Bird Mart Dates!

A Thank You goes out to Jena Ingram for providing me with the dates for both the Spring and Fall bird marts. I have updated the Events page to reflect the Spring Mart. However, I will need the location of the event in question along with the other minor niggling details.

This weekend I hope to keep working on the proposed changeover, and I may even do a presentation of what I'm up to at this next meeting... or the one after that. You all have been duly warned, heh-heh-heh!

Later!

Another Long Pause...

Well, so much for regular updates!

Sorry for not doing as much with the site as some of you may have hoped for. Like I said in my last entry, It's hard to update when you're not getting enough feedback. That, along with the adjustment phase in my work life, prompted me to kinda take a step back and review my life priorities. I won't make promises, but I think I'm back on the wagon.

Today, before the meeting commences, I have made some updates to the site. A new link in the Links page. The information in the Club page is updated. The front page now has our 2006 Seedcracker of the Year Award winners. The photo for them is also in the Photo Gallery, which will see new pics soon.

I plan to do something major to the site in a couple of months. It has something to do with this blog journal, but will also encompass part of the main site as well. I won't spill the details yet. I'll have to talk to the board members and see what they think.

Cheers!

Admin Notes 12/19/06

Been a while, hasn't it? Well, I don't have much time to elaborate on my crazy life. Hopefully, this email will explain the most recent hangups in my life:

Hello there! Been a while, hasn't it? Sorry to say that, due to extreme changes in my work schedule, I don't honestly know when I'll be able to attend another meeting. Rest assured, I'll still be able to work on the site, but it's kind of hard to do when the only ideas I had gotten were when I had been physically at the meetings.

I need feedback from everyone on the best courses of action for the site and next steps to take. I'll be looking out for the next newsletters and update the site as needed with any news found. Let me know what's going on.

I'll be working on a schedule soon with my employer after the new year which will enable me to start attending meetings again. I've recently had a position change and I'm having to do some major cleanup in the department that I "inherited"!

Take care, everyone, and I hope to hear from you soon. In case I don't see or hear from you, have a wonderful Christmas with your families, loved ones and feathered kids!

With all my heart,

Christopher Walls

Now that I have a change in my work life, it's time to get acclimated. Hopefully, I'll have more time to devote to the club. See you all soon!

Update: Some Hard-Learned Lessons

I know, I know... get off my back, will ya? Long time no see... or at least write! I have a couple of things to share.

First, in case some of you haven't noticed, there's a new improved photo gallery in the ASCS site. While members will still have to submit photos to me for posting, this gallery is much easier to add on to. Also if someone sends pics with an attached text document with captions they want added, I can do all that in a jiffy. The pictures for the ASCS Silent Auction (see Upcoming Events) were posted in record time (with captions!), as were Noelle Fontaine's pictures (after wading through her gigantic collection!!).

Second, I also installed a simply awesome forum board, called the ASCS Community Board. The forum board is divided into individual forums for different topics of discussion, and I made sure to include just about every topic I could think of that members would want to talk about. I even incorporated some features like user-customizable avatars and user rankings. Please... every web-surfing member... go visit it, make a login for yourself, and help make the club a real community! You will have to make up a username and password the first time you want to post something on it. If anyone needs help or has questions, don't hesitate to email me and I'll do my best to help you out.

Now it's time for a personal note for you all. I haven't written here in a while, mainly due to everything that has been going on in my life. As I stated in the last meeting, I was extremely late in getting many of the things done to the site that I said were going to be done. One member told me that I didn't have to apologize, that everyone goes through problems and rough times and the club would understand. For that, I thank her immensely. I also thank the club for believing in me and putting up with the erratic updates. Nevertheless, I am the site administrator and I do take what I do at least semi-seriously! I really don't want to launch into (read: retype!) the whole speal on what happened to me a month or so ago, so here's a snippet from my personal blog posting:

(title: How I Dropped Off The Face Of The Earth) ... I had the at-the-time brilliant idea of turning on FileVault, A feature buried deep inside the Mac OS X preferences. What this exactly does is take your entire home folder and make what is called a sparse disk image out of it. It not only does that, but it also encrypts the image in 128-AES key encryption with a user-defined password. It encrypts the home folder like this when you log out of Mac OS, and decrypts when you log in to the system with your password.

