Hello Coordinators,
Hope your weekend was enjoyable and spring is threating to become a
reality in your neck of the woods.
Just a few things going on in our project that you should be aware of:
* Back when I was offline Nancy put out a roll call that you all
answered. Additionally she asked you to check your sites for broken
links. Nancy and I are going to begin manually checking each county for
broken links and will give you a note with the findings. We will
appreciate you taking care of the broken links as soon as possible.
Nancy will start with the beginning of the alphabet and I am starting
with the end of the alphabet and we will meet in the middle. Part of
this check will be to confirm we are all abiding by USGenWeb
requirements. The one that will likely come up the most is "prominent
placement of the USGenWeb logo" and having said logo linked or a text
link immediately under or over the logo. Prominent placing means that
when a person visits your site, they immediately see the USGW
affiliation. At the bottom of your index page is not a prominent
placement. I would be happy to help anyone who does not know how to
make a link in a graphic if you would like to learn. Another aspect is
the name of your site. Using Glacier as an example: Glacier County
Genealogy is NOT acceptable. Glacier County is NOT acceptable. Glacier
County GenWeb IS acceptable. Glacier County MTGenWeb IS acceptable. I
think you can understand what I am trying to say. You need to have
GenWeb in your site name as that denotes it as part of the USGenWeb project.
* Another item that Nancy and I are going to start going over is our
current rules in preparation of adding new bylaws that all of us can
come up with. One item that needs to be changed immediately is the
verbage " 1. Each county page must have a pointer to link to the
MTGenWeb Project State Page. The URL is:
http://www.mtgenweb.org/
2. Each county page must have a pointer to link to the MTGenWeb
Archives Table of Contents. The URL is:
http://usgwarchives.net/mt/mtfiles.htm
It is suggested that you further encourage people to visit the
archives by listing some of the files for your county that can be found
there."
-The reason this needs to be changed immediately is because of the word
"page". I don't think the intention was to require a link on every
single page of our counties. I think only one county in the entire
project is currently complying with this rule. I propose we substitute
the word "site" for the word "page". Having this requirement on your
index page is sufficient to meet USGW guidelines. This may be left over
from a time when multiple if not all counties in the project were on one
site. ie: all of us having an address UNDER the state site
~mtgenweb/glacier.htm.
*Karen's technical status-My struck by lightning PC has been replaced as
of yesterday by a new PC. However I am stuck with using the old PC for
my emails at this time until I can figure out how to migrate all of the
emails and folders in the old Thunderbird to the new Thunderbird.
Emailing from the old PC is not a problem but I wanted you to know I am
running back and forth with email and doing my technical tasks.
Patience right now will be much appreciated.
That is all for the moment. Please let us know if you have any troubles
registering for upcoming national election. We are fortunate to have a
veteran EC member in our midst in Shirley Cullum.
All my best,
Karen DJ