[Robotgroup] The Robot Group Website-- Whats happening and why

[Vern Graner]

I have a few minutes and I wanted to fill everyone in on the website 
changes--

At a couple of meetings towards the end of 2007 a number of folks 
expressed concern that the website "recent events" on the front page had 
not changed since 2006 and it made us look "inactive".

I had written that portion of the site in HTML and therefore updating it 
required some labor intensive (and careful!) edits to put new events in, 
namely:

--FTP the index.html down to my machine
--Open it in notepad
--Copy/paste one of the "event" blocks of code
--Compose a new event description
--Change all the link URLs to new photo galleries
   and/or event source pages
--Make a thumbnail image for the event
--FTP up the thumbnail up to the site
--FTP up the new photo gallery
--Test new index.html on local machine
--FTP up the new index.html to site
--Test to make sure all links work
--Make any corrections (typo's, case issues, misspellings etc)
--FTP Upload new index.html
--Test again

Subsequently it was not updated unless *I* had time to do it.. and I was 
a bit busy (please refer to the Banquet Video for a list of things I was 
busy doing.. including the banquet video itself) ;)

Subsequently I asked James if he would take a look and see if he could 
make the site easier to update (i.e. eliminating that cumbersome process 
outlined above) by moving the front page to a "blog" format such as 
WordPress. This way, we could give various users accounts that could be 
used to update the front page without having to learn HTML and/or risk 
accidentally "breaking" the page with a missing quote mark or closing tag.

Now, remember, The Robot Group Inc. owns THREE domain names:

robotgroup.org
therobotgroup.org
robotgroup.net

Registration info on the above three domains is here:

http://www.notepad.org/RobotGroupDomainInfo.txt

All the domains point to the same server (located and hosted on my 
company's servers at TxIS.com at no charge to The Robot Group).

When James investigated how to do the update he discovered that the 
"main site" was an old Moin Moin WIKI based page with a mish-mash of 
symbolic links to other directories and files. There's lots of other 
tangles in there that go way technical and I want to keep this a generic 
post, so ask James for gory details. :)

The upshot is that James has mostly finished moving the front page to a 
WordPress format and we will be setting up some volunteers from the 
group with the rights to edit the front page. :)

He has a ways to go to bring the WIKI back as it is a VERY old Moin Wiki 
and its rather tangled up. I expect he will have things sorted out soon 
and we all owe him a huge debt of gratitude as the site infrastructure 
hadn't been updated in a LONG time and it has been (and continues to be) 
a challenge! :)

THANKS JAMES!! :D

Vern

PS: Brooks, your subdir on the site is back up: 
http://www.robotgroup.net/brooks/

-- 
Vern Graner CNE/CNA/SSE    | "If the network is down, then you're
Senior Systems Engineer    | obviously incompetent so why are we
Texas Information Services | paying you? Of course, if the network
http://www.txis.com        | is up, then we obviously don't need
Austin Office 512 328-8947 | you, so why are we paying you?" ©VLG