Don’t eat too much!

Just click on the picture of Thommen and I to see what I mean. This is the perfect solution to a user-friendly, minimal back-button site navigation… well, as far as images go! Just click on the “close” button in the picture, or hit “C” on your keyboard, to close the picture!

I’m terribly sorry for not being available lately, and also for the lack of updates. Last month was a very hectic month for us, hence our absence from the last meeting. So, going forward, hopefully I can catch up with the club here and post some new stuff very soon. I’ll need help from the members on this.

Thanks to Lori Steiz for checking up on me! All other members, feel free to contact me if you have any questions. (clwalls@seedcrackers.org)

Update: I have a new post in Site Updates. Check it out now!

As always, if there are any problems with anything in the site, please let me know. Your emails and comments can only help, and as such are a gift!

Cheers!

First, there may have been some confusion for a few members who came to the site and saw the “Login” tab in the top menu bar. This was added earlier to make it easier for me (and anyone else whom I appoint as a contributor/administrator) to go to the login page for the Site Administration portion of the new site. It was not… repeat… not meant for most ASCS members to log in to the Club Community Forum. That login page is on the Forum portion of the site. Unfortunately, I received emails indicating frustration over the setup. Well, the best way for me to change this was to eliminate the “Login” tab entirely and make a link to the Forum Login page on the front page of this site. The site’s Administration login link is now at the bottom of the sidebar, safely out of the way. Going forward, if anyone is having problems with the site, please let me know ASAP. If you are having problems with the site, chances are others are having problems, too. Give me information on the specific pages (page addresses, starting with http://) you are having problems with.

Second, I made a comparison of this site versus my own site and noticed I made a error in the setup for page linking. So I fixed that as well. Reason: When you email a link to a page in this site, or bookmark it in your browser, http://seedcrackers.org/2007/06/15/bandit-spazy-play-head-games/ looks much better than http://seedcrackers.org/?p=12… and it’s a better indicator of what the visitor can expect.

Lastly, I helped Cliff post an important article about our ASCS Emergency Response Program. In fact, it’s so important to our club and our cause, that I even modified the sidebar to give it its due attention. Please read it and see what you can do to help our fellow members and avian friends.

I have one big thing planned for the site; I have the ASCS Member Videos main page in draft status and I’m brainstorming the best way to structure this upcoming feature. If anyone has suggestions, let me know via email. I know I have some vids I’d like to share with you all, and I also know some of you just have to have some vids you can share with the club. If anyone has videos to contribute, let me know and/or send them through email to me. I can convert most formats, and I can even embed YouTube videos on the site as well (they have to be yours, though!).

That’s all I have… Cheers!

Becoming a member of the ASCS Emergency Response Program or ERP can be rewarding and reciprocal. We are setting the program up by ZIP Code. I would also like to see friends or groups of members get together and learn about each others birds, this can be a great bonding experience for the birds and humans. I know that for about five years we have had this type of mutual relationship with Noelle Fontaine and it has been a life saver. We know the bird routines, their diet, and they’re used to being handled by all of us, which can be helpful with Blue & Gold and Military Macaws that aren’t always friendly or will step-up for other people they don’t know. But it does seem that they instinctively recognize a bird person, sometimes.

I have mentioned in several articles I’ve written about when one of us were in the hospital and Noelle would either pickup our birds and take them to her house if she had room, if not, she took care of them at our house. Then any time Noelle needs to go out of town or has a need for a place for Kharma or Signal they come to our house for however long is needed. This way the birds all know each other, in fact Kharma and Signal come over just about every day just to hang out with Bandit and Spazy in the second aviary out front, or in the second cage inside and spend the day with the boys while Noelle works. Some weekends the boys and Sweetie go to Noelle’s for a couple of days to play with the other birds.

Now I know what we do is beyond what most people will ever do, it does show what people can have if they really want it. There are different levels of involvement for a person and there are those that will need help in an emergency that never thought would happen and those that plan ahead and never have a problem, I call those people very lucky.

