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

[brooksdesign]

  Yes I saw everything I needed up was back.Thanks a million again and fortunatly my coolest connection ever was not clouded with tech problems (their system was also down so they never knew).I can't wait to tell you the details and as soon as I can I will be trying to recruit those of you that may be willing to work with on my hairybrained scheme(this one actualy benifits from my delusions of grandure) as this one will eventualy have to be turned over to real pros.
-brooks  

-----Original Message-----
>From: Vern Graner <vern at txis.com>
>Sent: Jan 7, 2008 12:06 PM
>To: The Robot Group Mailing List <robotgroup at puremagic.com>
>Subject: [Robotgroup] The Robot Group Website-- Whats happening and why
>
>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
>_______________________________________________
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>Robotgroup at puremagic.com
>http://lists.puremagic.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/robotgroup


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