The Western Amateur Radio Friendship Association
"Communicating with the world through friendship."

WARFA Web Site Redesign and Maintenance

WARFA Home Page

04-09-2008 --- Updated: 04-23-2008
<= Our server before the webmaster, Bart, WA6HZN got out the low yield tactical nuclear weapon and tidied it up.

04-23-2008: Radio On The Left Coast is returning to the web site. There isn't much at the moment, but it will expand with both old and new content. It returned with 3 pages. These 3 pages are all linked to the Left Coast home page and each includes a link back to the WARFA Homepage for reasonably easy navigation. The 3 pages are...

  1. Selected images from past WARFA retreats
    -- A few choice photos taken at past WARFA retreats to crank you guys up for our retreat which is just days away now!
  2. Selected links to other web sites
    -- This new version of the links page is a highly culled version of the old one with a couple of new links. Essentially the links page could be called Bill's and Bart's Interesting Bookmarks. It is not our intention to maintain a comprehensive data base. The sites that we feature on this page are just interesting in some way, at least to us.
  3. Vintage radios
    -- At the moment, this is just that silly HW-12 which you've seen unless you're new to our web site, but I've got more pictures from people who are restoring glowbugs including an AM transmitter that is to die for (if you like hanging out on 3870 khz., the AM window) and my antique NCX-3.

If you guys don't like the "after dark" color scheme of the Radio On The Left Coast section, I can change that easily by editing just one file! This part of my web site is my first attempt to impose style on a collection of web pages.

An old friend who updated his web site daily until the day he passed away used to refer to web site redesign as "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic". These days, I can see what he meant by that.

How the web site will be organized: To my mind there are four essential pages on our web site:

  1. The Net Caps Page
  2. The WARFA Swap Net Page
  3. Swap Meets On The Left Coast
  4. The Space Weather Page (and its subpages)
These four pages will become a "web site within a web site". I am slowly working out a style for them. They should be very easy to navigate as I am going to design a navigation panel for all of them. Stay tuned!

Radio On The Left Coast will be the home of feature articles and fun stuff. My idea here is to present a linked list of all of its pages on its home page with a link back to that home page on every other page. That should make for fairly easy navigation. Of course, you'll be able to jet back to the main (core) WARFA web site, the four essential pages, from the Left Coast section.

This scheme should let me expand the Left Coast section as much as I like and, of course, other sections are possible.

If you have any ideas or suggestions, I'd love to read them: webrat@warfa.org

04-13-2008: The following is a message from Bill, WØQNI that your friendly webmaster received this morning...
GOOD MORNING ONE AND ALL!

The web page is changing. Bart WA6HZN, with a little help from WØQNI, is redesigning the pages. It has already changed on the home page (but not finished.) You can get some idea by going to www.warfa.org.

We have had over 40,000 hits since we put the counter in place. This averages out to over 1000 per month hits. This means that 40,000 people have seen our web site. Since mid February the net cap page has had over 1700 hits.

What this means is the site is going up-stairs to a new level. It will be a lot easier to find things on our site. Also there will be some surprises along the way.

So keep watching the web page!

Thanks, Bill, WOQNI

Your friendly web master is beginning to get the hang of the new modern way to lay out a web page. He's been looking at an online tutorial and dissecting other people's style sheets, playing with bits and pieces of code. This gold bar..
...is eleven lines of code when generated the old fashioned way and one simple line of code when generated the modern way. The new method is a lot like writing a simple computer program in some programming language like BASIC or C.

This is going to be good! In the long run, this is going to be easier on me. Pieces of web page code can be named so once the style sheets are up and running all your friendly webrat has to do to generate a gold bar anywhere on the site is to type...

<hr class="goldbar">
and the gold bar will appear.

Your friendly webrat is shooting for a unified look to the site that includes a sidebar or top of page mouseover menu that appears on every page. (Do any of you have a preference?) In the mean time the web site is going to look rather plain.

The net caps are back! Eager to play with his new tools, your friendly webmaster did include a few elements of style. (Isn't that some book on how to write theses and term papers?)

04-09-2008: If you watch The Home And Garden Channel (HGTV), you may realise that the first step in a redesign of some space is often a complete gutting of that space.

Our web site has become rather cluttered over the last few years.

It's also become rather large and complex. Each page was individually edited.

There is a way to give a website a unified look and to make it much easier to change as new features and information comes along.

Your friendly webmaster is beginning to teach himself these techniques.

The technique is to employ a style sheet which is a hidden web page that tells a simple web page how to look snazzy and fancy. Many web pages may share the same style sheet.

In the mean time, our web site may look rather plain and simplistic.

Our server has become rather cluttered over the last two years and it would be time consuming and difficult to attempt to remove the old items individually. The folder on my computer which holds the master copy of our site is also quite a mess, so I made a new folder on my machine and completely cleaned out our server.

The old site has been replaced with essential pages. The new version of our web site will grow as I begin to convert its pages to our new format.

The new technique will also make it possible to present both a graphics and low graphics version of many of our pages without me having to make two versions of each of these pages.

If you use a browser like Firefox, you can turn off the style sheets (after they arrive) to get a simple layout with your preferred color scheme and fonts. You can do that now, if you like, to get rid of the minimal style elements of these temporary pages.

Check this page from time to time to find out how I'm progressing.

If I add comments to this page, I'll be sure to mention that I've done so on our home page.