A meeting of the Mountain Lakes Web Site Committee was held on Oct 11, 2006 at the Mountain Lakes Borough Hall.  In attendance were Clive Knowles, Nilesh Shringarpure, Mark Watrous, Borough Council Liaison George Jackson, and Chairman Andy Bulfer.

Activities Since Last Meeting

• Andy Bulfer added a new start-up organization "Stay at Home Mothers" to the Community page.  This is not a traditional organization that has physical meetings.  At the time, it had only one member, the organizer, and a Yahoo Groups Web site.  Bulfer polled the Committee about what to do.  Although there was a range of opinions, a majority of the Committee felt the organization could be a valuable addition to the Borough and the organizer should be given a chance to make it work.
  
  
• Mark Watrous conducted an investigation when an unusually high hit rate was noticed in the Web Committee's daily traffic report.  We were extremely concerned that some type of malicious attack was occurring.  It was finally concluded that an errant software program in another ISP was causing the problem.  The traffic spike disappeared after several days
  
  
• Clive Knowles added a calendar page for the Garden Club.
  
  
• Nilesh Shringarpure worked on a broadcast e-mail proposal as described below.
  
  
• At the request of Patricia Carque, Senior Pastor Community Church, Andy Bulfer updated the listed worship hours for the Community Church.  He also cleaned up the html and brought it up to current technical standards.
  
  
• Mark Watrous updated the pages for the Police Department to fix broken links.
  
  
• Clive Knowles talked to Duke Smith about 55+ events and updated their listing.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer added Field Hockey and Wrestling sign-up forms to the Recreation page and Forms Center.
  
  
• Mark Watrous updated the Shade Tree Commission pages to remove references to "certified_tree_expert" pdf file that had been previously replaced by the Web Committee.
  
  
• At the request of Health Commission Secretary Robin Steele, Clive Knowles removed two Sept.  programs from the home page and Notice Board -- Stroke Prevention and Internet Safety -- when these programs were canceled.
  
  
• We received an e-mail message from an antique cars enthusiast concerning an inaccuracy in the write-up about the Waverly Electric Antique Car in the Historic Photos section.  Andy Bulfer updated the page. He later looked up that type of car on Google and discovered our picture on an antique cars Web site. Possibly we have the only photo of that type of car readily available.
  
  
• Clive Knowles generally watched over the Notice Board and resolved minor issues as they arose.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer added a front-page picture of the 'Little Theater on the Boulevard' and updated the historic write-up with more information on its leader, Arthur Stringer.
  
  
• At the request of Blair Wilson, Mark Watrous sent instructions for uploading the Environmental Commission meeting minutes.  Wilson plans to upload the Commission's minutes herself.
  
  
• Mark Watrous updated our robots.txt file to keep search engine bots out of the Business and Calendar sections of the site.  Robots.txt is a special file on the Web site that gives instructions to search engines about which areas of the site we do/do not want indexed.  There is little benefit to having these areas indexed and they were involved in the major traffic problem described above.
  
  
• Clive Knowles added a page on Rabies at the request of Health Commission Secretary Robin Steele.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer received the October HSA Bulletin and installed it on the Web site.
  
  
• Mark Watrous sent a login/password for the Town Club Web pages to Luann Pollock who had informed the Committee that she is taking over management of the pages for the Club
  
  
• Andy Bulfer fixed Calendar and Business pages formatting based on a suggestion by Emily Wolfe.
  
  
• Mark Watrous continued to monitor the Web site usage and error logs to identify and fix problems on the site.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer added an e-mail address for Kenneth Huelbig at Borough Hall.
  
  
• At the request of Dana Merville, Andy Bulfer sent list of all 'mtnlakes.org' e-mail addresses to Dana Merville.  She intends to review the list and identify those that are obsolete and should be removed.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer removed old, obsolete pages about Municipal Alliance Committee.  He reset the link on the Community page to point to their home page.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer fixed up the Municipal Court page: straightened out the formatting, removed the artifacts that Dreamweaver puts in, and added a link to paying traffic tickets by credit card.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer who has done it in the past formatted and upload material about the Spirit 5K that he received from chair of the Medical Needs Foundation, Margarethe Laurenzi.
  
  
• Andy Bulfer added Roots & Wings to the Community Page.  There was some concern that it is not really a Mountain Lakes organization.  However, it was founded by a former a Mountain Lakes resident and there is such a large fraction of Mountain Lakes residents on the Board of Directors that the addition was considered justified.  They are considered a worthy organization and are having an important fund-raiser later this month.
  
  

Old Business

• Broadcast E-mail System -- According to George Jackson, the Borough needs a means to communicate with the people of the Borough by broadcast e-mail.  This could be used for urgent messages and perhaps as a cost-saving alternative to the Home and School Bulletin.  It would be on an 'opt-in' basis, only those who positively indicate that they are willing to receive these e-mails would get them.  Nilesh Shringarpure reported on the study he had done including his recommendation to use a ListServ product from Lsoft, a company that provides broadcast e-mail as a service.  The technology he recommended is full-featured but straight-forward.  However there is a cost and the Committee asked Shringarpure to meet with Borough Manager Gary Webb to identify a list of uses that could be made of the system and the cost savings that could be achieved.
  
  
• Audio Historic Walking Tour -- Andy Bulfer suggested to the Historic Preservation Committee that they develop an audio version of the historic walking tour that the Web Committee recently installed on the site.  It would permit users to download the audio files from the Web site, load them into their iPOD or other music player, and listen to them as they walk -- similar to what many museums have.  Bulfer reported that the HPC reacted very positively to the idea.  A member of the HPC, John Grossmann, a professional writer, agreed to undertake the project.  The Web Committee will support them as required.
  
