Quick guide to maintaining this site

Time for me to be moving on, but before i go…

Background

I used to maintain what is called a static site for the 2004, 2005, and 2006 season. I used Microsoft Frontpage, in case anyone is interested. It is still available at xc.azbikelaw.org

The new site is named mpxc.wordpress.com. Beginning with the 2007 season I switch over to a web-based, collaborative site. What does that mean? Is just means it is fully updated via a web browser so that anybody with internet access can fully administer the site. The software that enables this is called wordpress — though you don’t need to know that or download anything. And also, somewhat confusingly, the company that provides the web server — for free! — is called wordpress.com.

To get started simply register at wordpress.com, it is free and quick. Then contact the current administrator with the EMAIL address that you used to register. The adminstrator will then enable you as a registered user.

Look and Feel

The first thing to notice is the layout and look-and-feel of the site. This is controlled by something wordpress calls the “theme”. The theme controls all the visual presentation, such as the fonts, colors, heading and navigation. There are many themes to choose from, the current theme is called “Contempt”.

Posts and Pages

Information is encapulated in tidbits called “posts” and “pages”. They are similar, but just remember that pages automatically form the navigation structure (e.g. Boosters, Coaching, Contact, Pictures, Records, Schedule), whereas postings are the day to day information that you wish to present in the main body (e.g. Info about a particular meet, fundraiser, or any random topic). Posts always are presented from newest to oldest.

Composing posts and pages is identical, when you click on new page/post you will get an editor that lets you enter whatever you wish. You will also have a limited amount of formatting options (e.g. bold, italics, bullet lists). For everything except very short postings, it is somewhat cumbersome so you should try experimenting with cut-and-pasting from other applications, e.g. Word, or Excel. For hard-core editing, there is a tab called “Code” which allows you to directly edit/enter HTML markup code. Tables in particular are hard to create– you should try finding one you like and then just copy and paste it (that’s what i did with the table on the schedule page).

Dashboard

This is where the administrator controls everything — access it at: http://mpxc.wordpress.com/wp-admin if you are not logged in, you will be prompted to do so.

The new admin (whoever that may be!) should immediately go to: Manage / Pages and edit the page called “contact”. Change the “page author” (on the right) so that anyone who tries to use the contact form will get sent to the proper email.

Other things to look at; the theme is chosen from the presentation tab of the dashboard. In that same tab is “widgets” which contains the layout of the boxes which appear in the right column. A thing which should be of interest is updating the “text1″ widget because that controls the picture and caption that appears on the right.

From time-to-time you should backup the information contained in the site. To do this go to the manage / export tab of the dashboard. This will create a file you can save that contains all the posts and pages (warning: it won’t backup anything you have uploaded, so you have to manage that seperately).

Pictures

A special note about pictures. What i have been doing recently is to try to collect up links to any photos or videos and putting them in a page called Pictures. That way there is something of a central repository for all of them.

WordPress is really not set up to be a picture album, so I have always maintained separate albums that I generated with a program called jalbum — all the stills from 2004-2007 are linked here. Going forward, I would suggest looking into Picassa which is a free web-based photo album that looks pretty good.