About this site

This website was created to promote Worthington Neighborhood Scouting. Please send comments, fantastic pictures, and information about units and Worthington scouting events to Alan Magnuson.

This page is very random collection of notes about how WorthingtonScouts.org is maintained. Some of the comments address technical issues -- e.g. how the search functions are implemented. Others comments address design issues, e.g. how I choose topics -- e.g. anything that might be interesting and/or useful to the archtypal first year cubmaster or denleader.

Note: There are lots of people in the district who are knowledgable in web design and in many ways, WorthingtonScouts is an amateur effort. The intent of this page is to document some of the issues encountered with WorthingtonScouts and leave something that other scout webmasters might find useful.

A note about Hosting

These webpages are composed on my personal computer and uploaded to the server that hosts WorthingtonScouts.org using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). The hosting service costs about $80 per year. I'm not very clear on the specifics of what $80 purchases in web services, but it's probably overkill for the average Pack or Troop.

There are a number of FREE website services that will let you set up a website and add content to it through your web-browser. These are very simple to use and often allow you to upload pictures and/or PDF documents. If you're thinking about setting up a basic unit website, take a look at the examples in the left hand column. If you're thinking about starting a hobby . . . read on below.

Is there a method to this madness?

In the process of giving some unsolicited advice to another scout webmaster, I came up with these notes which attempt to describe any goals/good intentions that guide the development of WorthingtonScouts.org.

Website mission: Be useful, be interesting, be appropriate for scouts (HT to RS).

Specific goals:

Information:

Who, what, where, when.

e.g.: We're holding a Shooteree for Cubscouts at Camp Lazarus on Sept. 22, 23

Promotion:

Why we should be interested.

e.g.: Come to the Shooteree, launch flying projectiles in a variety of ways, and get a free autographed photo of Lord Baden Powell!

Recognition:

People and businesses volunteer time and resources to make our events possible -- we need to say "Thank you".

e.g.: List the units and scouters who help events. Put logos/links to businesses and organizations who donate time and material to events on the event page.

Knowledge retention:

Helping people who come after you, e.g. who were the folks who set up the hatchet range at the shooteree?

e.g. All html pages developed to publicize events are kept online (see past events). These are used to provide a template for promotion and planning of later interations of these events.

Website theme: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Scouting in Worthington.

The Worthington Scouts website delights in material that is apocryphal and/or shamelessly exaggerated. It is neither as polished nor as accurate as the Buckeye District or Simon Kenton Council websites. It is intended to aggregate information from these sites with additional information, observations, and other online sources -- hopefully in useful and interesting ways.

Style guidelines:

Don't use text when you can use a picture.
Every event, organization, unit, etc has a logo, every logo is a link to additional information.
Scout patches make great logos.
Don't copy stuff from the district and council websites, link back or frame district/council pages and supplement them when appropriate.
Every location should link to google maps. When space is not an issue, pair the location with an actual map -- it's possible to embed annotated google maps in webpages, e.g. see http://worthingtonscouts.org/lazarus.html#Location.
Links to resources, e.g. fliers or related websites, are listed in the left hand column.
Every page has a link to the online district FOS page. If it's a council or district event, make sure to point out that the event is partially supported by FOS contributions.

Future Directions:

I've experimented with adding a "Wikipedia" functionality to the site so that registered users can actually add/edit content. The goal is to create a site that is truly written and maintained by the Worthington area scouting community. My first attempt at adding user-edited content botched the presentation of this technology and was quickly withdrawn. Anyone who can give me some clues to doing this properly is welcome to send me their advice. -- AWM

Mad about Maps!

It is possible to embed a Google Map in a webpage! It's also possible to overlay a google map with marked locations, paths, and areas using a KML file. This is done with Javascript and Google's Map objects. See the Camp Lazarus Map and its more detailed rendering on Google maps for an example -- notes on this to follow.

Useful Tools

The website was originally composed in Microsoft Publisher, but was recently (Feb/Mar 2007) redesigned for better download speed using the web utility NVU.

