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Help Wanted with the Riverdale Park Web Site

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§ Help Wanted with the Riverdale Park Web Site

As many people have noted, the Town's Web site is not updated as frequently as it should be. If anyone would like to help out, I will try to keep an updated list of tasks here that I have not completed, and instructions on what to submit to me so I can publish to the web with minimal effort.

The web site is currently (30 August 2003) rendered using Userland Frontier, version 5.0. This application has extensive support for creating large, interlinked websites, but has not been updated in over five years. There is a newer version, but its price is about 50% of the total annual website budget, and I extensively adapted the base package to generate this site, so it would be difficult to upgrade anyway. I'm looking to move to another site generation package such as http://thewml.org/ -- let webmaster@ci.riverdale-park.md.us know if you have any suggestions. I'm not going to make the transition to anything for which I can't get the source code -- I've been burned once, and that's enough.

Update: (07 February 2005) I have the new site generation software working reasonably well (but there are still issues). I'll try to update the Instructions, below, as soon as things are a little more stable. Don't work on anything until then!

Update: (10 December 2004) I have recently been receiving several offers for help from various town residents. I have removed some items from this list, but am likely to add more on. The development of the new site generation software is progressing; I hope to make good progress over the upcoming holidays. Many thanks to those who have responded, and especially to Rob Oppenheim, Krista Molino, and Marc Molino, who have come through with materials I requested.

Instructions

The format of individual pages is fairly simple. Here, for instance, is the full code for the Public Works Department main page:

#include <template.wml>


<elPageTitle>Public Works Department</elPageTitle> <elTitleImage>publicwkshd</elTitleImage> <perl>imageRef("pubworks", "Picture of a flower bed maintained by Public Works",{align => "right"});</perl>
The public works department provides many of basic city services including <elxr>trash pickup</elxr>, <elxr>Refuse Collection Restrictions</elxr>, <elxr>snow removal</elxr>, and <elxr>landscaping</elxr>.
To contact Public Works call 301-864-1803. #include <templatepost.wml>

The site generation software takes care of all of the links, navigation bars, etc., and doesn't modify any formatting html (e.g. <table></table> ) If you want to submit a page, then send it in a format that looks like this and I can insert it immediately.

Projects

Out of date pages

These pages need updated content -- if you want to do the research and write it up, I'll be happy to post it. Let me know if you find any more.

Ward 4 - Lawrence Taylor
Ward 5 - Gerard Kiernan
Ward 6 - Kenneth Webb

Businesses (and the subsidiary pages) needs to be completely revamped. I've heard two suggestions: link to the Riverdale Park Business Association web site (http://www.riverdaleparkbiz.com/) or get the list of businesses that have paid their town business license fee. What do you think?

Laws of the Town of Riverdale Park, both the code and charter, are available in WordPerfect format. If you can convert these to PDF (Adobe Acrobat format) I would like to put them up that way. Anyone brave enough to want to convert these to html should contact me about thoughts on that.

The Schools & Libraries page is a bit too general, and out of date.

Political Representation

I have several Council Meeting Minutes that need to be formatted

"Link Rot"

"Link Rot" is when links to external (or internal, for that matter) web pages are broken -- the other end of the link has moved. I have a list of ~60 external links that have rotted out. If you are interested in finding where they have gone, let me know!

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This page was last changed on Friday, December 10, 2004. Questions, comments, or submissions? See the Website Committee web page. This page has been accessed 9095 times.