of My Yahoo. For now, this will have to serve as the home page for the Right Angle Club of Philadelphia.
To get there, enter its URL (web address), in the place provided by your browser (remember, Firefox is preferred).
URL: www.my.yahoo.com
That will give you a generic entry screen for anybody's Yahoo web page, so you enter its particular name: rightangleclub
Then, you enter its password, which is 12331233
(The reason it has this password is our tradition of going in to lunch at 12:33 PM, and always having to be reminded twice.)
Then, check the box that asks you if you want your computer to remember. Yes, you do, because that will save you a little trouble, and you can go straight to the password.
Then, you will see our orange and black front page in all its glory. Orange and black were selected because our rosette is orange and black. I suspect that's because the Etherington brothers went to Princeton, but you'll have to ask them.
There's a lot of stuff on the screen, so look toward the upper right corner, where there is a calendar. Click on today's date, and you will get today's schedule, once you have linked up. You link up by going down a few lines where there is a box for you to enter your password, which is 12331233, remember? You won't see this box again, because this will trigger the computer to get the calendar for the current week, and keep it updated in that area. But it's only a week's worth, and if you want to look ahead for weeks and weeks, go down just a little where Yahoo calendar is underlined, and click it. This will give you a full year's calendar (for the Right Angle Club only, of course). You'll have to navigate around to see it all, because it's too big to fit on the screen all at once.
Just to the left of the Yahoo calendar link is the word Update, underlined. If you click on this, nothing much seems to happen. It's there in case you forgot to turn things off the last time you used it, and "today" is now some other day. Clicking Update brings it all into order.
If you want to know whether there's a luncheon on a particular date, or who the speaker is, go up higher to the calendar at the top of the page. Try Feb. 18, and you get that day's event.
We've tried to think of every way to remind you of what's going on, but there's no way we could figure out how to remind you to put your green nametag back in the box. Perhaps we could do that by sending out a Request for Proposals.
We'll tell you about other things on My.Yahoo.com some other time. There's lots to learn, particularly if you went to Princeton.
To get there, enter its URL (web address), in the place provided by your browser (remember, Firefox is preferred).
URL: www.my.yahoo.com
That will give you a generic entry screen for anybody's Yahoo web page, so you enter its particular name: rightangleclub
Then, you enter its password, which is 12331233
(The reason it has this password is our tradition of going in to lunch at 12:33 PM, and always having to be reminded twice.)
Then, check the box that asks you if you want your computer to remember. Yes, you do, because that will save you a little trouble, and you can go straight to the password.
Then, you will see our orange and black front page in all its glory. Orange and black were selected because our rosette is orange and black. I suspect that's because the Etherington brothers went to Princeton, but you'll have to ask them.
There's a lot of stuff on the screen, so look toward the upper right corner, where there is a calendar. Click on today's date, and you will get today's schedule, once you have linked up. You link up by going down a few lines where there is a box for you to enter your password, which is 12331233, remember? You won't see this box again, because this will trigger the computer to get the calendar for the current week, and keep it updated in that area. But it's only a week's worth, and if you want to look ahead for weeks and weeks, go down just a little where Yahoo calendar is underlined, and click it. This will give you a full year's calendar (for the Right Angle Club only, of course). You'll have to navigate around to see it all, because it's too big to fit on the screen all at once.
Just to the left of the Yahoo calendar link is the word Update, underlined. If you click on this, nothing much seems to happen. It's there in case you forgot to turn things off the last time you used it, and "today" is now some other day. Clicking Update brings it all into order.
If you want to know whether there's a luncheon on a particular date, or who the speaker is, go up higher to the calendar at the top of the page. Try Feb. 18, and you get that day's event.
We've tried to think of every way to remind you of what's going on, but there's no way we could figure out how to remind you to put your green nametag back in the box. Perhaps we could do that by sending out a Request for Proposals.
We'll tell you about other things on My.Yahoo.com some other time. There's lots to learn, particularly if you went to Princeton.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Introductory Sample
(This entry will be removed after the Right Angle Club's Blog is established.)
Read-Only.
"Blog" is a slang term for Web Log. This one can be found on the Internet by typing in its name, which is: www.rightangleclub.blogspot.com (you better write that down, or enter it in your "favorites" file.
