Welcome to the new website of the Rotary Club of Qualicum Beach Sunrise
The old website is at http://members.shaw.ca/qbsunrise. Maintained on the web space provided with my own personal Shaw account, the old site was done by hand. Although it has served its purpose over time, it was hard to edit, its look had become stale and it lacked many of the features a modern site should have. It had a very basic type of password protection which really amounted to security by obscurity. Although it had some useful content, it was limited by the fact that information only became content if I added it to the site. It amounted to a place where I could put information provided to me and those who came by could read it. It will stay where it is, so that its content will not be lost, but from this point new content will be on this site.
This new site is created using a content management system, (a "CMS"), called Drupal. Drupal is open source software. It allows us to use many site features that we have not had available. Check out the separate Features Help page for details. Once we become familiar with using these features (and I figure out how to set them all up!), the overall model of the web site will be quite different. Instead of being like a magazine (something you can only read and that has a delay between things happening and being reported) the new site will be more like a meeting place. It will be a place where we can discuss ideas and make plans (see Forums), where members can lead their own public discussions or editorialize (see Blogs). There will be a place that will work like a file cabinet that contains documents that are private records to be available for our members. The Scuttlebutt will be here, changed in form and content to some extent. It will still be something that the public can read, but members will be able to add comments to it that others will see.
These changes, and a raft of others, will make this site a community rather than a magazine. It will be what we as a group make of it.
This welcome message was last updated on April 7, 2007. The site is now running and all of our members have been sent a login/password for access to the site. The links at the bottom of this page will take you to content we have added to help you out. Have a look there and in the sub pages that follow and you will may find what you are looking for, or, Click Here to Get Help.
Our club web site at http://members.shaw.ca/qbsunrise/index.html has filled up the available space that Shaw allows. Sometime ago the club reserved its own domain name, which we will now use. While this site is being configured, features and users are added, the old site will remain the official club web site. Once this site is fully operational, a link to this site will be posted there and new content will be added to this site only. For the time being, the content of the old site will remain where it is.
As soon as we have enough of this new site configured for it to serve our needs, an announcement will be sent to the club mailing list so that our members can check it out.
If there are features or sections of the web site that you have questions about, add a comment below and we will try to add some notes here to help you out. This will enable us to provide the help that our users actually need.
I posted a note earlier today to the web site that mentions the change of our club web site to a new server. I hope we will all find that the problems of the past several months of slow response or no response at all to the web site are a thing of the past.
But there is one change that many will notice and that is email notifications of changes to the web site now work. That means when anything new is added to the web site, it will automatically send out a notice about it. If it is turned on for your account, you will receive a notice for this posting to my blog.
I anticipate several questions that will come up right away.
Firstly, since many of our members have not been using the web site, login names and passwords may have been forgotten. Your login name is just your usual name, first name and last name separated by a space with normal capitalization. So for me, it is "Ken Walker".
Passwords are individually set. If you don't remember yours, there is a link in the login box to request a new password. This may not have been working before, but it does work now. It will email you a link that you can click on to log in and then you can set your password to whatever you like.
The second question I expect will be: "Can I shut off these email notifications?" The answer to that is yes you can. Once you are logged in, there is a box on the lower left side of your screen with your name at the top of it. If you scroll down and click on "My subscriptions" you will see tabs for "threads", "blogs", "categories" and "content types". If you look in "categories" and "content types" you will see how you can set the types of content you will be notified about. Just tick the boxes for the ones you want, untick for the ones you don't want and save the settings by pressing the Save button at the bottom and that will do it.
Let me know if you need any help with this (kgw@lunar.ca). You can also find information in our help files here.
To report an attendance makeup, contact the club secretary, Ken Walker by email with the event attended and its date. In October 2008 we disabled the online Contact page. Email is now the way to report makeups.
Blogs (short for web log if that helps) are a place where individuals can post their own comments, ideas and thoughts and others can respond to them. At the moment, we have blogs enabled on this site. This is a way of having a discussion categorized under the name of the person who has started the discussion. Think of it as one Rotarian's soap box.
This could be a place for, say, comments from our President, or from any other member for that matter. Right now they are set up so that anyone coming to the site can see them.
