The September meeting of the Davis PC Users Group began with the usual news and announcements, followed by a vigorous question and answer session, and finished with an exciting look at a new "free" Internet service. President Dave Eden presided with the assistance of Treasurer Tony Barcellos and equipment manager Ralph Reid. Vice-president Tim Feldman was unable to attend due to business demands.
Voice from the Past
Dave announced that former Davis PCUG president Gene Weisskopf had surfaced, via e-mail, to badger our current president about 1) his inability to remember which night the meeting was scheduled for, and 2) his ability to spam the Davis group members with his erroneous meeting reminders. Not missing a beat, Dave asked Gene for an update on life in the radioactive zone—and got a small essay in return.
Gene and his wife Carol live in the Richland, Washington area, which is in the shadow of the Hanford nuclear facility. Gene writes: "The world's first non-experimental, full-scale nuclear reactor was built here in 1944. It's known as B Reactor, and was the first of the three reactors built at the Hanford Engineer Works, the plutonium production plant for the Manhattan Project."
Carol works in the chemistry lab at the plant and Gene, along with writing the occasional book, is the president of the B Reactor Museum Association (BRMA), a non-profit, volunteer group that was founded in 1990 to promote the preservation of B Reactor and its eventual conversion into a museum.
Gene writes: "Since joining the group, I slowly took on more and more of its work and projects. Funny how that happens in volunteer groups. I've put the quarterly newsletter together for the past few years, computerized their membership list, put up a small Web site so people can find us, gone to various DOE meetings, written letters, helped give tours of the reactor (special tours, often for Russian or Ukrainian nuclear engineers!), and I'm currently the president of the group."
You can find out what Gene is up to at the BRMA web site.
Hays Has a New Gadget
Hays Fischer brought his newest gadget to the meeting: the Intel Pocket Pal digital camera. This $149 camera functions as a digital "still" camera away from your computer and a quasi-video camera when connected, via USB cable, to your computer. It holds up to 128 high-quality photos in its on-board (non-removable) memory. We asked Hays to take some candid photos during the meeting which we'll make available as soon as they are "developed."
Big News of the Night
The surprise announcement, and feature presentation by Dave Eden, was the release of the Davis PC Users Group Web site. Dave received an e-mail two days before the meeting announcing a new service offering "FREE web hosting of your web site with up to 15Mb of storage." Of course, the FREE part was enough to motivate our fearless leader to begin his adventure in "easy" Web site creation.
You may recall that our president honed his Web site creation skills as the webmaster for the Sacramento PC Users Group (1995-1999) and as creator of his employer's corporate intranet. Hand-coded HTML pages were the norm, then, using a simple text-editor rather than the whiz-bang web-coding applications now available. And Dave's HTML-coding presentations were very popular with both the Davis and Roseville chapters of the SPCUG.
So why hasn't our group had a Web site before now? Mostly, you'd have to refer to our fondness for not spending money. To have a Web site, you have to have a host—a service which provides the space and connectivity to the Internet. That usually costs. Sure, there are free Web-hosting services—Yahoo's GeoCities comes to mind—but some of those free services come with too much "baggage." (Remember the little pop-up windows every time you arrived on a GeoCities page?) So, when that fateful e-mail arrived late in the afternoon on Monday, September 25th, Dave couldn't help himself—he had to jump right in and give this new service a try: ZDNet's SiteBuilder.
The SiteBuilder application, powered by Trellix, is a nifty on-line Web site creation tool. The application walks you through the entire Web site creation process, offering pre-configured templates for a variety of interests. You can select from dozens of templates and many different backgrounds. Once you've selected a template and background (both of which can be changed later, if you wish), you're off to the races.
SiteBuilder starts by providing an initial set of pages, containing text, graphics and sometimes photos. Of course, you can add, modify, or delete just about everything on every page. In "edit mode," every text paragraph includes a little "Edit" button which, when pressed, takes you to what amounts to a "properties" page, where you can add or change the text and change other attributes including font, size, and color.
You can also add "WebGems" to your site. The WebGems are mostly third-party products which you can include in your site—for FREE—although you'll most likely be asked to register and agree to terms and conditions before use. Current WebGems provide links to maps or driving directions, a site "guestbook," file download, weather links, music and video. We've added some map WebGems to our site and we'll be experimenting with the other WebGems in coming months.
"So," you ask, "what's the catch?" Since you won't be paying a dime for your new web site, ZDNet includes an advertising banner at the top of every page to help pay the bills (no, the ads can't be modified or deleted via the "Edit" button). But, the banner ads are (so far) so small and unobtrusive that you really don't even see them.
SiteBuilder is so easy to use you don't have to any HTML coding or graphics knowledge. Even a "newbie" Internet user can have a Web site up-and-running in just a few minutes. As to whether anyone will visit your site—well, we'll leave that up to you. Just remember that some of us are color deficient, so please don't place red text on a green background (or, even worse, green text on a green background).
If you're not reading this article on our Web site, give us a view.
Send us your links!
We'd like to hear from you if you use SiteBuilder to create your own web site. Send your web site's address to us at our new e-mail address, davispcug@yahoo.com.
Our next meeting will be at 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, October 25th, at the Davis public library, 315 East 14th Street, Davis, California. See you there!
—
Dave Eden