Emergencies come in all forms though, we often think on a personal basis of injury, illness or death in the family, but then nature can have a deal a nasty hand with wind, lightning, rain and flooding. Then of course there is the tragedy of fire that struck a member of this club, and other members have already dealt with. You see, one of the premises of a club is coming together for a common cause so we have comradely, a sense of belonging, so we aren’t alone. We are here for you, and while a lot of society may not understand our love and attraction for some of the loudest and hardest biting creatures since the dinosaurs, oh yeah, they are, but we’ll call them birds, we understand. I’ve had people tell me I’d like to do something but, I can’t make all the meetings, I work nights, I don’t do good with people and the list goes on, well here is the chance for everyone to get involved, we need people in all zip codes.

Step one, for everyone is take the time to write down the information someone else would need to know to take care of your birds the way you do, your Veterinarian information. Special information about your birds, what they like, don’t like, do they prefer men or women, do they step-up, do they nibble, bite or chomp, you get the idea. Emergency contact numbers, your cell phone, the Vet’s number and emergency number, other family or neighbors numbers. You could start with a form that’s used for babysitters for the kids to help with the organization.

Step two, I believe, should be to join the ASCS Emergency Response Program, of course for some of us health or other issues may limit what we can do, but we may still may be able to take in an additional bird for a few days in an emergency, so don’t be afraid to sign up, no one is expected to single handedly take on a hundred bird breeding operation. Of course, if there is a large collection of birds in need we hope to have more than enough members to take care of everyone.

Step three, one of the best steps in preplanning is to find an ERP MEMBER, or another ASCS Member or a qualified friend or family member. However, if your family is like mine, the only one that can handle my birds is my son Scott in Denver. Your birds will do better and you will fell more confident if you meet your emergency caretaker ahead of time. In addition, if you are the ERP MEMBER you’ll feel more comfortable if you meet the people and the birds you may be called on to care for.

Becoming a member of the ASCS Emergency Response Program, is easy, just email me at csteele@seedcrackers.org, call me (480) 326-6319, or talk to me or any of the Board members at any of the ASCS meetings. If you have any questions about the program, please email, call or talk to me at one of the meetings before you decide not to become a part of this program.

If you need assistance in an emergency, contact me or any of the ASCS Board members, phone numbers are listed inside the front cover of the monthly Newsletter.

So no matter how you look at it, whether you just sign up, or only contact us if you have a need, this is a program where the Seedcracker’s can really benefit it’s members and the members can benefit by getting to know each other even better. Our birds even have a better life because of our mutual care arrangement we have with Noelle. After all aren’t we all in this for the birds we love and we only want the best for them.

First, I’m sure you all have noticed what is now the Main page of the site. I did this because I wanted to keep a bit of continuity with the old site and have a welcoming screen. Also, it keeps the site from looking too blog-oriented. Since I did that, I figured I’d replace the “Home” button with “News”, since the postings from here on will be genuine Club-related entries. Added to that, I thought it’d be a nice touch to have the site update with an excerpt of the latest general club posting, right there on the front page. Kinda like that voice saying “Get in here and read!”

Second, I’ve just put the preliminary finishing touches on both of the “Links” and “Contact” pages. The Links page is set up to be a breeze to update, while the Contact page has some simple e-mail links for members and guests to use.

Third, I have some new pictures up. Some are from what I just recently talked about, but some others are new pics from our wonderful VP, Noelle. Check ‘em out, will ya?

Next on my agenda: A project from our membership champion, Cliff…. and updating the Photo gallery’s core web-application, ZenPhoto. They have some new features on it that will make my life a bit easier when it comes to all the member’s photos.

Cheers!

Next up: try to fix the font colors in the Photo Gallery, while still keeping the current color scheme and make it look readable! It may be tougher than I think…

First, the second version of the site (the one I originally made to replace the first version) was built when I was still learning all about HTML code. At that stage, I naively thought that frames were the best way to go for making information accessible. Well, I was right… from a user’s point of view! The problem was that the information wasn’t accessible from the World Wide Web’s perspective. Nothing could be mapped on a search engine, and the site only gave vague clues to search engines as to what it was about. Second, updates to the site could only be done by rewriting the code for each page to be changed, and then use a FTP program to upload those files to replace the old ones on the server. Even the most hard-core programmer will tell you they’d rather not mess around with code unless they absolutely have to! Well, now the technology exists where we don’t have to do as much coding; just writing in a text field (like I’m doing now!) and hitting the magic “Publish” button is 90% of the work here! Third, some of the pages, like the Club Articles section, would most benefit from having a blog-oriented organization. Information needs to be easily found by all members… not hinted at on the front page, requiring the visitor to dig! I felt the ASCS would most benefit from having the information it needs to display front and center, accessible either through one or two clicks, or through a quick-search. These reasons gave incentive to make some sweeping changes for the better.

