President's Notes (08/08)
President's Message
The Benefits of Our Website
by Phil Sorrentino
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
The SPCUG website has become a central repository for SPCUG information and
a convenient communications channel for SPCUG members. All facets of the operation
of SPCUG can be found on the many pages of the website. Information such as
the monthly meeting time, place (including a map of the area and the
Sarasota Middle School complex) and subject is always available for anyone’s
use. A complete calendar of the educational classes, forums, and Mini-SIGs
offered to SPCUG members is also available. The Website currently consists
of about 6,000 pages, taking up 280MB of hard drive space. The Website
currently gets about 700 visits a month. Creating and maintaining a Website
this big, and as active as this, is a very labor intensive effort. We are
very grateful to Gary Schweinshaupt, the originator and current webmaster,
for providing such a wonderful Website capability for all of our members.
This has not been overlooked by other groups. Over the years, SPCUG.ORG has
won numerous awards in FACUG and APCUG contests.
Here are some historical comments from Gary that may help put the current
Website in perspective.
“The fact that there would be an SPCUG Website first appeared in the
Monitor, in July 1995 (we had to trade ad space in the Monitor to pay for
an ISP to host the Website.) The SPCUG.ORG domain name first appeared in the
Monitor in June 1996. I started publishing officer’s and leader’s email
addresses in the list of leaders on June 1997.”
“I started several bulletin boards embedded in the Website during the
early years, but each proved to be more trouble than it was worth,
eventually I started the SPCUG Yahoo Group in Nov. 2001, which eliminated
the need for a bulletin board” (the SPCUG Yahoo Group is still in use and
provides timely answers to some very involved computer questions.)"
“I attempted several embedded updatable Web calendars in the Website,
again more trouble than they were worth. I eventually, around 2001-2002,
found the calendar that we now successfully use. (the calendar allows us to
easily show the schedule of all SPCUG events all year.)"
The SPCUG website has become a reliable source of accurate and timely
SPCUG information, that we all depend on. Thanks again, to Gary, for
developing and maintaining such a useful and easy to use website. :
Copyright 2008. This article is from the August 2008 issue of the
Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota
Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL
34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit
computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and
our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication
the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For
further information about our group, email:
admin@spcug.org/ Web:
http://www.spcug.org/
The Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc. has 1,100+ members
and was established in 1982. We are members of the Assoc. of PC User
Groups (APCUG), the Florida Assoc. of PC Users Groups, Inc., and we are
members of the America Online Ambassador Program.
See http://www.spcug.org for all reviews from the Sarasota PC
Monitor, go to the Newsletter Section.