Hello All,
Tonight I was pondering upgrading things on the www.elec-trak.org (or .com) website. I thought it would be good to poll everyone on some of my thoughts. Please give this some thought and email back yours.
Hopping on top of my E-15's seat, here I go:
- I don't feel like our numbers are increasing much. If you look at some of the other tractor clubs, they seem more robust. What to do (or is it not a problem) ?
- It breaks my heart to think running (or nearly running) ET's are sitting unused or in the junkpile. Why can't we as group make some of them running and GIVE them to groups (like a church, city, any enviromentally-active company or whatever) to use? The more folks who see an ET makes more folks who might want one.
- I feel that we all answer the same questions over and over again. As we
do not have an indexed archive for our email messages, a lot of info gets
lost.
- While the websites are good, there isn't any easy way for us to upload
and comment out information individually or spontaneously. This would be
invaluable for those of use with problems to submit a picture (worth a
thousand words, I hear).
- We lack a registry of existing tractors.
- We lack a concise history document for them as well.
- We still don't have PDF's of every Owner's Use and Care Manual on the
www-sites collectively.
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A solution I've been thinking of is a having is a BBS....
I see a lot of other clubs using web-based bulletin board software.
- anyone can browse. Registered users can upload text AND IMAGES. It's
searchable, too
For an example of a layout see http://www.acuramdx.org and
http://www.acuramdx.org/forums You can all guess what car I drive.
This site is uses a popular package called vbulletin. One of the
interesting things here is you can have multiple admins/moderators for the
foums.
So far the downside is that we're really used to seeing the emails. Typically on the forums you need to "subscribe" to a discussion group, and then you'll get an email whenever something changes on that group. You still need to go to the WWW site to read/write messages. But you get to see pics then too.
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Another is that I've been doing is re-writing the www interface to
something much simpler. Right now you *have* to use MacroMedia Dreamweaver
to edit the site. I used a template (which I thought was cool), but now
with so many changes means any menu-update means updating over 60
template-ed pages. It's getting kinda kwirky doing the updates.
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For those who are curious, the domain names are good for another three years (www.elec-trak.org and www.elec-trak.com).
The ISP is paid up for the next two years (cost is $240/year). We're only using about 35% of the allocated disk space, and about 5% of the bandwidth.
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My darling bride bought me (or should I say let me buy) a brand-new HP
officejet d145 combo printer-scanner-fax for Christmas. The scanner has a
SHEET FEEDER (Thank God)... Omnipage Pro 12 Office software is also on
order.. this should allow almost automatic generation of PDF files.
Currently the page-by-page scan on the old HPScanJet 3300C was about 15-20
minutes per page...
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Okay, I'm off my tractor now...
Don
Houston, Texas
Restored E-15