February 2008

Once again we had a good roll up.

Just for a change this meeting we had a look at my video of a wild life trip to Sabah Borneo. Next meeting the Caribbean. We also looked at how to set up cascading style sheets.

Also we will look to get a form working for the MWRPA site.

The next meeting is 15th March.

See you there.

Regards

Robert

Our usual team arrived this month where we continued looking at uploading the MWRPA site. After much anguish and discussion we found our problems were caused by the way FTP Commander operates. We also had problems using NOF FTP so we installed the free Core FTP program. This seemed to have a better user interface. We were then able to get everything working as it should.

We also set up Core FTP to upload our own sig website.

Next meeting is Saturday February 16th 2008.

At the next meeting we will update the MWRPA site after user feedback.

See you there.

Robert

Our usual crowd arrived and we continued to work on the Meadowbank West Ryde Progress Association site.

The site now looks good and we tried to upload it to the server. We were able to log on to the server and delete most of the existing site. But there is a problem accessing the directory with both FTP Commander and NOF. I will probably have to contact the previous web master to sort out the problem.

Next meeting is 19th January 2008

See you there.

Robert

November 17 2007

We looked for a new version of AVG antivirus and mentioned www.filehippo.com where all sorts of freeware programs can be found.

We then tried to log on to the MWRPA site host server, without any success. Will need to get contact details.

Next we looked at many new site styles for the MWRPA site. We chose to use ‘Virtual City’. This made a much improved site. We modified the front page and created the meetings page.

Next month we will continue to build the site by importing data from the news letter.

The next meeting will be on Saturday December 15 - 2pm see you there.

Robert

October 20 2007

We installed NetObjects Fusion 9 then cleaned up a lot of old files from our hard drives.

We used Photoshop to update our latest member photos and upgraded our site front page.

From now we are going to use Fusion Version 9 as our standard program.

At our November meeting we will do more work on the Meadowbank West Ryde Progress Association site which has alreaded been upgraded to ver 9.

The November meeting is on Saturday the 17 November.

See you there.

Robert

September 15 2007

We had a good roll-up this month with one new member attending.

We discussed getting everybody a copy of NetObjects Fusion 9, which came out in PC Authority September issue.

We then began to build a new site in Fusion 8 for the Meadowbank West Ryde Progress Association. We used a a style called Crossback - Orange Blue. We edited the style to make the text larger and more readable

The home page is nearly complete.

Next month we will continue to build this site. Look forward to seeing everybody next month.

Saturday 20 October at 2 pm

Robert.

August 18 2007

We had a bad start to this months meeting. We found that our meeting room had been booked by others! After standing around for some time John arranged for us to get a room (the boardroom) on the third floor.

We started the meeting by taking some new photos of our group to update our website.

We discussed the templates for Fusion 8. We created a blank page on the site from an existing page - The command is export as template (see file menu). This can be imported whenever we need a new page.

We then discussed forms. The CGI scripting seems to be able to be downloaded from the ISP. The link must be inserted in the ‘settings’ for the form properties pallet.

Next month we will use these skills to make a new site for The Meadowbank West Ryde Progress Association.

The next meeting is Saturday the 15th September see you there.

Robert

July 2007

Christina, Steve and Peter send their apologies for this meeting.

We looked into templates as a left over from last meeting. After some experiments (a bit risky we lost one of our reports. Fortunately I was able to recover it.) we decided that it needs more research.

We will be waiting your return Peter!!

For the next meeting we will look further into this.

The next meeting is Saturday August 18. I will be taking a couple of photos to update our image!! So we need everybody there.

See you (the lot).

Robert

June 16 2007

As Robert has taken his password on holidays we didn´t continue with the forms.

We created an archive reports page and tried to get a template page set up. For some unknown reason this failed in a peculiar way - referencing an unknown file beyond its end. But it should be possible, as Steve got it to work on his machine. Googling this error we found it is fixed in "update 2 for NOF8", so we downloaded updates 1 to 4 and installed them. This cured the problem.

Bob showed us how to validate HTML syntax using the http://validator.w3.org site. He also showed us some of the requirements of XHTML which is set to replace HTML for web pages.

Peter

May 19 2007

We had a good attendance this meeting.

We looked further into forms and form handling. We created a form using NetObjects Fusion’s form tools. The form looks good but we will need to get the OK from Comcen to operate the CGI script.

We then looked at Pacific.net.au forms and we made up a form from their help page, Technical support. This form worked successfully.

We then looked at Jotform.com and tried their system of form creation. We copied the source generated into a NetObjects Fusion text box HTML properties field. This generated a readable form which we need to set up an account with Jotform to test it.

This is very interesting stuff. Will look into it further when I get back from holidays for our July meeting.

Our next meeting is on June 16. Tony and Peter will jointly run this meeting.

All for now

Regards

Robert

April 21 2007

We had a good roll up Steve South and Christina sent their apologies.

Bob showed us the latest version of Opera.

