Hi Anand: Hope you found this site OK.

My brief lecture on the Internet
I think that this bboard can provide the website working group with a valuable way of communicating. Using a bboard is a way of transcending the boundaries of time and space based communication: we neither have to be available in the same space, like meeting in person, or in the same time, like using the telephone, to still be able to communicate. Of course, this is only an advantage to those who have Internet access, which is still a tiny, tiny minority of the world's population, and the world's geography. Even in Canada, the number of individuals with regular, affordable access to the Internet is still about 20%. Clearly, the Internet is not going to save the world, nor make the world a more democratic place in the near future, dispite all the corporate-driven hype. Nonetheless, it can facilitate communication, given its restrictions (Or otherwise, the entire U of C Greens webpage would be useless). OK, enough about that.

Cool things about this bboard, especially if you know HTML
This bboard is backed by a database that basically takes whatever we say here and sticks it in a database location. When you ask for that information back, the server takes the content of the database, slaps a template HTML code around it, and serves it to the browser.

For this reason, I can do things like this and this. Pretty fancy, eh?

I can also do stuff like this: please click here (don't worry, this opens in a new window.) OK: enough playing. My point is just that what you enter here can be interpreted by the browser as a HTML tags, not just as text. This can have some distinct advantages, especially for us. I can now refer to the Council of Canadians website, and you can see exactly what I mean.

Some real business
The reason that I refered to the Council of Canadians is because Cody says that it is a site that has the submit/unsubmit thing that we talked about last meeting:

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Nice one Cody! A few alterations on the code, and we should be in business!
I think we should approximate this site for our site, although it is a pretty standard design, so lots of sites will be similar. This is just one example of thousands.

Frames
However, I do not think that we should use frames like this site does. Frames will restrict the users who can view the site. If we do want to use frames, I think that we should set up two parallel sites (with identical content), and have a Javascript from the initial page that links to either a 4.0 browser version, or a pre-4.0 version. Alternately, we could put a link for this on the initial page, but many users do no know their version number, so this may be unnecessarily confusing. Perhaps both, a script and a link?

OK: one last thing:

Both Cody and I have set up bulletin boards for future use in the website. You are looking at one of them, while the other is here. We should choose which one to use.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both sites, but please check them both out and we can discuss this later. Personally, I feel that the discuss.rockies site is better, with a one huge irritating exception: You have to login to post anything, which means that you have to fill out a form about yourself, then wait for the server to e-mail you a password (randomly-generated, and un-rememberable), then access your email account (writing down your cryptic password), then try to login to the bboard, which for me, required that I click "More...", then "Login again"! I doubt that very many people are likely to complete all that (unnecessary) obstacle course just to post their thoughts on some particular subject. This will especially turn off new people from posting, which defeats one of the purposes of a bboard in the first place. Nonetheless, this board offers many features that the one that you are looking at now does not. These features may make the excruciating process of loging in worth it. Comments?

The end?

OK, this posting is huge, especially since I am not sure that anyone will actually read it.
Talk to you soon.

-- richard (ribird@ucalgary.ca), November 13, 2000