In this form, it is "read-only". You can also reach it by double-clicking the "link" , which is any words at all, signaled by being in a different colored type , underlined. Anybody in the whole world can read this blog, either by double-clicking a link, or by entering its full name in the space provided on your browser. We can change that later, if we need privacy.
Read and Write.
The corresponding secretary of the club, or some other person who has been given the secret password, can change or add to the Blog, by going to the (now Google-owned) website called www.Blogger.com. That won't do you much good, unless you know the password, however. As time goes by, more and more people will learn the password, and eventually some kid in Bulgaria will intrude into our space. At that point, we will have to get more vigorous about protection, but at the moment we are simply lost in a universe of 12 million blogs, where it is unlikely we will be discovered by chance for quite some time.
Comments.
There's one exception. Blogger allows you to check yes or no on permitting readers to send back comments to the "blog-master". We checked "yes", and (at the moment) welcome comments from the audience. However, we can check "no" at any moment, so watch your language. Although, come to think of it, most bloggers are about twenty years old, and you ought to see the language they use, and even the candid photos they sometimes include. Try clicking on the word "comment" at the bottom of the page.
Contents -- are up to you.
We're thinking of announcements, schedules, membership lists, programs, club history, minutes of the meetings -- or what you will. Comments, anyone?
Read-Only.
"Blog" is a slang term for Web Log. This one can be found on the Internet by typing in its name, which is: www.rightangleclub.blogspot.com (you better write that down, or enter it in your "favorites" file.
In this form, it is "read-only". You can also reach it by double-clicking the "link" , which is any words at all, signaled by being in a different colored type , underlined. Anybody in the whole world can read this blog, either by double-clicking a link, or by entering its full name in the space provided on your browser. We can change that later, if we need privacy.
Read and Write.
The corresponding secretary of the club, or some other person who has been given the secret password, can change or add to the Blog, by going to the (now Google-owned) website called www.Blogger.com. That won't do you much good, unless you know the password, however. As time goes by, more and more people will learn the password, and eventually some kid in Bulgaria will intrude into our space. At that point, we will have to get more vigorous about protection, but at the moment we are simply lost in a universe of 12 million blogs, where it is unlikely we will be discovered by chance for quite some time.
Comments.
There's one exception. Blogger allows you to check yes or no on permitting readers to send back comments to the "blog-master". We checked "yes", and (at the moment) welcome comments from the audience. However, we can check "no" at any moment, so watch your language. Although, come to think of it, most bloggers are about twenty years old, and you ought to see the language they use, and even the candid photos they sometimes include. Try clicking on the word "comment" at the bottom of the page.
Contents -- are up to you.
We're thinking of announcements, schedules, membership lists, programs, club history, minutes of the meetings -- or what you will. Comments, anyone?
Monday, February 07, 2005
Club Computing
Most clubs, family groups, or neighborhood associations are held together by one loyal volunteer who does all the work. This limits the scope of the club to what one person is able to do in spare time. When that central person gets tired of it or moves away, things tend to fall apart. In the spirit of encouraging more volunteerism, this article suggests some ways the home computer can easily automate the normal drudgery of running a club. Having just performed this task for the local computer society, I can report it takes about two hours to put it together. If I did it three times, it would take forty-five minutes. A rank beginner, who doesn't even know what the words mean, might take all day to do it, but no more than that.
Most of the programs a club would need were first developed for people on the go, like a salesman who visits several cities, or a college student who commutes. It's an easy step to imagine different club members in different places instead of one person in several places. Electricity travels so fast that connecting computers together with the whole world's internet can be thought of as essentially all one big computer. For practical purposes, it doesn't matter whether a piece of information is in two parts of one computer or in two different computers hooked together by the internet. The whole process is so cheap it might just as well be free.
Selection of Computer and Operating System. Over ninety percent of the world's home computers are based on the Windows operating system, but Windows is having a lot of trouble right now with viruses and spam. Right now is Apple's big chance, because the Apple OS X operating system, based on Unix, seems to be immune to viruses and spam. So, if you are buying a new computer, I suggest you look at Apple's "headless" version. That's a little six-inch box to which you attach the monitor, keyboard and printer that presumably you have left over from some Windows system. Times will change, but right now this five hundred dollar little headless job is worth the money. That's for the club secretary; all the club members can use any kind of machine they happen to have, for "read-only" use.
