The June meeting of the Mountain Lakes Web Site Committee was held on June 12, 2002 at Borough Hall. In attendance were Emily Wolfe, Sally Santiago, and Chairman Andy Bulfer.

Accomplishments

• Emily Wolfe put a slide show of Memorial Day photos on the front page. The show features 13 photos that she took of the parade that change automatically every 5 sec. She implemented it using a Javascript program she found somewhere on the Internet.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer put a set of 75 photos of Memorial Day on the web site reached from a link in the Whats New section of the front page. There are 31 photos of the parade which Bulfer took himself, 5 of the ceremony at Memorial Stone which he also took, and 39 of Mountain Lakes Day which were provided by Beth Suereth. There is also a copy, used by permission, of the wonderful Daily Record article written by Suereth describing Mountain Lakes day.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer met with Margarethe Laurenzi to discuss the Historic Preservation Committee's Oral History of Mountain Lakes project and the role that the ML web site could play. Laurenzi has taken on the job of organizing and completing the project which has existed for some time but until now has been puttering along at a low energy level because of the lack of a person to lead it.
  
  Laurenzi has a long list of old-timers they wish to interview. She has assembled an interview guide and a roster of volunteers who visit the interviewee, conduct the interview and record the results on audio tape. The plan is to transcribe the resulting audio tapes into written text. They have completed a number of interviews already of which a few have been transcribed. There are many left to do.
  
  Laurenzi wishes to ensure the results are easily accessible to the public. It was agreed that there would be a separate section for Oral Histories in the website History section. It would contain an overall summary of the project, the interview guide, a copy of Bethe Suereth's Daily Record article describing the project, and a list of the names that have been done or are concretely scheduled. Clicking on a name would bring up a page that would contain the person's picture, an executive summary of the transcript, a brief resume describing the person, a link to the actual written transcript, and perhaps an audio snippet from the tape so you could hear the actual voice. There would be a search engine that you could put in a topic or keywords and it could lead you to the transcript that contains that topic. There should be a way for website visitors to make comments, suggest additional names, or volunteer to help.
  
  
• The Borough Hall E-mail system has not worked for some time. Andy Bulfer has been working with Syed A.Mumtaz, a consultant engaged by the Borough to maintain and administer the Borough Hall desktop computer systems. The plan is to give all 18 municipal government denizens of Borough Hall addresses in the mtnlakes.org domain, e.g. gwebb@mtnlakes.org. Their e-mail traffic will flow in and out through Optimum Online via a cable modem attached to the in-building network. Bulfer will set up e-mail accounts in the GTI system and Mumtaz will configure the Borough Hall computers. The arrangement is tricky because Borough Hall is not connected directly to GTI but it has been tested with Dana Merville’s e-mail and it appears to work perfectly.
  
  
• Emily Wolfe did some redesign of the Schools page. It now has pictures of all four schools across the top. The links have been somewhat reorganized too. The committee approved the design.
  
  

Discussion and Action Items

• A resident complained that several of the Zoning/Planning Board application forms are out of date. On investigation we found that there is no e-mail address for use by either the Webmaster or the public to contact these boards. Andy Bulfer sent an e-mail about it to Gary Webb but did not receive an answer, probably because of the Borough Hall e-mail problems. Bulfer will pursue it with Webb after the e-mail system has been fixed.
  
  
• It was decided that the Memorial Day slide show on the front page will be replaced with a July 4th photo. Lat year’s animated gif of a fireworks display was considered impressive and might be used again. Emily Wolfe will implement. The 75 Memorial Day photos will remain.
  
  
• The Synagogues link on the Houses of Worship page is broken. Sally Santiago will investigate and fix it.
  
  
• The Town Club pages are improving but have many broken links and are generally not up to our standards. Sally Santiago will pursue it with them.
  
  
• The Police Page is still not completed. The intention is to put bios and photos of individual officers in order to give them a more human face. We have a number of bios and photos in hand but they are not organized and we don’t know if the set is complete. Sally Santiago will pursue.
  
  
• The Dept. of Public Works is a major area that is not yet represented. They are responsible for water, roads, sewers, recycling, leaves and brush. They touch all of our lives. We need to get material about them. Jed Breslin had said he would work on it but no progress appears to have been mad. Andy Bulfer will check with Breslin.
  
  
• Several months ago, it was decided to include a module on the Dams Renovation project. It was felt that the public didn’t understand what was planned or why the work was necessary. Jed Breslin had said he would work on it but no progress appears to have been made. The committee speculated that the project is either cancelled or on indefinite hold because of NJ’s budget problems. If true, the public should be informed since many people knew of the issue. Andy Bulfer will check with Breslin.
  
  
• The Recreation administration pages that Andy Bulfer promised to develop have not been completed. Bulfer had promised Nick Tensen it would be done by mid-May. Bulfer promised to get busy on it.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer has not made any progress on the Community Calendar.
  
  
• Sally Santiago has not made any progress on the Medical Needs Foundation material. Emily Wolfe volunteered to pursue it since Santiago will be busy with the Police pages.
  
  
• Back in March, we received an e-mail from Kate McKulla, the Editor and Designer of the Home & School "Bulletin." She inquired if it is possible to have us build a page within the Community section for the Home & School Association. There is only a brief description of the H&SA at present. One of the thoughts she had was to make the Bulletin available each month via PDF download on the webpage. Andy Bulfer responded back to her enthusiastically but we never heard from her again. Sally Santiago will contact her and negotiate what level of support we should provide.
  
  
• We have been trying unsuccessfully for several months to get material on UN Weekend. Members of the committee have recently discovered that there is an advertisement for it in the Home and School Bulletin. It was decided it is fruitless to continue to try to obtain information from the organizers and we will just put on the material from the ad. Emily Wolfe will put on the ad either by scanning it as a gif or data-entering the material.
  
  
• There was a long discussion about the Schools Site. Over the last few months, there has been a significant improvement and the Schools Site now has a fair amount of material. However, the committee feels that there still needs to be better integration to make the two sites look more like one community site. The committee is concerned about clear navigational links not artistic style. For example, a link labeled “Home” should go to the Borough site.
  
  There are a number of similar rather technical issues that don’t require senior borough officials to resolve, but they do require everyone to agree that rationalizing the navigation is desirable. There is also the issue of pointing the mtlakes.org domain toward the Borough site. The committee was concerned that the School Board might not follow through on their commitment to route mtlakes.org to the Borough site. Jed Breslin had said he would work on it but no progress appears to have been made. Andy Bulfer will check with Breslin and then pursue it personally if necessary.
  
  

There will be no meeting in July or August unless a special meeting is called to discuss the Schools Site. The next regular meeting will be on Sep 11, 2002 at 8 pm at Borough Hall.

Andy Bulfer,
Chairman