We have had no new members since our last meeting. I have posted a request that each person bring in a new member to our chapter. I have had several requests lately and have sent out information and applications, but have not had a response.

Sandi Gardner, SBGARDNER@aol.com
V.P. of Membership

This report is a bit on the technical side, and I post it here mainly as a matter of record so that any other persons handling website communications for the chapter in future can understand the history of website growth which explains some of its odd structure.

We actually now have the site on two locations. It resides on both the Walden University "minnehaha" server (url: http://minnehaha.waldenu.edu/pdk/), and the server space we have rented from "The Host Group" (THG) where it can be accessed at url: http://waldenpdk.org/. The site is mirrored in the two locations—meaning it is exactly the same in each location, except that the Walden server does not allow the interactive capabilities of "cgi scripting" which we need for true interactivity. So clicking on links to the discussion board from the Walden server location takes you to the THG site where the discussion board is actually located. (This is all transparent to the user.)

[Again, please don't feel like you have to understand all this, because it is going to get more confusing from here, but the information will be valuable to any other chapter members who may get involved with site planning and maintenance in future.]

The THG site has the advantage of allowing cgi scripting (among many other benefits I haven't yet begun to take advantage of), and that has been necessary for the development of the discussion board. It will also be crucial for other interactive elements such as polling and voting that we will implement in future.

John Craddock told me recently that he spoke with Anne Arendt at Walden, and she was willing to set up a discussion board for us; but when I had asked her about that a year ago, the system she proposed seemed like it would not suit our needs entirely. At that time, the Walden University website staff was unwilling to give us password access to the scripting-capable main Walden server (quite understandably!)— so we were faced with a choice. We could rely on help and service from the Walden web staff (and be at the mercy of their time scheduling restrictions when we needed to make site updates), or we could do all maintenance and updates to our site ourselves—if we relocated all the files to Walden's secondary "minnehaha" server—for which Walden does provide us password access, but on which we cannot run scripts. I felt we really needed the freedom to be quickly responsive and dynamic with our communications, to be able make frequent updates and changes to the site whenever needed—especially during our meeting periods. So, I asked that the site be relocated to the secondary server, where I am free to edit and add files immediately as needed.

I then requested funds to secure another server location that we could link to, and where we could implement our dynamic elements.Funds were approved for this last spring, and the site contract was purchased, along with the domain name "waldenpdk.org". That's how the THG site came into the picture.

In addition to implementing voting and polling on the THG site for upcoming meetings, there is still a big task I must get to, related to the old, original website files. The first chapter website, created by Andre Elliot, is included within our current site. You can access all those original files by clicking to the "Chapter Information" section. Since being moved to the minnehaha server however, some of the links within that section no longer work correctly, and the footer on all those pages needs to be updated to provide return links to the rest of the site. This is just a tedious, time-consuming chore that I haven't gotten to yet--but I will!

Gay Wiseman, gwiseman@mindspring.com
Webmaster