It worked well… very well…. too well, as a matter of fact! The first few days were no problem. One day, I tried to log in to the system. It gave me a message stating that my user account “could not be accessed at this time. Please try again later.” This was bad news. Needless to say, I tried everything I could. Root login, Apple user forums, web searches… I even dropped $90 in DiskWarrior software in an attempt to crack open the encrypted sparse disk image my files were locked away in. I kid you not, I had over 14 gigs of stuff in my home folder, which I have no access to whatsoever. All the projects I was working on, sites I had backup image files of (including the professional one I was working on!), preferences and settings for so many programs and applications I use every day… gone! The only thing that may have caused this was probably a bad sector on the drive where the sparse disk image was created. It’s like having the key to your house, but all the locks are melted with no back door or windows (har, har!) to use.

So I’ve spent the last few weeks in a state of re-build...

The moral of this story is: backup, backup, backup!!! Backup all your preferences, settings, and important documents (financial, passwords, pics, resumes... whatever you hold dear) at least every month. Backup once a week if you're a user like me that has ongoing projects going on at the same time and has raw project files flying around everywhere on the hard drive! Even Apple Macs, being the awesome computers they are, can still be subject to human error, bad programming, malicious attacks (rare!)... you name it. Hey, most of you in the club have pictures of your birds (and other loved ones!), important vet info, and assorted documents you may want to keep from going into The Great Digital Beyond should something catastrophic happen to your hard drive. Believe me, even if a tech manages to get a bad drive working again, file recovery is a royal pain and takes lots of time and labor cost out of you. Lesson learned here, that's for sure!

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you all at the next meeting!

Update On Site Transition 6/12/06: Pages!

Ok! Now things are going to be happening at a (hopefully!) quicker pace. I'm writing this late because of some unexpected fallout from family problems on my wife's side, so bear with me.

More importantly right now as I type this, the databases and web pages of the .org site are being moved (migrated, they call it) to newer servers and systems. The .org site is DOWN for now. Good thing I still have the .com site up! :-D. PowWeb did not say how long the migration will take; it shouldn't take more than 12 hours or so. Cross fingers!

Also, I started re-coding the pages like the way they should be for more search engine visibility. The result can't be seen now due to the switchover. I've got the Main page and About ASCS page done, and the rest of the pages will follow sooner than expected. By next meeting, it should be 85-90% done. The good thing about the re-coding and structuring is that the site layout looks tighter. I'd also swear that it loads faster, too! The only pages that will not have the same header and sidebar will be the Community Board (forum) and new Photo Gallery. These pages are actually sites unto themselves and I'll definitely have distinguishing ASCS graphics set up on them.

More to come. Stay tuned!

Update On Site Transition 6/3/06: Forums!

Ok! Now I'm rolling along here!

First, I just got done taking some of the main pages most members will deal with and pointing them to the seedcrackers.org domain. Much, much better for bookmarking! I still need to redesign the pages, but that will come soon!

Second, I put the finishing touches on ASCS's very own Community Board forum! Looks grrrrreat and performs like a champ! Had a couple of mishaps with it today, but all's good now! I MAY not integrate it into the site yet until the redesign is finished, but then again... it looks sad without ASCS members playing on it! :(

The new photo gallery is coming along great, too. I just gave it the same background as the rest of the ASCS site. All the photos from the current gallery are on the new one and it took me 90% less time to do it!

Here's hoping the rest of the transition and re-design goes just as smooth.

Cheers!

Update On Site Transition 6/3/06: Photos!

Hello members! I just wanted to let you know what's going on. I know some of you are wondering what I'm doing with the site. Well, rest assured, I haven't been sitting on my laurels. Yes, I haven't been able to do much this week. Today, however, I tested out a new photo gallery. Guys, be glad that you don't have to deal with the headache I went through trying to get it to work. The server company that the .org site is going through for server space (PowWeb) is under a massive re-structuring and they're moving all data over to the new servers. I think something they did messed up the databases, because both photo galleries I installed through the company's installer wouldn't work at all. I had to choose the simplest gallery to edit its php files and manually install/configure MySQL databases, something I've never done in my life. I have to thank whoever designed the gallery, that's in place now, for the setup page I finally found on their site (it was never installed for the server company!).

Needless to say, this new gallery works pretty well. The only thing I don't like is that it's only set up for a single administrator, and doesn't allow for the creation of sub-user accounts. It does make things easier on me as far as coding goes; just a drag-and-drop to add new photos! I will be finessing the layout, fonts and graphics for it, but you can see a preview of it by clicking here! The preview is actually for my own gallery on my upcoming family site.

Gotta go, so wish me luck. I may not be able to attend the Arizona Avicultural Society Bird Mart tomorrow, so I hope you all have fun!