Alternative Design from 5/23/00 Preserved
George Shaffer, the principal of
GeodSoft, LLC, has 17 years of programming, system design, analysis, and
computer management experience, including 4 years of web development and
management on NT and Sun systems.
Current projects include web design, development and back end
database/web integration for large associations. He is also
working on a book, Guide to Building an Association Web Site,
parts of which are available on this site.
Prior to computers he worked as a freelance illustrator. In
addition to a B.A. he has a two year Commercial Arts degree and an award
winning academic art history with four years of college level arts
courses. Learn more about GeodSoft, LLC and George Shaffer in
About Us.
Site Not Finished or Public Yet
Please keep in mind that this site is not finished yet and that
if you are seeing this you are one of a few friends or professional
associates that I have told about this site, in the hopes of obtaining
constructive feedback before going live in early June, 2000.
To see what's been worked recently, check
What's New which I've kept updated
whenever I've made any publicly visible changes.
At this point I have a site design and navigational
structure in place. I have just completed (5/9/00) a
powerful site maintenance script that applies all the standard
page features and varies the buttons, site map and platform
specific elements based on the context of the current page.
All pages have been standardized on a tentative final design
but any changes that I choose to make can be propagated
throughout the site in less than a minute.
Recently I've been focusing on the
About GeodSoft area,
Making This Site.
This section is complete to this point but will grow as
the site grows. I'll continue work on this section as
appropriate, but be focusing more on written content
in the near future. What's New page gives a capsule summary day
by day of what's been worked on. In the About
Us area, the description of ATLA's web site is about 1/3
complete and will be my next primary area to work on.
The Book and Cascading Style Sheet
sections merely describe what is to come.When the site nears
going live, the content on this home page after the paragraph
resume will be replaced by a comment/feedback form.
Except for additional background explanation the Sample
Site area is finished and the Terms of Use and Privacy
Policy areas are near completion, at least until conditions
change.
Following the ATLA web site history
I will probably finish the commentary sections
of the sample site and then work on the style sheet section including
the test page with its various conclusions and explain the
extent that cascading style sheets (CSS) are being used on this
site. Adapting some of the more complete chapters
of the book to the book section will likely follow.
Someplace in
here will be providing a functional search capability. I had
thought searching was going to be trivial since I already had
it working on my NT 4, IIS4 server which I planned to use for
this site. First Index Server did not recognize
the new GeodSoft virtual site and now it sees that site
instead of default site in which I keep all my online
documentation and which is a key working tool for me.
This change was apparently spontaneous as I had made no
IIS setup changes that should have affected this and certainly
no Index Server setup changes for more than a week prior to
when the change occurred. These recent NT server problems,
described in detail in the Making this Site section are
pushing me very close to permanently abandoning any and
all Microsoft server products.
Baring unexpected developments I expect that
either of the BSD or Linux machine will host
my first live site.
Later a user response form and
database to hold this information plus visitor information voluntarily
provided with such responses are planned. At the same time I will
develop a suitable privacy policy.
Long term, I hope to return to my
XML and Java explorations and hope that XML will provided an automated
method for keeping web and print versions of the book in sync. Some
form of forum for user response and idea exchange related to the ideas
and opinions expressed in the book and other commentary on this site
is also a long term possibility.
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