Router. If you have several computers on one telephone line, you need a router to send the right signals to each machine. We suggest Linksys, made by Cisco. Because the router changes identification numbers every time it is restarted, it tends to foil the buccaneers out there who are trying to find your credit card. Therefore, it's not a bad idea to have a router attached, even if you only have it connected to a single computer. Security folks say it takes about fifteen minutes for some $#@! (pirate) to find a newly installed computer, and most banks get several hundred break-in attempts every hour. That's because everybody is getting automated these days, including criminals.
Choice of Browser. After you get set up and organized and all, you need to download the Firefox browser, which right now is faster and more spam-proof than either Internet Explorer or Netscape. Go to some other browser and enter www.firefox.com There's no harm in having several browsers sitting on your computer, including Opera if you like, but right now Firefox is the one to use. A browser, in case you care, is a program that takes a stream of internet data and translates it into the image on your screen, sort of like translating Morse code into a telegram. Some browsers are lean, mean and fast, while others are loaded with a lot of bells and whistles that slow them down. If you can't see any difference by trying them, go with the one that gives you most spam protection.
Yahoo Calendar. There are lots of computer calendars, but right now Yahoo offers one that is somewhat better for public use by clubs. For an illustration, take a look at the Philadelphia Orchestra calendar that can be located on Philadelphia Reflections in the lower left column, by first clicking the "Philadelphia Calendars" button, and then clicking the link to the Orchestra's schedule. Naturally, the Orchestra doesn't want people changing their public schedule, so the calendar is "read only". You can create a calendar like this for your club or organization by going to www.calendar.yahoo.com and entering an identifier and password. You can only change the calendar if you have the password, so be careful who is allowed to have it. If you make a misjudgment about this, just abandon the calendar and start a new one. You can of course create a personal calendar for yourself; it would be nice to merge your calendar with organization calendars. Calendar-merge programs do exist, but presently are a little primitive. Even nicer would be the ability to drag and drop individual events from one calendar to the other, but that's mostly on the wish list. The calendar for the Right Angle Club is at www.calendar.yahoo.com. The identification name is rightangleclub and the password is 12331233, because we traditionally go in to lunch at that time.
Yahoo Address Book. There are zillions of address books, but Yahoo provides a public one, if you allow club members to know the password. On the one hand, it's a big convenience for the secretary to have everybody fill in his own data. It can take ten or fifteen minutes apiece to complete all that information. On the other hand, if just anybody can have all this data, you can expect to get lots of unwanted solicitations. Naturally, you want to keep intruders from altering the data, but whether or not you make your membership list public is your own decision. So, probably you want to transfer the data to a list that you keep private, using a system of letting people enter data, and then erasing it after it is transferred.
Listserv. A very handy tool is to create a listserv, which is a system of e-mail that is sent to everyone on the list, and everyone can chime in with comments. It makes for a lot of local excitement, and it keeps families together, including reunion classes from all the schools you went to, 'way back then. If the Rs and the Ds get to bashing each other on the Listserv, you will learn the value of designating some sober soul to be list master, given the power to exile people whose mouths get too noisy.
Minutes and History as Blogs. Most clubs keep minutes, and after a while they start to record their history. It's a lot of work, and often gets lost; furthermore, it's hard for anyone but the author to read. Right Angle Club: www.rightangleclub.blogspot.com.
While there are a dozen programs and systems for creating blogs (that's short for "Web logs"), Google has bought www.blogger.com from that company, and has pepped it up quite a lot. Like the rest of these ideas, this one is free, and there are several million of these in existence. Sometimes people write poetry in the form of blogs, and some other people put up some pretty raunchy pictures or commentary. Apparently Google doesn't care, so they shouldn't mind if you publish the minutes of the East Whipswitch Cooking Society as blogs. It's very easy to do, and their canned "templates" produce some pretty elegant web sites in minutes. That's right, minutes in minutes.
Finances and Newsletters. Clubs typically collect dues or charge for luncheons, but financial stuff on the Internet is more complicated and must be dealt with in a later article. Similarly, you can publish a newsletter using RSS that is very spiffy indeed, but that's really hard to explain, and must be described in a separate article, too. Anyway, these preliminary items are enough to keep a new club busy for a few months.