For a better description of what a blog is, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog and then use the back button in your browser to come back here.
For discussions that are organized and categorized by topic, see the Forums section of our site.
Or, to start your own blog, click here.
Blogs (short for web logs if that helps) are a place where individuals can post their own comments, ideas and thoughts and others can respond to them with comments. Right now, you are looking at an item from Ken Walker's blog. When there is a new blog entry, it shows up on the front page (what you see when you click Home on the top menu) as a new item. Only members who are logged in see these blogs- others don't see them and neither will you if you are not logged in.
At the bottom of this item, there is a link to "Ken Walker's blog". That will take you to my own blog section of the site where the things I have added can be reviewed along with any comments other users have added.
Essentially, this is a way of having a discussion categorized under the name of the person who has started the discussion. This could be a place for, say, comments from our President, or from any other member for that matter. Right now they are set up so that anyone coming to the site can see them. For a better description of what a blog is, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog and then use the back button in your browser to come back here.
Here are some links you might find useful:
* To start your own blog, click here.
* If you need some help, please let me know.
* You can add a comment to this blog entry using the Add Comment link below
* View recent blogs (posted in the last 6 weeks or so.
* To View all blogs, click on Blogs in the top menu.
* To View blogs from a particular member, go to the User List, select a user and click on View Blog Entries
I will add to this list as our members post the classification blogs President Ed has asked for. Here are the ones we have up to July 25:
1. Ken Neden
2. Jean-Marc
3. Kim
4. President Ed
5. Jim
I hope that makes it easy for everyone to try this out!
(This function, along with the Contact menu item in the top menu bar) have been disabled because spammer have been the only users of it.)
With a website like this, we need a way for people to contact us, hopefully reaching the right person readily. At the same time, publishing our email addresses on a public web site is a sure way to have it harvested by those who send unsolicited junk mail. We deal with these conflicting issues by the use of a publicly accessible Contact page together with individual member contact pages. The public Contact page, (a link to it can be found at the bottom of the Navigation menu on the left) allows our members or anyone who visits our site to direct a message to the right person in our club without needing to know that person's email address. At this point, the choices include
We can add items to that list. It has the option of sending an acknowledgment email to the person completing the form. The other contact feature is that we have enabled individual contact forms. This means that if you post an event or a blog or any content that someone might want to respond to you directly about, you do not need to disclose your email address (and let the spammers get it). To see how this works, you will see at the top of this page, a link to my name. If you click on that link, it will take you to my user profile page and from there you can click on Contact. If you fill out the form there, it sends me an email without disclosing my email address. There is one of these for each of our members. It is also handy if you know a member's email address. With this, you don't need to know it.
The Forums section of the website, so far, is private. Only Members can see the content there.
A problem you need help with? You have come to the right place. We hope that you will ask for help in the Web Site topic of our Forums. Only Members have access to the Forums. The questions you have are probably questions that someone else will have later. If you ask there, others will be able to find the answers and we won't have to answer the same questions repeatedly. As things develop, browsing there might even find the answer you are looking for. If that doesn't fit, please go to the contact page and send a help request. The system will send me an email and I will get back to you as soon as I can. The more information you give me, the better I will be able to help. Let me know what page you were on (the title at the top), what you were trying to do, and what happened. I will try to respond by email or through your contact page if you are a member who has working login. Sometimes, the best way to deal with things is by telephone with each of us in front of our own computer. If you leave me a number to call, I will do that at a time that works for both of us.
In the menu bar at the top of every page you will see a "News" link. These are an example of RSS news feeds, but in this case, it is our web site that gathers up the news feeds and displays them to you in the two blocks that are displayed. The top part of the screen you will see is a constantly updates Google news search. The bottom half is current News items from the Rotary International web site.
If you need some help with this, just ask!
Subscriptions provide a notification system that is active rather than passive. When you add a posting to a discussion forum, make a blog entry or post other content to the site, in the menus at the bottom of the screen, below the box where you type your entry, you will see a section marked Subscription. If you tick that box, the system will notify you by email of any replies or comments to the item (the system calls any item you post a "node") by sending you an email. You may want to tick this box when you post an item so that you will know right away if anyone replies to it on the web site.
