Harbor Soaring Society

 

In early 2009 the HSS Executive Board agreed to try a web site content management program developed by Charles Goggin. There was no charge for his program, but it required the club to use DiscountASP.net as our internet service provider. The cost is $200 per year, but we received a first year special price of $100(?). This gives us 1.0 GByte storage (not counting photo storage), 80 GByte per month data transfers (the bandwidth used by visitors) and a 30 MByte cap on downloads.

 

The main feature of this program is that anyone who is given access may add, modify, or delete the content of our web site without any programmer training by following the procedures given below. This will keep our web site more up to date, allow quick communication to members, and provide a common location for club documents.

 

The site will have the same features that it used to have plus some added features as follows.

Existing Features:

 

Added Features (not presently implemented):

The following procedures are made available to all club members with the need to add, modify, or delete material appearing on the web site. This explanation will use the following nomenclature to direct operator actions.

Any modern browser may be used. Call up your browser and in the address bar, enter http://www.1hss.org/ followed by CR. This gives you access to the HSS web site in its normal mode.

To begin the access to the content administration program, look back at the address bar at the top of the page;

The only tabs you will use presently are the “Page and Content Manager” tab, the “File Manager” tab, and the Website Settings tab. Disregard “Your Account Information” if it appears. 

Instructions for “Page and Content Manager”, “Website Settings”, and “File Manager” are given below. Go to whichever activity you need.

Most activities will involve adding text, images, tables, links, modifying existing text, and adding pages. Click the “Page and Content Manager” tab. A new screen appears with very little content. Click the “Show All Pages” tab. This brings up all of the pages of the web site. Note the green, blue, and red little boxes indicating status of each page. Changing the status will be discussed below.

You may now select the page that you wish to work on. Point to that page and right click to display a menu of options. When selecting any item, be sure to point to the text. The menu is as follows:

Text Management:   Select your page and enter it with Edit Main Content. You may click anywhere on the page and begin typing added text, like using a text program like MSWord. Likewise, deleting and modifying work the same way. At this point there seems to be no “Text Box” capability as in Word. However, there is a button in the top row that provides templates. Use them if they fit your purpose. Be sure to save any changes before exiting the text management page. After you have made a modification, you may go back to the Show all Pages display, and select “View in Browser” for the page you just modified. This will show how your modifications will appear to the world. Sometimes the browser does not seem to show what you thought it should. No comment at this time.

 

Paste from Word:   This feature allows you to get a word document and paste part or all into a web site page. The steps are as follows:

If the page will not Save properly, try reducing the size of what is copied, and do it in several parts. Also, the page may get full. Open a new page.

 

Insert/edit Image:   To insert an image, it must first be uploaded to the program using “File Manager”. See procedures below. 

Select your page from the “Show All Pages” window, and enter it with Edit Main Content. Locate where you wish the image to be placed by clicking your cursor at the spot.

1.      Select the desired image file and then click the “Open” button. This returns you to the “Image Properties” window. The location of where the file resides may partially show in the box.

 

This process should work for all files other than text files which should paste as in Word.

 

The way some information appears on the screen is controlled through the Website Settings. The home page shows club officers as a box on the right side. This box shows on all pages selected. To access and change the contents of this box:

1.      Click the “Website Settings” tab in the Website Administration Console page. This brings up the Website Settings box.

2.      Click the link next to “Enable Default Secondary Content” label. This brings up a table that has the club officer’s names in it. 

3.      Change as desired, then press the “Save” button. Inclusion of E-mail links is TBS.

4.      Click on “Save” button(if possible). Exit the Website Settings box.

 

In the Website Administration Console, click the File Manager tab. This brings up the File Manager page which is where photos, pdf, and other types of files are stored, organized into folders, or deleted. The File Manager has five tabs that allow uploading of the following types of files:

Note that these files use the HSS web site storage, so are limited to 1 GByte total.

 

It is necessary to first upload any image or pdf file that will be used on the web site before actually including it on any page. Immediately below the five tabs is a bar which contain four small symbols on the left side.

 

Uploading All Files:   After selecting the File Manager page,

1.      Select one of the five tabs listed above. Most likely either folders or individual files will appear. These were previously uploaded. For this example, click the “Image” tab.