Fast User Switching. Other operating systems will surely imitate it, but Apple is at present where you have to go to make a separate computer section for your club. Apple originally had the idea that several people would use the same machine, and want to keep their data secret from each other. So, they have a system in which you can click the upper right corner of the screen, and you can place yourself in a secret room with its own password. We suggest that it would be better to see this as a new desktop. All graphical interfaces of all computer operating systems use the metaphor of a desktop, which is what suggested to me that the club needs a desktop like my own. That is, it's littered with half-finished business of a dozen sorts, suddenly abandoned when the phone rings or a visitor arrives. You would like to be able to come back to your desktop and take up your work where you left off. For that, you probably need several desktops, and that's what fast user shifting provides you. Not vitally essential, but very convenient.
Favicons. Especially if you have fast user desktops specially designated by work topics instead of people, you can really use the favicon, or favorite icon, feature. A favicon is the little miniature do-hickey to the left of the webpage URL in the URL box. Maybe you never noticed it, but it's usually there. If you take your mouse and drag the favicon onto the desktop (you may have to shift something to create some blue sky desktop room) a new icon will appear on the desktop. Close up and click on that new icon, and you will open up a browser and go right to the page you were using when you created the icon. This is such a real neat feature that your desktop is apt to fill up quickly with a lot of web pages you happened to come across. It doesn't take long for the favicons to choke the desktop into uselessness, so this feature is at its best in a system where the topics of general utility to the user are sub-set by fast user switching.
Your Own Website. Apache. Your club will soon get the idea that you need your own website, but in fact you already have several of them. Your calendar, address book, club minutes blog, club history blog already add up to four websites. To most people, having their own website means consolidating all this material into one elegant page, with photos and artwork. You can do that, but it's much harder, and you first need to see if you really have a need for that.
If you do, and particularly if your club runs a little on the snooty side and highly prizes its privacy, you might want to consider going all the way and becoming your own internet provider. That brings us back to Apple, since the OS X system includes a free copy of Apache, the program for running your own site on your own computer. Now, that's really a big undertaking, far beyond the average club. So if privacy of that order is mandatory, you may have to hire someone to do it for you. But Apache sure makes it possible, if that's where you feel you want to go.
Most of the programs a club would need were first developed for people on the go, like a salesman who visits several cities, or a college student who commutes. It's an easy step to imagine different club members in different places instead of one person in several places. Electricity travels so fast that connecting computers together with the whole world's internet can be thought of as essentially all one big computer. For practical purposes, it doesn't matter whether a piece of information is in two parts of one computer or in two different computers hooked together by the internet. The whole process is so cheap it might just as well be free.
Selection of Computer and Operating System. Over ninety percent of the world's home computers are based on the Windows operating system, but Windows is having a lot of trouble right now with viruses and spam. Right now is Apple's big chance, because the Apple OS X operating system, based on Unix, seems to be immune to viruses and spam. So, if you are buying a new computer, I suggest you look at Apple's "headless" version. That's a little six-inch box to which you attach the monitor, keyboard and printer that presumably you have left over from some Windows system. Times will change, but right now this five hundred dollar little headless job is worth the money. That's for the club secretary; all the club members can use any kind of machine they happen to have, for "read-only" use.
Router. If you have several computers on one telephone line, you need a router to send the right signals to each machine. We suggest Linksys, made by Cisco. Because the router changes identification numbers every time it is restarted, it tends to foil the buccaneers out there who are trying to find your credit card. Therefore, it's not a bad idea to have a router attached, even if you only have it connected to a single computer. Security folks say it takes about fifteen minutes for some $#@! (pirate) to find a newly installed computer, and most banks get several hundred break-in attempts every hour. That's because everybody is getting automated these days, including criminals.
Choice of Browser. After you get set up and organized and all, you need to download the Firefox browser, which right now is faster and more spam-proof than either Internet Explorer or Netscape. Go to some other browser and enter www.firefox.com There's no harm in having several browsers sitting on your computer, including Opera if you like, but right now Firefox is the one to use. A browser, in case you care, is a program that takes a stream of internet data and translates it into the image on your screen, sort of like translating Morse code into a telegram. Some browsers are lean, mean and fast, while others are loaded with a lot of bells and whistles that slow them down. If you can't see any difference by trying them, go with the one that gives you most spam protection.