I hope you will want to be notified when the Scuttlebutt is published and about any discussions in committees that you are a member of. As a member you will be able to browse discussion forums for committees that you are not a member of and you may want to be notified of discussions of those as well. Some of us, the current president for example, may want to subscribe to notifications by email for all committees.
If you want to subscribe or unsubscribe to notifications for any part of the site, look in your own menu at the bottom of the left sidebar, for "My Subscriptions". If you click on the Categories Tab, you can choose any forums you like. Down at the bottom, you can choose from the content choices there, They should be self explanatory.
If you want to be notified whenever a new issue of the Scuttlebutt is posted to the site (and I hope everyone will subscribe at least to this), go to your own menu by scrolling down and look for "My Subscriptions". From there, go the Categories Tab and tick "Newsletters".
Let me know if you need help with this as it is a very useful feature of the site.
When you first come to our website, you will be able to see some of the content, but you will not be able to edit content and some of the features we offer will not be available.
To get started you need an account. If you are a member of the club, you will receive an email when you are inducted as a member inviting you to join the community here. It will give you instructions about how to set up your account including how to login and set your password. Your browser can be told to remember those and to login automatically. If you login from a computer that is also used by others, you won't want to use that feature and will need to remember your login name and password.
The User Login link appears at various places, but if you look at the lower left side of your screen (you may need to scroll down) you will see a place you can do that. If you forget your password, the system can send you a fresh one.
Visitors who would like to know more about our club are welcome to browse around. If you want an account so that you can log in as a Friend of Rotary, the Create an Account link will request a user login and password. Give us a day or two (sometimes less) to authorize the account.
Anyone requesting an account should set their real name as their login, complete with regular capitalization and spaces. Requests for accounts that do not appear to be a real name will not be authorized.
Our club photo archive is coming along nicely. I have added my own photos and those Ed has provided. I am in the process of adding a large collection from President Elect Ken. George and Charles have given me a copy of their photos so they will be added soon.
You can see the collection so far at:
http://www.23hq.com/kwalker/album/list?album_collection_id=4015816
There are some things yet to do to complete the collection:
These are the photos that we don't know the date of. If you know what year they are from, could you let me know?
You can edit this or add comments to it. This is a place that is my todo list of features to add to the site
The Help link at the top of every page will take you to a page with a link to Features. That is where to go for specific information on more specific parts of this site. Here we explain the general layout that you will see when you come to this site and log in.
Below the banner at the top of the page, it is divided into 2 columns. The description that follows assumes that you are a club member and that you are logged in. For others, some of the mentioned items will not appear or may not be functional. Many of these items are optional. Members can go to their user page and untick many of these and they will disappear. If you are a member and some of these features are not visible, you may need to go to your user page and turn them back on.
As I watch people begin to use the site, I see that it is not as clear as it should be where things are to be posted. What seems to be happening, is that people see the Comment link and add a comment wherever they happen to be. The problem with that is they don't end up in the right place. A couple of suggestions about website improvements have been added as comments below a note of an upcoming event. Another was entered in reply to a forum post that it was not related to rather than as a new forum topic. And some come to me by email outside of the website altogether.
When you add something to the site, it gets added where you are in the site at that moment, so before you start adding things (and please do add things). Here is a bit of an outline:
Hope that helps, if you have questions, just ask!
The website is now up and running. It has some of the same content we had before. There were problems with the site before that made it sluggish and sometimes it wouldn't work at all. We hope (keeping our fingers crossed) that these problems are all behind us as of October 2008.
Our club web site offers us a way to collaborate and move our club ahead. But that can only happen when people are comfortable with the new system, have been able to log on and know how to find their way around.
To help people get up to speed, I will be doing a series of one on one help sessions. These will be offered evenings at 8 pm. If you want to set up such a session, just let me know. I will phone you on the evening you choose and we can walk through the system. I will be in front of my computer and you should be in front of yours. We can walk through the site together, see how it works and get comfortable with the whole process.
Let me know by clicking here to send me a message when you would like to do this.