GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR ATLANTAWOODTURNERSGUILD.ORG
IN JANUARY 2010, THE GUILD BOARD ADOPTED A GUIDING PRINCIPLE THAT THE GUILD WEBSITE IS FUNDAMENTALLY A REPOSITORY FOR CLUB INFORMATION AND DOCUMENTATION OF CLUB ACTIVITIES.
In Other Words, We Don’t Want To Spend Our Resources Developing And Maintaining A Website To Compete With Other Online forums such as Www.AAWForums.Org Or Www.Woodcentral.Com. Nor Do We Want To Compete With Www.Craigslist.Com Or Www.Ebay.Com For Online Merchandising.
Stated A Third Way… “We’d Rather Turn Wood Than Maintain A Website!”
www.AtlantaWoodturnersGuild.Org WILL Be Responsive To Membership Requests, to Make Guild Membership Uncomplicated, and Do Everything Possible To Communicate The Fun And Fellowship Enjoyed At Our Guild Meetings And Events!
TO ALIGN WITH THAT GUIDING PRINCIPLE, THE WEBSITE WAS UPGRADED DURING Q1 2010 TO INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:
- The guild’s logo was added to the website header.
- A framework was put in place to post records of club documentation and activities. This framework allowed the board to continue to post everything to the “Home” page, but when it gets old it is “transferred” to other pages based on the category of the post.
2.1. The “Home” page content is for next month’s, this month’s and last month’s postings.
2.2. The “About the Guild” page content is maintained by the guild president.
2.3. The “Guild Library” page content is maintained by the guild librarian.
2.4. The “Guild Membership” page content is maintained by the guild membership coordinator.
2.5. The “Guild Programs” page content is maintained by the guild programs coordinator.
2.6. The “Guild Business” page content is maintained by the guild secretary, treasurer and webmaster.
2.7. The “Show and Tell” page will include photos and posts categorized as “Show and Tell”
Please utilize the email addresses on any of the webpages to provide feedback or ask questions concerning the content of that web page.
WEBPAGE STRUCTURE
- · The Left Side of the page is for links outside of atlantawoodturnersguild.org
- · The Center of the page is for content
- · The Right Side of the page is for links within atlantawoodturnersguild.org
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TECHIE STUFF 2007
The first edition of www.AtlantaWoodturnersGuild.org went online in September 2007. This post was provided by the guild’s first webmaster, and founding member, Jon Payne Sr.
The content here is published using the WordPress Blog. This makes it easy for our officers to make updates using the WordPress interface and without coding in html, or uploading files with ftp.
Since this site uses WordPress (WP), and since WP supports RSS feeds, you can subscribe to the home page and keep up with us without visiting the web site. In fact you might want to use RSS to gather articles from other web pages that have content of interest to you. RSS feeds bring the news you want to you instead of you having to go out and visit a bunch of web sites. Let your computer automate the task of gathering up the things that interest you, and present them to you all in one place (an Aggregator). That’s what RSS feeds do. What follows is a short primer on RSS, Aggregators, and RSS to Email forwarding.
Many of us have portal sites such as the personalized Google, or my.yahoo.com set as our home pages. Each of these has the ability to display RSS feeds on your home page. If you have a gmail account, you can display an RSS feed as a clip at the top of your email. If you have a Google personalized home page, you can sign up for reader.google.com and display a link to your news feeds on your home page. Every time you visit you will see if you have any unread articles.
Here is a very cool video of the hows and whys of RSS feeds. (You’ll love the non tech way this is presented.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU
Some email programs such as Thunderbird have RSS feed subscription functionality built in. Since you check your email regularly anyway, this adds the equivalent of another inbox and shows any unread articles.
On any WordPress blog you can subscribe to new posts and to comments about posts. Look for the link at the very bottom of the page. For either type of link, right click on it, select copy, and then paste it into the proper location of the program you are using to aggregate the links. The link will look like this;
http://atlantawoodturnersguild.org/wp/?feed=rss2
If you try and open that link in your browser you will see something that looks like HTML code (actually XML) instead of a pretty web page. This is the code that tells your aggregator how to find what you are looking for.
NOTE: After pasting from WP, you may see the first word as “feed:http://” Remove the first “feed” but not the second word “feed”.
I encourage you to explore RSS feeds. You may find that many websites you often visit have feeds. A reader is how you can get them all to appear on one page for viewing and you dont have to navigate to a bunch of websites.
To find feeds that others subscribe to ( a top 100 list) go to http://share.opml.org/. From here you can import an OPML file that will automatically subscribe you to feeds that match your interests.
It gets better. . . .
Suppose you’d rather have the RSS feeds in your INBOX where you can apply rules to filter and sort them into folders? Here are 2 free websites that offer this service. You tell them the RSS feeds you want and they grab them and email them to you!
Cheers!
Jon