Yahoo Calendar. There are lots of computer calendars, but right now Yahoo offers one that is somewhat better for public use by clubs. For an illustration, take a look at the Philadelphia Orchestra calendar that can be located on Philadelphia Reflections in the lower left column, by first clicking the "Philadelphia Calendars" button, and then clicking the link to the Orchestra's schedule. Naturally, the Orchestra doesn't want people changing their public schedule, so the calendar is "read only". You can create a calendar like this for your club or organization by going to www.calendar.yahoo.com and entering an identifier and password. You can only change the calendar if you have the password, so be careful who is allowed to have it. If you make a misjudgment about this, just abandon the calendar and start a new one. You can of course create a personal calendar for yourself; it would be nice to merge your calendar with organization calendars. Calendar-merge programs do exist, but presently are a little primitive. Even nicer would be the ability to drag and drop individual events from one calendar to the other, but that's mostly on the wish list. The calendar for the Right Angle Club is at www.calendar.yahoo.com. The identification name is rightangleclub and the password is 12331233, because we traditionally go in to lunch at that time.
Yahoo Address Book. There are zillions of address books, but Yahoo provides a public one, if you allow club members to know the password. On the one hand, it's a big convenience for the secretary to have everybody fill in his own data. It can take ten or fifteen minutes apiece to complete all that information. On the other hand, if just anybody can have all this data, you can expect to get lots of unwanted solicitations. Naturally, you want to keep intruders from altering the data, but whether or not you make your membership list public is your own decision. So, probably you want to transfer the data to a list that you keep private, using a system of letting people enter data, and then erasing it after it is transferred.
Listserv. A very handy tool is to create a listserv, which is a system of e-mail that is sent to everyone on the list, and everyone can chime in with comments. It makes for a lot of local excitement, and it keeps families together, including reunion classes from all the schools you went to, 'way back then. If the Rs and the Ds get to bashing each other on the Listserv, you will learn the value of designating some sober soul to be list master, given the power to exile people whose mouths get too noisy.
Minutes and History as Blogs. Most clubs keep minutes, and after a while they start to record their history. It's a lot of work, and often gets lost; furthermore, it's hard for anyone but the author to read. Right Angle Club: www.rightangleclub.blogspot.com.
While there are a dozen programs and systems for creating blogs (that's short for "Web logs"), Google has bought www.blogger.com from that company, and has pepped it up quite a lot. Like the rest of these ideas, this one is free, and there are several million of these in existence. Sometimes people write poetry in the form of blogs, and some other people put up some pretty raunchy pictures or commentary. Apparently Google doesn't care, so they shouldn't mind if you publish the minutes of the East Whipswitch Cooking Society as blogs. It's very easy to do, and their canned "templates" produce some pretty elegant web sites in minutes. That's right, minutes in minutes.
Finances and Newsletters. Clubs typically collect dues or charge for luncheons, but financial stuff on the Internet is more complicated and must be dealt with in a later article. Similarly, you can publish a newsletter using RSS that is very spiffy indeed, but that's really hard to explain, and must be described in a separate article, too. Anyway, these preliminary items are enough to keep a new club busy for a few months.
Fast User Switching. Other operating systems will surely imitate it, but Apple is at present where you have to go to make a separate computer section for your club. Apple originally had the idea that several people would use the same machine, and want to keep their data secret from each other. So, they have a system in which you can click the upper right corner of the screen, and you can place yourself in a secret room with its own password. We suggest that it would be better to see this as a new desktop. All graphical interfaces of all computer operating systems use the metaphor of a desktop, which is what suggested to me that the club needs a desktop like my own. That is, it's littered with half-finished business of a dozen sorts, suddenly abandoned when the phone rings or a visitor arrives. You would like to be able to come back to your desktop and take up your work where you left off. For that, you probably need several desktops, and that's what fast user shifting provides you. Not vitally essential, but very convenient.
