Delaware Valley Radio Association

New material added in “Instructionals & Resources” & Photo Gallery:

Additional material recently submitted by John Dilks, K2TQN, supplementing his January 2012 DVRA presentation on Ed Raser, W2ZI.

Photos of Sat., Feb. 4, 2012 antenna connectivity upgrade session

Photos of 2nd Sat., Feb. 11, 2012 Packet station check & Repeater Operation Review

Photos Shack Seminar- Sat Feb 11 2012- Lloyd Price,N2KPC, Intro to Digital Modes

We’ve added an “Instructionals & Resources” page to the W2ZQ.com website; we’ve started with:
a) Arduino links from last DVRA presentation by AB2RC
b) Boy Scout Camporee Radio Patrol Mystery general information & links related to event.
c) links to build the WB2HOL foxhunting beam

We’ve also added 2012 Radio Merit Badge Day photos to the Photo gallery.

You can follow the links below or check any of these by clicking on the sidebar.

Arduino Presentation links by Alex Flinch, AB2RC – Wed., 2/8/12

Boy Scout Camporee Radio Patrol Mystery Sat. 10/6/2012 & WB2HOL foxhunting beam

2012 Radio Merit Badge Day photos

So it’s been said before, but it bears repeating: Send in content!  Maintaining the club’s Internet presence is easy for me, while some might find the notion of handling software updates and server registrations about as foreign as Morse code (okay, bad example :> ).  However there is one thing which I am no good at all at doing, and that’s writing stories.  I read Bob’s column every month in the Beacon, and often times wonder where he gets inspiration to write and how he seems to do it with ease.  That is where all of you come in.

I’m sure that Bob’s not the only person who can put words together on a page and make them look good, and that’s something which any website needs – CONTENT!  It’s one thing to have it tell you the history of the club and mention an upcoming event, but without a steady stream of stories, articles and content the website will look stagnant.

People always assume for some reason that I want/need help running the site itself.  Just the contrary, the site is fine, but I need articles to go on it!  How can you help, then?  Sign up for an account here if you haven’t already, and drop me an email to say you want your account to be able to submit stories.  Then write, write, write!  Once you’ve written a story or two, send me a note to say it’s ready and you want it published, and I’ll put it up on the front page.  If we get enough stories that there’s a surplus, I may delay some of them so that we have a steady stream of new articles instead of a burst.  But first we need new content.  So put on your berets, pour a glass of wine, play some soft jazz (or whatever inspires you) and submit an article or two!

Thanks!

A few updates to brag about:

• The DVRA is joining forces with the Trenton Computer Fest!  The Hamfest page has been updated with all the information (for some time now, but thanks in part to the new theme it doesn’t look horrble anymore) so visit there if you’d like to learn more about the event.
• The licensing page has also been updated with the correct dates for 2009 (now that someone reminded me that the old dates were still there.. from 2007!)

The logo still needs to be fixed, mostly because I need to find a hi-res version of it to scale down (the one that I have doesn’t look decent due to the backgorund in the image).

Unfortunately my hand was forced in this case, but I had wanted to look into doing a redesign of the website.  I say my hand was forced because upon inspection I found a lot of crap on here that didn’t belong – during one of the times between WordPress upgrades, the site was broken into and a bunch of redirect sites were put in place.  These are put up by spammers so they can try to drive their search engine page rankings higher.

The crap has been cleaned off, and I’ll be spending a chunk of the evening picking a nice theme and layout for the site again (the one we were using had some other difficulties, which made formatting look horrible more often than not).  So if you refresh the page and the design changes, you’ll know why.

So I’ve had quite a few people offer to “help” with the website here.  The problem is, the help being offered isn’t what is needed to do things – everyone is willing to help run the site, but the site runs itself.  So what do we really need?  Content!

As you can see, there’s a lot of articles on the front page.  As a new one is posted on the top, it pushes the rest down off the page until they’re only viewable if you follow the “Next Page” link at the bottom, or use one of the “Archives” links on the left.  So the fact that there’s an old news story on the page is only because there hasn’t been enough new news to post on here which would make it disappear off the front.

So how can you help?  Sign up for an account, and send me an email that you’d like to be able to post stories.  They could be about upcoming Walk-A-Thons, or a planned fox hunt, or even a link to an interesting article you read online.  Once I get your email, I can set you up to be able to write new stories (you’ll then login with the “Login” link on the bottom of the left sidebar, and if you’re already logged in use the “Site Admin” link to get to the dashboard).  Write a post and submit it, and more likely than not I’ll put it right up here.

To all members subscribed to our mailing list via a Comcast email address!  Comcast has decided once again that emails from our web provider (and therefore, from our mailing list) are all spam and are silently dropping them.  They are not telling you this, of course, because they want to provide a spam-free experience.  Apparently, they also want to provide a customer-service-free experience, because they refuse to unblock us again.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about it.  If you would like to sign up for an email account with Google, we can change your subscription to there.  But as long as you’re using Comcast for email, know that you might get emails blocked from legitimate senders without warning – and without any way for you to say you want them to pass through.

Our club forums (at http://forums.w2zq.com) have only seen a little bit of usage since they were brought online.  Well, I should say they’ve only seen a little usage by club members – the spammers are loving them, because they sign up constantly for new accounts.  Since their inception, I set things up so that new accounts there have to be approved before the user can post anything, but that doesn’t stop 20-30 spammers per day from trying.

Since there’s not a lot of traffic there, they’re becoming a bit of a nightmare to maintain, and because club members can now post comments and have discussions right on the main website instead of only in the forums (as well as the mailing list, of course), I wonder if they should just be removed entirely?  What are your thoughts on the matter?  Leave a comment below and we’ll discuss the pros and cons of each.  If people really think the forums will serve a purpose and be useful, I’m happy to leave them as they are – but if nobody else sees the point, I’m just as happy to make them disappear :>