NVU Screenshot

NVU is an HTML editor similar to Microsoft Frontpage. It's released under an Open Source license that allows it to be downloaded and installed on your computer without charge. It runs on both Linux and Windoze -- the Worthington Scouts website is maintained on a Windoze machine.

NVU has a publishing feature that automatically uploads your pages to your website's hosting service. Once it's configured, you don't need to transfer files with FTP (unless you like messing with FTP).

Many of the graphic images were found using the image search option on Google. Others, like the NVU screenshot (above), were captured using the image manipulation program, GIMP, which is also Open Source, i.e. it may be downloaded and installed on your computer without charge.

GIMP screenshot

Like NVU, GIMP is available under both Linux and Windoze.

Update Aug. 07: NVU is still the primary utility used to author this website, although it's been very flaky on the pages that use embedded frames (like the Worthington Units page). The upload feature has a way of mangling embedded frames and objects. The workaround is to upload modified webpages outside of NVU using a standard FTP client. There is an update of NVU available, but I have not yet evaluated it -- AWM.

COMMENT AREA

Many of the pages have a link to comments areas. These are Wiki pages hosted at

worthingtonscouts.wikidot.com

The Wiki pages link back to this site using an iframe. The code on the wiki page looks like:

[[embed]]
<iframe src="http://worthingtonscouts.org/2007_07_14_daycamp.html" width="100%" height="300"></iframe>
[[/embed]]

Update: The Wiki area was a bit of bust, so as of mid July '07 it was turned off until it could be presented more effectively. Anyone having bright ideas about how to present a comment area is welcome to send me a clue -- AWM.

Graphics

The logos used for Worthington Neighborhood Scouting and Pack 365
were done by
Susan Glover of Troop 123.

GADGETS

Some of the pages have games, e.g. Space Invaders. These can be found at

http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/

Versioning

WorthingtonScouts.org is composed on a Windoze notebook computer. Some of the pages now contain embedded frames and javascript content (e.g. maps, calendars, and gadgets) that don't play nicely with NVU's publish feature, so the webpages are uploaded to the website using a basic, boring ftp session that any hacker should be able to manage. Nonetheless, I was concerned that NVU might damage some of the pages containing the more advanced content, so I put the site under version control. I have a SVN (Subversion) server running on a Linux box and regularly submit changes to the SVN server. This allows me to roll the website back to any date after mid August '07. SVN is a well known programmer's tool that allows multiple developers to work on each other's programs without getting in each other's way. It can also be used to allow multiple authors to work on WorthingtonScouts without getting in each other's way -- when the site acquires more than one author, I'll work out the details.

We have a Search Engine!

Well, actually it's not OUR search engine, but we're using it anyway. Site searches are done with Google using a Google Hack implemented with javascript and forms. There is a simple search form:

<form action="http://www.google.com/search" onsubmit="return validate(this);">
<label for="temp">Search:</label>
<input name="temp" id="temp" type="text">
<input type="hidden" name="q" value="hovercraft+eel">
</form>

The form is located where you want to see the search prompt. The search string must be modified slightly by appending

"+site:worthingtonscouts.org"

This limits the search to worthingtonscouts.org. The string modification is done using a bit of javascript:

<script language="Javascript">
function validate(f) {
if (f.temp.value="") {
return false;
}
f.q.value=f.temp.value+"+site:worthingtonscouts.org";
return true;
}
</script>

The javascript function is located in the header section of the webpage (between <head> and </head>).

THE FINE PRINT

This site will often provide information about events that are also promoted on the Buckeye District Website. While we think our site has prettier colors, the District site should be considered authoritative. In cases where this site disagrees with the District Website, the reader should assume that the Worthington maintainer, Al Magnuson, was having a bad day and that the district site is correct. In these rare (cough, cough) cases, please drop a note so that the misinformation can corrected.

The opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of
the Simon Kenton Council, BSA, Columbus, Ohio.

Hosting

The website is hosted by Support Technologies. This company also registers the worthingtonscouts.org domain.