A meeting of the Mountain Lakes Web Site Committee was held on Nov 10, 2004 at Borough Hall. In attendance were Mark Watrous, Emily Wolfe, and Chairman Andy Bulfer.

Candidate for the Web Committee -- NOT!

Andy Bulfer discussed membership on Web committee with Ron Underwood who lives on Grove Place. He would have been great. He has lived in town a long time and has a strong technical background. Underwood was enthusiastic, told Bulfer he wished to have his name submitted, and planned to attend the meeting. However just before the meeting, Bulfer received a call. Underwood had discussed it with his wife and they decided he could not afford the time. Bulfer was disappointed.

Activities Since Last Meeting

• Andy Bulfer and Mark Watrous met after the last meeting to plan the migration to the new server. They discussed the job, enumerated the tasks to be done, split the tasks among themselves and began working on the migration. They encountered several problems discussed below.
  
  
• Emily Wolfe installed a section on the Medical Needs Foundation. The material covered both the Spirit 5K and the dinner at Rockaway Country Club.
  
  
• Mark Watrous put on material about UN Weekend. After the event, he removed it.
  
  
• Paul Odenwelder is now supporting the MLEF section and Mark Watrous helped him get going with Dreamweaver to change the pages and upload to the site.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer put on material about the Senior Citizens.
  
  
• At the request of the Shade Tree Commission, Andy Bulfer put a quote on the Shade Tree site: "A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. -- Greek Proverb". Bulfer subsequently did a search on Google and discovered that this proverb is part of the mission statement of the New York Horticultural Society. The STC knew it was a quote but did not know the source. Although it predates the NY Horticultural Society by thousands of years the STC decided that the Society should be given an acknowledgement. Bulfer plans to do so.
  
  
• The Shade Tree Commission also requested a copy of a Daily Record article about the Commission be placed on their pages. After some reassurance about copyright issues, Andy Bulfer installed it.
  
  
• Emily Wolfe put an autumn leaves jpg on the front page.
  
  

Migration to the New Server at GTI

As discussed last time, our hosting company, GTI of Morristown, wants to move us to a new server. They insist the old one is obsolete, unreliable, difficult to maintain, and insecure. The new server is already in place beside the old one. While the work is being done, the old server will continue to operate. The plan is that all the users with their passwords will be installed on the new machine. There are 35 users on the current machine including all the users at Borough Hall who use it for e-mail, the community organizations who manage their own Web content, and the members of the Web Committee. All the Web files of which there are thousands in the main site plus those of community organizations will have to be copied over to the new server. Then testing will have to be done. When all is in readiness, DNS will be switched and the new server will take over the load.

Mark Watrous has moved all the community organizations' Web sites over but it proved difficult. GTI has set it up so that we don't have a single login that can see and manage everything like we had before. Watrous had to log in as each organization to move their content over. We need to get GTI to change this. It is intolerable that the committee cannot have a login that permits them to manage the entire site.

Andy Bulfer has obtained the passwords for everyone at Borough Hall and plans to begin installing their e-mail accounts as the next step.

Watrous and Bulfer discovered another apparent problem. It looks like the directory structure in the new server is different in a seemingly minor but important way. They are not sure but Bulfer and Watrous suspect that all CGI scripts will have to be in a directory called 'cgi-bin' rather than in the directory where they naturally fit. This will make the job much more difficult since many files which we had not planned to touch will now have to be edited and tested. Moreover, Bulfer and Watrous can see only one cgi-bin directory which means none of organizations that manage their own content can have CGI scripts, only the main site. Bulfer has brought these issues up to GTI but has not received a response. CGI scripts are software programs the Committee has written that handle complex activities like the loading Borough Council minutes (by the Borough Clerk), the Calendar, "Search the Site", processing forms (like the recent book signing at the Library), etc.

New Discussion Items

• The Committee received a communication from Luann Pollack requesting that the Nite Owls organization be hosted on mtnlakes.org. The Nite Owls is an off-shoot of the Town Club. They are a viable organization and have been around several years now. However, they are not a wholy Mountain Lakes group, they have members from other towns. It was decided to agree to their request. Mark Watrous will implement.
  
  
• The Committee received a request via Gary Web from Carisa Mahnken of the Wildwood Advisory Committee for a notice on the Web page when schools are closed for emergencies like snow days. The objective would be to make it easier for residents to know about emergency closings, delayed openings, or early closings. This had been discussed by the Committee back in November 2003 and Andy Bulfer had prepared a concrete proposal. Bulfer subsequently met with Dr. John Kazmark, the school superintendent, to discuss it. Kazmark appeared to need no convincing. He told Bulfer that they had discussed at one of his staff meetings but nothing ever happened. Kazmark committed to using it if it were developed. Unfortunately, it was a moderate amount of work, it got started late, other priorities intervened and nothing ever happened. The Committee decided that the proposal should be resurrected and implemented this year. Bulfer will do so.
  
  
• Robin Steel requested that the material about Dog/Cat licenses be updated to reflect this year's dates. Mark Watrous will implement.
  
  
• The Committee has received a request from Peter Holmberg for a "Save the Date" notice on the front page and an e-mail address in the mtnlakes.org domain. Andy Bulfer will implement.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer received a copy of the latest Recreation Commission minutes. The RC had been managing their own Web content but with Niecy Chambers gone, they are now requesting that the Web Committee do so. Mark Watrous will implement.
  
  
• The Shade Tree Commission requested that photos of last years Arbor Day be placed on their pages. Emily Wolfe will do so.
  
  
• Emily Wolfe said she would clean up and remove the now outdated Medical Needs Foundation material.
  
  

Review of Past Items

Unfortunately, little progress has been made on the following older items:

• The committee decided last time to draft a letter to all the committees and community organizations telling them how to create their own material for the site. Emily Wolfe has been working on draft letter for the committee to review but she has not completed it.
  
  
• A project to display in the "What’s New" section, the material on the Bulletin Board (the physical one on the corner) has been discussed often by the committee. The hope was we could have a Web page form that each person who puts a new item on the outside Board could also type in the phase (it is no more than 25 characters). However, this has always appeared too burdensome for the Bulletin Board volunteers and there is no convenient PC at Borough Hall for them to do so. Although at one time it had been planned to meet with the entire Bulletin Board committee, this committee is loosely organized and does not have regular meetings. At the last meeting, Blair Wilson said she would contact Elyse Ross whom she said might be relevant. Emily Wolfe suggested that perhaps the Bulletin Board committee could assign one person to do nothing but input the announcements in the box -- all of them, not just the ones chosen for the Board.
  
  

Date for Next Meeting

The next regular meeting will be on Weds Dec 8, 2004 at Borough Hall.

Andy Bulfer,
Chairman