  
• Tax Insert -- Last time, the Committee expressed a desire to have the new real estate tax rates on the Web.  We had requested an electronic version of the insert that was sent home in the mail but have not yet received it.
  
  
• Shade Tree Database -- We are waiting to hear from the Shade Tree Commission if they wish to pursue the proposed searchable database of trees in the Borough right-of-way.  The proposal would allow someone to put their address into a Web page form and obtain a listing of the details of the trees in the Borough right of way in front of their house.  The STC meeting was Thu Sep 14 so we may hear soon.
  
  
• Home and School Association -- Mark Watrous met with H&SA President, LaVonne Feigeles, to initiate a major new Web Committee project: development of a full H&A presence on the Web site.  The H&SA is an important town organization that heretofore has had nothing about it on the Web.  The Web Committee was delighted that they are finally moving on it.  Feigeles herself is their liaison to the Web Committee.  Subsequently, Watrous developed a draft layout and navigation based on the meeting.  The Web Committee has reviewed it and liked it.  Feigeles and other representatives of the H&SA are currently reviewing it.  After the layout is finalized, Emily Wolfe will design graphics to 'make it pretty'.  The H&SA will provide the content which the Web Committee will upload.
  
  
• Notice Board Policy -- There was a discussion about the policy on what notices should be permitted on the Web site Notice Board.  Although the initial concept was to have it the same as that of the physical Bulletin Board outside of Borough Hall, some on the Committee now feel that policy is too restrictive.  Clive Knowles reported he had discussed the issue with Elise Ross who moderates the Notice Board.  She felt that the current policies are clear and simple and have worked well for both the Bulletin Board and the Notice Board.  Ross told Knowles that she would be open to taking a look at any new Notice Board policy but made no promises that she would support it.

  Potential new policy options were discussed.  It was decided that notices of events must meet four criteria:

  1. Local -- Come from the Borough government, the Schools, an organization on the Community page, or an organization on a Supplemental Local Organization List (SLOL) maintained by the Web Committee.
  2. Non-Commercial -- Admission may be charged but the event must not be profit-making or be sponsored by a business.
  3. Open -- Events must be open to anyone who lives in Mountain Lakes.
  4. Civil -- Notices must not be unlawful, obscene, defamatory, libelous, threatening, pornographic, harassing, hateful, or racially or ethnically offensive.

  It was hoped that Ross would support this new policy.  The SLOL will initially contain one organization, the non-profit Boonton Area Cultural Arts group which sponsors the summer concerts at Grace Lord Park.
  

• Search Engine -- The Committee would still like a Search Engine on the front page.  We had one with the previous server.  One of the things that makes it difficult is a self-imposed requirement that the schools site (mtlakes.org) to be included in the search results.  Andy Bulfer reported he has identified and downloaded search engine software and will install and try it in the next few weeks.  From its description, it meets our requirements.  It is distributed under the GPL -- General Public License -- which means it's free for us to use.

No Progress

• FAQs -- George Jackson is reviewing and updating the FAQs page.  Jackson reported he has not made much progress.
  
  
• Monthly Traffic Report -- Each Committee member currently receives a daily e-mail report on traffic handled by the Web site on the previous day.  However, we would like the daily statistics rolled up into a monthly traffic report that could be distributed to a wider audience.
  
  
• LINC projects -- In April 2006, Andy Bulfer submitted four ideas to the LINC coordinator at MLHS for consideration for student projects.  Although she promised they would be completed by June 13 (the date of High School graduation) we received nothing.  Bulfer queried the school by e-mail but has not received a response.

New Business

• UN Weekend -- We have been trying to work with UN Weekend chair Wendy Vandame to get material about the weekend up on the Web.  However, with the weekend only a few weeks away, not much had happened until we got an e-mail complaint from a person at the UN.  After that we began to receive material from the UN Weekend Committee and now the UN pages are up to date.  Vandame was also urged to put a notice on the Notice Board
  
  
• Meeting Minutes -- Andy Bulfer noticed that there were still two major boards or commissions, Shade Tree Commission and Health Commission, that did not yet have their meeting minutes on the Web.  Most do including the Borough Council, Planning Board, Zoning Board of Adjustment, Environmental Commission and Recreation Commission.  Several Borough committees do also including Historic Preservation, Woodlands Management, Web Site, and soon, Traffic & Safety.  Bulfer e-mailed the two, pointing out that they can do it themselves (we developed software that permits it to be done without our involvement).  Both commissions readily agreed to do so.  It was decided that Bulfer will set up the minutes pages, install a link on each committee's home page, and set up the upload pages for each committee.  Mark Watrous will then test the arrangement and send upload instructions to the secretary of each committee.
  
  
• Rules of order policy -- The Committee adopted a policy for permitting the public to address it at its monthly meeting in an orderly way.  There will be a period for public comment at the beginning of each meeting.  Each individual who wishes to address the committee will be allowed up to five minutes to speak
  
  
• Charlie Hyson 100th birthday -- There's a man in Mountain Lakes, Charlie Hyson, who is going to celebrate his 100th birthday on Nov 10, 2006.  He has led a full life, rich with voluntarism and help to the Borough.  The Mountain Lakes Borough Council is planning a resolution in his honor.  George Jackson will arrange to obtain a photo of him and we will install it on the Borough Web site along with a copy of the final resolution.

Date for Next Meeting

The next regular meeting will be on Nov 15, 2006 at Borough Hall.

Andy Bulfer,
Chairman