Now, my personal blog is run on the WordPress platform, which is a very powerful, customizable, easy-to-use publishing program entirely run on the server space I rent out for my site. My site’s front-end page is the portal to my blog, photo gallery, video gallery and scads of other pages. However, the blog contains, and links to, the main meat of everything about my life. I thought “If WordPress could do that for me, and others have run entire sites off of it, then what can it do for the club?!” Hence, the reason for the platform switch! If I should ever leave the club for any reason, I want the succeeding administrator to have a low learning curve, if need be.

Now that I gave the introduction, how about a brief walkthrough? I’ll try to include thoughts on future additions, without making too many promises, of course! Let’s start with the horizontal navigation bar, underneath the ASCS site banner. No one needs me to explain what the “Home” button does, right? The “About” button takes you to the info page about the club. Nothing too fancy. The “Photo Gallery” button takes you to all the club’s, and member’s, photos. I still need a way for members to post their own photos on this, since the ZenPhoto webapp only allows for one admin sign-on… Any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated. The “Club Articles” section was a pain to put together; it may not look like much, but it required mucking around in lots of PHP code to get it to automate itself the way I wanted it to. Hopefully, it will serve the club well! The “ASCS Forum” is the place for all members to go to for reading and posting announcements, want-ads, advice and anything else they want the club members to know. If you’ve never been a member of a forum before, try this one and you’ll soon get the hang of it all. The “Archives” page is where you’ll find all the old postings by month, category or author. Any postings on Upcoming Events will not show by author, since those are tucked away in their own special niche on the site, as I’ll explain in a bit. “Links” will be finished in a week or two, and that will hold all the club affiliations with businesses and other clubs.

Now on to the Sidebar, the smaller right-hand side of the pages. From the top, we have a cute, nifty “Search” field. Now, my main problem with the WordPress program was that it treats what they call “Pages” somewhat differently than regular “Posts”. I wanted to make any Club Articles, like the one you’re currently reading, different than regular “Post” updates and general club info. However, if I made Articles as “Pages”, the Search field ignores Pages, and we wouldn’t want that. So I modified the page code so that any posts written as Club Articles would be tucked away from the regular posts and have their own spot in the site, yet still be searchable. Just try a search, like typing in “Spazy”, and click Search, and you’ll find out what Cliff’s bird has been doing lately in his articles! Next we have the Events Calendar and Events List. Both work together to alert our members and guests to what we have going on. Click on any of the events to see them in detail!

The “Meta” section of the Sidebar is mainly for those who have a login for contributing, editing or administrating the site, but there is one thing on there that’s very useful to our members. If your computer has a browser that is capable of displaying RSS feeds, you can click on the RSS link in “Meta” and subscribe to this site’s feed. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and what it does is let your browser notify you when there’s been any updates to this site. Nifty, eh? As of this writing, Safari and Firefox are the best browsers for RSS feed updates, but there are add-ons available for other browsers that give them the capability as well. I encourage everyone to do some research, as this is a great capability to have.

Well, I’ve just about spewed everything I have to say about the new site format and everything it entails. As of this writing, I still have to expand on the Links section and unify the ASCS Forum interface with the main site (white is such a contrast to tans/greys/browns!). But right now, I think things are good to go! As usual, let me know if anyone has any suggestions. I’m here to listen and consider!

Cheers!

Christopher Walls

After the usual social portion and the general club notes, the special guest was… surprise!… our very own Mary Dubabin with her partner-in-crime, Dakota. Her Blue-and-Gold macaw certainly seemed like a handful, but was very well behaved and we learned a lot from her presentation. Macaws are known to be the clown princes of the psittacines, and he was no exception!

Afterwards, we all took turns at the various tables around us and engaged in a sort of… well… toy-making party! The club spent some time educating each other on ways to make inexpensive, homemade toys for our feathered companions. This was a unique meeting for everyone, especially with the glue, peanut butter, seed and foodstuffs sometimes leading to messy but funny situations!

Oh and the raffle was fun, as usual! (right, Noelle? ;))

All in all, another fun night! I took pictures and they are posted in our Photos section under “2007 Toy-Making Party”. Until next time…