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Secretary’s Department Newsletter |
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Over the last several months a number of online tools on the USPS® web server, which can be of value to squadron, district and national webmasters, have been modified and made available for general use by the Information Technology Committee. These tools and descriptions of them can be found at the USPS webmasters in-house tools site: www.usps.org/national/tools. These tools were originally designed to work for specific squadrons or the headquarters staff. Briefly, the tools which can either be accessed or are documented at the above site are: · A tool which allows squadrons or districts to update the information in the websites data base which is displayed to the public and which controls the operation of other tools such as the online roster described below. · A tool which allows similar functionality for national committee webmasters. · A tool and documentation for the USPS hit counter which can be used to indicate number of visitors to a web page. This can be used by websites both internal and external to the USPS web server. · A site integrity checker for sites internal to the USPS web server. It checks all links, graphics, and document references within the site. If either an internal or external reference does not exist, the user of the tool will see the information on the generated report. · Access to html documentation for the national member only pages security mechanism. All national committee sites should be using this mechanism. · Access to html documentation for the online roster software. The online roster is available to all squadrons. It provides an online roster display and an online organization listing plus the ability to generate a printer friendly up-to-date squadron roster. It complements the DB2000 squadron management system and uses extracts from the DB2000 system to generate the roster. This is a rather extensive set of programs and webmasters really need to check it out. · Documentation on the squadron/district/national contact mailer. This provides a form for member or public questions and uses the contact email addresses in the websites data base to send the queries to the appropriate contacts. This software provides the ability to easily change contact e-mail addresses for an entire site and hides the actual e-mail addresses from the browsing public. · A tool to clear the persistent cookies which are used by the members only security mechanism. This will aid webmasters in testing the above tools. All documents listed above contain links to working demonstrations of the software and detail how to implement the tools for individual websites. ITCom help in setting up the tools is available. Questions can be directed to Dan Bartell, dtb@usps.org. P/C Dan Bartell, SN |
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Volume 4, Issue 2 May 2004 |
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® 2003 - 2004 United States Power Squadrons |