Webmaster Report - January 2025
Technical update on behalf of the Webmaster:
- Please note that as the agenda, highlights, and newsletter become available, this is indicated on the home page of area41.org in red “announcements” text. You will see these directly below the cranes image, with clickable links.
- We continue to feed content into the new site. All reports from the January newsletter have been added as site posts, and therefore display on your individual pages in the site. Using the “latest posts” block, this automatically displays the latest posts under your committee or district’s post “category,” so please keep the content coming. This block came with our particular WordPress theme, and we will be sourcing a plug-in to display a similar list of upcoming events within your specific category on your site page. It is intended for each district page to include latest posts, upcoming events, and meetings in your district, in addition to the custom static content you provide about your district. The committee will be working with our delegate to address the best way to handle confidential content, including the upcoming General Service Conference items.
- The Español and Distrito 31 pages have been updated to read in Spanish by default, including the text on the buttons inside these pages.
- Please feel free to share reports and minutes from assemblies and in between, for prompt posting on area41.org. We want to know about your district meetings and committee meetings, as well as your special events. All events from the flier table have been added to the site as of last night. Additional Events can be submitted using the “New Event Form” found under the “Events” menu. But any and all content requests can also currently be sent to [Contact Committee (Technology and Communications)]. If you send your reports to [Technology and Communications] at the same time you send to the Secretary, we can get your reports on area41.org in advance of receiving the finalized newsletter. Knowing that many district reports include upcoming meeting and event dates, please help ensure these can get added to the website promptly.
- Meetings are updated by our webmaster, and updates to these should be submitted using “Request a change to this listing” in the bottom-left of a meeting’s listing. We are working with the Omaha and Lincoln Intergroups, so that meeting change notifications are sent to all three web servants, to ensure that meetings found in more than one website are getting updated in both places. That said, we are still locating any lingering meeting updates that might have gotten missed during the April - August 2024 timeframe. Please check your meetings on the area41.org meeting listing for accuracy, if you have not done this since last spring; and please itemize any specific details that have changed, so our webmaster does not have to guess.
- Several Google Workspace accounts have not yet been signed into. If that is you, please reach out for help getting signed in or to discuss an alternative means to receive your emails. In the meantime, we have added a temporary duplicate notification to website contact forms for these email accounts, and will manually forward form submissions to you until then.
- Whether you are an officer, service position, committee chair, or DCM, and want to work on your site page content or get logged into your Google Workspace account, please reach out to schedule a call or online meeting: at this time, you can contact me at [Contact Committee (Technology and Communications)] to schedule a working session.
- We received a surprising number of contact submissions during the first months of the new site, asking for where to mail area contributions. We have since added the Contribute link to our footer menu, so it is seen at the bottom of any site page. Additionally, please note the new page is located at area41.org/contribute and includes both a link to the online contribution option as well as the address for where to mail contributions. If your entity shares area contribution information on its own documentation, please update your link to area41.org/contribute and ensure that you are using the [treasurer's Area 41] email address, as the personal email previously listed is not anonymity protected. Thank you.
- Last, the only other item of note from the webmaster is that we will likely have our testing site deleted, as at least one user mistakenly ended up in this site instead of our primary live site and was therefore unable to see our current content. The tech team worked quickly to get a redirect from the testing site to area41.org, so no one can land in the testing site any more. And upon further discussion, the tech team will have JM Online delete the test site completely. Given how robust and supported our chosen theme is proving to be, we simply don’t anticipate needing the test site as originally thought.
In service,
Sarah R.
Technology and Communications Chair on behalf of the Webmaster