We looked at the Meadowbank West Ryde Progress Association site with a view to reworking it.

We noticed forms in the comments page and decided to see how they work. We spent some time checking out CGI scripting. We checked out Comcen and found code available for us to paste into our document. We are now trying to figure out how to successfully paste it in. Very interesting!

For our next months meeting we will continue with our forms handling code.

Meeting is the 19th May, at 2 pm. See you there.

Robert

March 17 2007

We had a good rollup of members today.

We looked at Brent’s and Tony’s site to see their latest updates. Another site worth looking at is Wilson Web, they have a lot of information about building web sites. Well worth a look at www.wilsonweb.com.

We updated our own site and looked at getting the pages to be dynamic so they will fit any browser without the need for a horizontal scroll-bar. To do this we found we needed to use tables in the layout, but these needed to be worked in from the start. We also had a quick discussion on search engine optimising.

Next meeting is Saturday 21st April. At this meeting we will attempt to update my site and look further into NOF.

See you there.

Robert

February 17 2007

The meeting was well attended by our usual members.

Various items of news were discussed and one of us? found a supplier of memory at good prices in Thornley.

About now, a lady visitor arrived and we were pleased to welcome Christina Ritchie to our group. Christina is interested in building a web site. We mentioned to Christina that we use NetObjects Fusion 8 as our web program and I gave a rundown on some of the basic features of its use. We then added the January report to our website.

Following this, we continued to update my Fotopage website.

After a coffee break we looked at style sheet creation and had a look at divisions in html. Divisions look like an interesting feature in web design and I am not sure that Fusion supports them. We must look further.

I gave Christina a copy of Fusion 8 but she has had problems loading it (correct numbers and all that) and I have forgoten what we did to make it work. Does one of our members have a copy of the program supplied on the computer magazine CD? If so could you bring it along please.

Next meeting is this Saturday March 17. We will continue to upgrade my site and look into other items that may arise.

See you Saturday.

Robert

January 2007

Most of our usual band of members attended. Steve South sent his appologies.

Bob Backstrom began our meeting by going to the NetObjects web site,www.netobjects.com where we looked at some Flash movies showing the ‘wonderful’ new version 10. They talk about ‘Productivity, Sophistication and Flexibility’ and show some great photo-transitions for use on your web-site. Doesn’t it just make your mouth water! Many thanks Bob.

We then looked at the upgrade to my own site, and continued to add photo sample pages to the site and configure the drop down menu.

For our next meeting on Saturday February 17 we will continue to upgrade my site. Also if anybody has anything else they want to bring up we will have a look at that too.

See you all next Saturday.

Robert

We reviewed our site, made some changes, and uploaded to the server.

Look here - www.fotopagedesign.com.au/websig/ for the latest news.

Our next meeting will be the 20th January 2007. At this meeting we intend to continue the update of Robert's own site. Steve South suggested we have a look at Perl or CGI and Javascript??

We would like to encourage people to give us feedback on our site layout. Have a look tell us what you think!

November 18 2006

We discussed what happened last month and downloaded a new version of AVG. We then had a look at the Forum and set up a registration for the SIG leader.

Our news will now go on the forum.

After tea:

We continued updating our web pages in NetObjects. Changed News to Announcements.

Looked at using a map and other details for the contact / location page. In Photoshop we drafted a map of the location of the School of Arts.

Next meeting is Saturday the 16th December. At this meeting we will upload the site and then have another look at my site which we began several months ago.

Robert

October 21 2006

7 Members attended.

The first half of the meeting explored various programs to create web pages from existing content, such as brochures in Office Suites and photographs.

Open Office will export as HTML files as will many other office suites, Picasa, XnView, Porta and YoPoW are good for putting photo albums on the web. Exifer helps editing the EXIF data for captions of digital photographs.

Then Tony and Bob explained how to customise menus in NOF, and how to incorporate text files into the web page. Tony also explained that to allow the pages to wrap correctly in smaller screens, the text needs to be in tables.

Justifying paragraphs is simple, and makes the pages look better.

September 16 2006

8 Members attended. We looked at the problems of the file versions. We corrected it to eliminate any confusion in the future.

Next we reconstructed the new PC User Group Logo to fit better on the page in Photoshop using layers.

We then had a look at a problem with Tony’s web site.

Next month I will be on holiday and Peter has agreed to run the next meeting — which will be on the 21 October unless notified by Bryan if there is a change.

For this meeting we suggest people to bring along any problems or questions relating to their web sites.

August 19 2006

Five of our regular members attended this meeting. We looked at updating the Websig web site. We found that text when imported must be <paste special> or it will retain original formatting.

We used the styles set-up to make a set of styles for the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). We copied JPEG pictures from our original site but experienced some problems with one of them. I suspect that there is some changes in the formatting of the pictures which causes problems.

We also had a problem getting a copy of the PC logo. Steve said he would get us an original copy which should give us a much better result.

At our next meeting on Saturday 16th September we will look further at our site and maybe have a look at my site.

See you there

Robert