A meeting of the Mountain Lakes Web Site Committee was held on June 15, 2005 at the Mountain Lake Library.  In attendance were Clive Knowles, Mark Watrous, Emily Wolfe, and Chairman Andy Bulfer.  Absent were Council Liaison Ralph Loveys and Jud Breslin.

Activities Since Last Meeting

• Andy Bulfer met with HPC Chairman Jim Cinnamond regarding redesigning the HPC Web pages.  The HPC has a number of good ideas regarding additional content and organization structured and are asking for help in graphic design and implementation.
  
  
• Mark Watrous updated the Troop 41 material.
  
  
• Emily Wolfe cleaned up the formating of the Rec pages but could do nothing about the outdated content.
  
  
• Clive Knowles made a major enhancement to the Notice Board that allows a submitter to put in a contact e-mail address and/or a URL for more information.  For security reasons, the URL must be to a location on the Mountain Lakes Web site.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer met with Denise Brennan and Ann Mucci in Mucci's Briarcliff office regarding the Grant Action Committee.  This is a committee constituted by the school board but has town-wide scope.  Their objective is to coordinate funding-raising and grant applications across all the organizations in town.
  
  
• Mark Watrous developed a cron job to automatically remove expired notices from the Notice Board once a day during the nighttime hours.
  
  
• Emily Wolfe received a number of updates to the Environment pages.
  
  
• Clive Knowles received voluminous material about Hub Lakes and plans to organize it and put it in the recreation section.  He also plans to meet with the chairman of Hub Lakes.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer added a flyer for the Library Summer Reading Program and put a nice picture of the Library with a child sitting in front engrossed in reading on the front page.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer added oral histories for Henry Popp & Ruth Harris provided by Margarethe Laurenzi of the HPC.  Still to do: a seminal speech by John Steen to the Borough Council.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer had a number of conversations and e-mails with Denise Brannan and Gary Webb regarding the need to update the Rec pages which are seriously out of date.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer received a series of Woodlands Management Committee updates from Chairman Jerry Uhrig and did many of them.  There are still several to be done.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer received the Consumer Confidence Report from Gary Webb but has not had a chance to put it on the Web yet.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer received, formatted, and installed an HPC on-line questionnaire (an e-mail version of an oral history) from former resident Jerome Wyckoff.  Wyckoff is 94 years old and currently lives in Pompton Plains , N.J.  He lived in Mountain Lakes from 1914 to 1942.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer scheduled a meeting with Wendy Vandame regarding material for UN Weekend.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer received material on the Mountain Lakes Organic Coop from Marnie Vyff and added it to the Community Page.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer received Lakes Management "Issues and Activities" for May and June from Glenn Tippy and added it to the Lakes Management pages.

Review of Past Items

• The Committee asked Mark Watrous to develop a program to allow Committee heads and the Borough Clerk to upload their own meeting minutes.  He had stated previously that he had hacked an awk program (awk is a computer language) to do this but it can only do ASCII text files (not binary ones such as image files or pdfs).  It was decided to begin using it immediately by requiring users to save their documents in HTML (which is ASCII) before uploading.  It is considered urgent that the Borough agendas and meeting minutes appear promptly on the Web site because there are members of the community who become very vocal if they are not there or late.
  
  
• It was felt that too few people know about the Notice Board capability.  It has been previously suggested that a note about it be put on the inbox in Borough Hall where the Bulletin Board notices are submitted.  It was also suggested that the Borough Hall staff be briefed about it since they submit a lot of notices to the physical Bulletin Board.  Andy Bulfer was assigned to do these items.
  
  

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

• The Dept. of Public Works is a major area that is not yet represented on the Web site.  The committee would like to have a section about them.  Emily Wolfe has been assigned to undertake this project.
  
  
• Modern Web usage dictates adding a DOCTYPE statement at the beginning of all Web pages.  This specifies to the browser the version of HTML that is being used.  It is a relatively recent requirement and most Mountain Lakes pages do not have it.  It is an optional technical nicety: our pages will continue to work just fine without it although it leaves browsers free to interpret the HTML and render the page any way they wish and different browsers do it differently.  Having the statement would insure our pages are rendered consistently.  The Committee decided to add the statement to all its pages.  Andy Bulfer said he could do so without much work.
  
  

New Discussion Items

• It was decided to investigate the possiblity of a software capability to let members of the community upload their own events to the Community Calendar.  Clive Knowles will study it.
  
  
• George Jackson recently sent an e-mail to all committee heads asking that they update the material about their site.  We may get a deluge of requested changes.  It was decided to distribute the work among the Committee members so that it is not too onerous for any particular member.
  
  

Date for Next Meeting

The next regular meeting will be on Wed Jul 13, 2005 at Borough Hall.

Andy Bulfer,
Chairman