Webmaster's Introduction

The "new" Draught Notice

by Michael Wood, webmaster

The new year is here and time for new ideas. As may of the members have probably heard, the "Notice" has gone electronic. Here’s a quick glance at what direction the Draught Notice is headed and how you can help.

Since we’ve gone completely electronic and published the newsletter of the club directly to html, there are several new possibilities for the web site. First off, since it cost the club no additional expense to publish it to the world, many of the items will be available to the brewing public immediately. Certain parts of our newsletter may not pertain or be of interest to the public so certain sections will be protected via the user id and passwords that you already have signed up with.

I hope to broaden the scope of the Draught Notice to be of interest to the general brewing community at large to help promote the hobby of brewing. There is little more that needs to be done to achieve this goal, only ideas and participation. For example, you’ll notice that the Draught Notice has several new columns. Several of them are reviews of things like beer, books and brewpubs. I hope that these sorts of articles will helps us achieve our club charter goal of promoting the hobby and giving back to the brewing community at large.

The new Draught Notice also has several new feature that are possible with the new format. Most of these are interactive advances as well as a new linkage format to help the reader navigate through the newsletter. Of some of the new interactive stuff on this months Draught Notice are: slide shows of events added directly to the article and the quiz script that let people have there answers graded and posted for fun. As for navigation, one can either click on the topic of interest or use the top scroll button to read the newsletter sequentially.

In order to promote the newsletter, I need the help of the members to provide me with content. As you know, the newsletter is put together solely by volunteers sending me articles I can publish. I hope to broaden the scope of the newsletter to be able to integrate all levels of brewers as well as provide lots of original articles that people may want to read. For those of you already sending me articles, thanks for the support and keep it up. For those of you just getting in to the new year, put write a Draught Notice article on your New Years resolution list. I NEED content!

In addition there are several items not listed on the Draught Notice that have been developed for the site. I finally got around to developing the members only area. Added to the area are the results of the internet survey and a members contact list. Please visit this area and tell me if any of the information is incorrect or you want me to change anything. Please remember that only members are privy to this information so dont get to paranoid.

I also got around to redeveloping our slide show. Unfortunately, my pictures of the holiday party didn’t turn out so good, but the slide show program can now do photographs if anybody is willing to scan them for me (or I can scan them if you’ll let me borrow them). One of the big feature added to the slide show program is the list function that will let you look at all the slide title and click on them to go right to the slide you want.

Another new page is a link page to search engines on the net. They consist of two of the more commonly used search engines that I use: Infoseek and Dejanews. I put them after a few people asked me how to find stuff on the net. They take a lot less time to operate than going to the search engines site themselves due to the lowered amount of graphics and stuff.

The calendar information has also been updated for the new years as well. Its worth a bit of your time to take a look at it since some of the beer styles and months there on have changed a bit this year. Also, keep an eye for competitions coming up. If you know of a competition that we dont have listed, give me a holler.

If you find any typo mistakes in the Notice, please feel free to contact me or the editor Charlie Webster and will get those nasty mistakes eliminated

I hope you all had a great holiday and hope to see you at the January meeting!

M. Wood