2.      Click the first symbol. This brings up the Image File Upload Manager for that particular file type. 

3.      Click the words “Add File”. The Upload Manager shows a choice of “Browse”. Ignore “Upload File” for now.

4.      Click “Browse. This takes you to a box titled “File Upload” and opens a window into your C Drive. You may now navigate anywhere in your computer, in search of an image file.

5.      Select the desired image file and then click the “Open” button. This returns you to the Image Files Upload Manager. The location of where the file resides may partially show in the box.

6.      Click “Upload File” button. This copies the file from your computer to the Image Files page.

7.      Click “OK” when upload has completed.

 Right clicking on the thumbnail image allows you to delete, cut, copy, or view the image on the browser as it would appear for all the world to see. Be sure to Save at some point.

 

Uploading Other Files Steps 1 through 7 above work for the other four file type tabs as well.

 

Adding a newsletter to the HSS web site requires uploading the file using File manager, and then linking the newsletter to the newsletter page. As explained above, enter the File Manager and pick “PDF File” tab. Click through the folders to find the appropriate year. Click the little “Add File” button and then use “Browse” to find the file as described in steps 3 through 7 above. In this case the file suffix is .pdf.

The Content Management Program uses a link to Google Calendar to show and modify the HSS Calendar. When accessing the HSS web site and you click on the Calendar tab, you link to the Google Calendar site. To modify the calendar, you must initiate a Google account. Once this is done (there may be some access permission involved here), the following steps allow HSS calendar modification.

It is now worthwhile to confirm that your changes do appear on the HSS web site. Use steps 1 and 2. Calendar control is also available through www.google.com/calendar .

 

Like Google Calendar, the Content Management Program uses a different on-line service for managing and storing photos. This is a free program called Picasa. There are two parts to Picasa. Picasa3 runs on your computer, while Picasa Web Albums runs on the internet. Go to “picasa.google.com” and download version 3 of Picasa. This is about a 9 MByte program that resides in your computer. It allows you to organize, upload to the Picasa Web Albums site (called Picasaweb.google.com), and store on that web site your photo files and albums. When properly linked to the HSS web site, any HSS web site viewer may select an album and is seamlessly linked to the Picasa Web Albums site for viewing. The advantage is that the storage on Picasaweb is not part of the memory allotment assigned to the HSS web site. To download Picasa using your browser:

Running Picasa3 on your computer:   After downloading Picasa3 to your computer, you may run it from your “Start” then “Programs” menu. Picasa 3 will automatically organize all of your photos on your computer.

Running Picasa Web Albums on the internet:   Picasa Web Albums lets you view, share, and most important, link photos and albums to the HSS web site. This site is not good for organizing, only viewing/linking and uploading. 

PLEASE BE PATIENT WITH THE FOLLOWING PROCESS.  IT IS NOT SIMPLE, BUT IT DOES WORK.

We now need to copy the HTML strip and paste it in the HSS Photo page source code. This is done as follows:

Confirm the addition of the album by observing it in the Browser, or call up the web site normally.

 

The following is an example of how it should look part way through the source code.

 

<td blah blah blah for 3 to 5 lines and contains an album name, followed by </td>

<td blah blah blah for 3 to 5 lines and contains the same album name, followed by </td>

 

<td (You type this, then insert your new link here. It will be 5 or more lines. You must type the <td at the beginning, and the </td> at the end. This group will contain your new album name.) </td>

                                                              When you leave your new link in the source code, it will be a single group of lines. When you come back later to view the source code, your group of lines will have magically changed into one or two groups. That’s OK.

Don’t forget to “Save”.

 

Other Picasa Web Album Features: The following is how to upload and link photos into old or new albums while being in Picasa Web Albums, on line.

2.   Most important, click the small green “Public” symbol, then click “Continue”.

3.   This brings up a box that specifies the photos or albums to be uploaded. Click the top “Browse” button which opens a window into your C drive. Navigate through your files and click on the photo you wish to upload. Next, click the “Open” button which takes you back to the previous box. If needed, click the next (of five) “Browse” buttons and repeat the process. Only five photos at a time can be uploaded into a named folder under this process. 

It is generally easier to use Picasa3 off-line to prepare folders/albums.