Favicons. Especially if you have fast user desktops specially designated by work topics instead of people, you can really use the favicon, or favorite icon, feature. A favicon is the little miniature do-hickey to the left of the webpage URL in the URL box. Maybe you never noticed it, but it's usually there. If you take your mouse and drag the favicon onto the desktop (you may have to shift something to create some blue sky desktop room) a new icon will appear on the desktop. Close up and click on that new icon, and you will open up a browser and go right to the page you were using when you created the icon. This is such a real neat feature that your desktop is apt to fill up quickly with a lot of web pages you happened to come across. It doesn't take long for the favicons to choke the desktop into uselessness, so this feature is at its best in a system where the topics of general utility to the user are sub-set by fast user switching.
Your Own Website. Apache. Your club will soon get the idea that you need your own website, but in fact you already have several of them. Your calendar, address book, club minutes blog, club history blog already add up to four websites. To most people, having their own website means consolidating all this material into one elegant page, with photos and artwork. You can do that, but it's much harder, and you first need to see if you really have a need for that.
If you do, and particularly if your club runs a little on the snooty side and highly prizes its privacy, you might want to consider going all the way and becoming your own internet provider. That brings us back to Apple, since the OS X system includes a free copy of Apache, the program for running your own site on your own computer. Now, that's really a big undertaking, far beyond the average club. So if privacy of that order is mandatory, you may have to hire someone to do it for you. But Apache sure makes it possible, if that's where you feel you want to go.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Newsletters
Clubs like to have newsletters. If you have enough news to fill one, they are pretty easy to create and maintain. However, they are a little hard to explain, so stick with us as we build up the idea.
First, take a look at what you are trying to achieve, and a handy example would be www.my.yahoo.com. You will see it is not a daily or a weekly, it is continuous. The page of the newspaper is a montage of ten or twelve blocks on a page. For example, one block might give you the month's schedule, another shows the sports scores, another shows the stock market, etc. Each one of those blocks is probably updated at a different time, making this a continuous newsletter, and of course there is a way provided to individualize the blocks of space, change the color schemes, etc. Since this newsletter is on the internet, anyone can read it from anywhere in the world, at any time. That is, they can read it if they know the password, which some clubs want to keep private, and others prefer to skip because it is a nuisance when people forget what the password is.
What underlies this process is a technique known as RSS. Each block of space in the newspaper is operating on a different scheduling, and each blocks "polls" a donor site every so often, for example fifteen minutes. The polling program calls the URL of each donor site at a preset time, where a record is kept of the last time the site was modified. If the site has been changed since that last visit of the polling program, the new site is downloaded to the newsletter page. If there has been no change, the polling program simply goes on to the next-scheduled site. In effect, the polling program is acting as a "robot". Modifications of this system, with considerable elaboration, are at the heart of the Google robot and other robots for other purposes. Generally speaking, the ordinary user doesn't have to know how to construct one of these robots, or modify one. No doubt, there will be extensive elaboration of this concept in the near future, but that's essentially how you can construct a usable newsletter in short order.
First, take a look at what you are trying to achieve, and a handy example would be www.my.yahoo.com. You will see it is not a daily or a weekly, it is continuous. The page of the newspaper is a montage of ten or twelve blocks on a page. For example, one block might give you the month's schedule, another shows the sports scores, another shows the stock market, etc. Each one of those blocks is probably updated at a different time, making this a continuous newsletter, and of course there is a way provided to individualize the blocks of space, change the color schemes, etc. Since this newsletter is on the internet, anyone can read it from anywhere in the world, at any time. That is, they can read it if they know the password, which some clubs want to keep private, and others prefer to skip because it is a nuisance when people forget what the password is.
What underlies this process is a technique known as RSS. Each block of space in the newspaper is operating on a different scheduling, and each blocks "polls" a donor site every so often, for example fifteen minutes. The polling program calls the URL of each donor site at a preset time, where a record is kept of the last time the site was modified. If the site has been changed since that last visit of the polling program, the new site is downloaded to the newsletter page. If there has been no change, the polling program simply goes on to the next-scheduled site. In effect, the polling program is acting as a "robot". Modifications of this system, with considerable elaboration, are at the heart of the Google robot and other robots for other purposes. Generally speaking, the ordinary user doesn't have to know how to construct one of these robots, or modify one. No doubt, there will be extensive elaboration of this concept in the near future, but that's essentially how you can construct a usable newsletter in short order.
