A meeting of the Mountain Lakes Web Site Committee was held on Nov 14, 2007 at the Mountain Lakes Borough Hall.  In attendance were Chairman Andy Bulfer, Clive Knowles, Mark Watrous, and Borough Council Liaison Steve Shaw.  Absent was Nilesh Shringarpure.

Activities Since Last Time

• Andy Bulfer put on an ad for a new borough manager with a link to it on the front page.
• Clive Knowles developed/modified many pages at the request of the League of Women Voters.  Their site had fallen out of date and required significant work to bring it to currency.
• Mark Watrous brought the Boy Scouts pages up to date.
• Nilesh Shringarpure completed porting the Nite Owls pages to our site.  This was a major amount of work.
• Andy Bulfer installed a minor fix for Scribbles Preschool on the Schools page at their request.
• Clive Knowles added two newsletters to the Swim Association area.  Unfortunately, the front of their section contains only the "Latest" newsletter so the earlier one only shows up on a back page newsletter listing.
• Mark Watrous fixed two broken links that had been introduced unfortunately by changes in the way some meeting minutes are displayed.
• Andy Bulfer received from Richard Uranker the meeting minutes for the Borough Facilities Committee and formatted and installed them.  He also formatted and installed a FAQ page and a Needs Analysis page.
• Mark Watrous continued to monitor the traffic and error logs and track problems on the site.
• Andy Bulfer formatted and loaded Duke Smith's Oral History.
• At the request of Dana Mooney, Andy Bulfer put on a page about the Tax Lien Sale and a Notice Board item about it.  Periodically Bulfer had to change the notice as people paid their taxes.  Finally, the tax sale was canceled.
• Andy Bulfer updated the rate card for various clerical items at the request of Borough Clerk, Christina Whitaker.
• Andy Bulfer installed new forms for lake construction and road opening in the Forms Center.
• At the request of Recreation Director Denise Brennan, Andy Bulfer put on a notice about the Christmas tree lighting and Menorah lighting on the Recreation page.
• Andy Bulfer installed a Tri Town Basketball registration form on the forms center and Recreation page.
• At the request of the Library, Andy Bulfer developed a New Acquisitions page for Library.  Currently it is in static HTML but Bulfer said he plans to modify the page to read an Excel file uploaded from the Library and automatically generate the page.  In this way, the Library can administer/change the page themselves without our help.  The Library Director said she was quite pleased with it and even showed it to her board of directors.
• Andy Bulfer installed an RFP for HPC related to a search for a local author for a book on the history of Mountain Lakes.

Public Comments

None.

Traffic and Error Review

This is a new section that Andy Bulfer suggested we discuss every month.  It will consider how we are doing on various site benchmarks.  The following are some possible benchmarks and their values since the last meeting:

1. Files (Nov 14): HTML-1280, Image-1598, Pdf-91.
2. Disk Usage for Web documents (httpdocs) (Nov 14): 102 MB.
3. Bad Links (Nov 14): Total: 23.  (Borough Council-12, Shade Tree-2, MAC-5, Borough Facilities-1, Forms Center-2, Recreation-1.)
4. Notice Board (since last mtg): Approved-33, Community Bulletin Board-17.
5. Traffic (since last mtg): Total Pages Delivered-74930.

Andy Bulfer will handle the repair of the Borough Council, Borough Facilities, Forms Center, and Recreation links.  Clive Knowles will do so for Shade Tree and Nilesh Shringarpure will be asked to do the MAC.

There was discussion of the very detailed traffic analysis page provided by GTI.  A help page for the traffic analysis is here.  There is also a detailed file statistics page developed by the Web Site Committee.

Old Business

• Town Club and MAC -- Nothing has happened on these sites yet.  Their current Web coordinator is moving but we don't have a solid answer yet about who will coordinate their material.  The Town Club is still generating Apache errors.  Andy Bulfer will contact them.  Nilesh Shringarpure said last time he might finally have found a contact for MAC but since he was absent, the Committee did not know where he stands with it.
• Girl Scouts -- Mark Watrous said he would update their pages.
• Nite Owls -- As noted above, Nilesh Shringarpure has finished porting their pages to our site which they had requested.  The pages have not yet been made visible because the Nite Owls have notified us that there are changes coming because the pages are somewhat out-of-date but they have not told us what the changes are.  There are a few changes Andy Bulfer has suggested as well. 
• FAQs -- Steve Shaw reported he has not been able to put much time into it because of his activities on the Borough Facilities Committee.

No Progress

• Broadcast E-mail System -- Borough Manager Gary Webb is still working on the policies for it as requested by the Borough Council.
• 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) be included in the search results.
• 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.

New Business

• Top Menu -- Andy Bulfer redesigned the top menu that appears on many of the pages.  It is visually identical to the current menu but is implemented with Cascading Style Sheets so that it is more disability-accessible and search engine friendly and has drop-down context-sensitive help.  The Committee decided to roll it out to all the pages that have top menus.
• Top Banner -- We have not had any success obtaining letters in the type font needed.
• Green Hints -- The League of Women Voters has provided a list of hints for being more "green" in our daily lives.  They requested that a random hint be displayed each time a user accesses the Web site.  The Committee discussed several options including putting the hints beneath the central picture or in a special notice on the Notice Board.  It was decided to put them first on the LWV home page.  Clive Knowles will implement after contacting them for concurrence.
• Errors -- Mark Watrous said that we continue to see several thousand errors -- attempts to access a Web page that does not exist -- per month.  Watrous said many of these are people methodically testing our site for vulnerabilities.  Others are caused by search engines or Web users attempting to view pages that once existed but have been removed.  Some are errant search engines or bots.  To our knowledge, none have done any damage. 

  There are several IP addresses that account for a disproportionate number of these errors.  The Committee discussed whether ".htaccess", a configuration file that we have not used before, could be a help.  Andy Bulfer will look into the details and Mark Watrous will implement.

Date for Next Meeting

The next regular meeting will be on Thur Dec 13 , 2007 at Borough Hall.

Andy Bulfer,
Chairman