July 1998 Volume 21, Issue 7

Webmaster's Intro

by M. Wood

This months issue fo the Draught Notice is simply put, huge. Having said that, I'm going to make the intro short because there is a lot of content for you to read.

A couple of the articles written by me were not completed. In particular, the EBMUD article only got as far as the tables in the water qualtity report and the graphics. I had intended to get a more in depth article showing how to imitate various types of waters around the world but this will have to suffice for now. I may have this information a future Draught Notice.

In addition, the Mead Style reference is missing some of the guideline information I intended to include such as the AHA style guidelines. I figured I would rather get the newsletter out on time and just update the articles sometime in the future.

In last months webmaster's Intro column, I mentioned the idea of making up a pamphlet of brewing for new members. At the June meeting, we discussed the idea a little and I discovered that there are already two seperate brewing tip manuals that we created by Bob Jones and Charlie Webmaster respectively.  I will try and obtain these pamphlets and make them available on the website and via paper copy to those who are interested in having them. I know I am.

The state of the Web

The website continues to get regular and steady hits month to month and seems to have flat lined. I don't see this as a problem since we are still getting plenty of visitors on a weekly basis via search engine requests.

The look of the Draught Notice has changed again. The old style of graphics was storage intensive and took a lot of time to download so I changed to a format that would be easier to reuse graphics. The website was recently backed up and is now approaching 100Megs! I needed to start conserving space a little.

There was a comment last month that the information regarding the meeting and style of the month was hard to find on the website. I have tried to correct this problem so that the information is easier to locate. In addition, I've tried to include other important information in several places to remind the members of important events.

I have also started to archive important resources on the net that are free to distribute. For example, the Mead reference section has several web sources archived and sometimes reformatted on our sever. The reason for this is to make sure that these important resources are not lost when a site no longer carries them. It would be a shame if these resources were lost. I will try to keep a careful eye to only choose items that are free to distribute.