Not a lot of big changes this month. We are tentatively scheduled to switch the site over for good in June. That means that you should spend some time familiarizing yourself with how to create and edit Pages and Posts on the site. I hope to be able to do a short demonstration of this at the May meeting so stay tuned for that.

Another thing you might want to pass along is that I have been regularly updating the PSEC twitter account to make announcements. You should add @pseconline to your timeline and encourage others to do so as well.

Mail List Issues

I’ve had some issues this month with the mail list. A lot of emails have been flagged for approval because of the ruleset in place to prevent spamming. It is no problem for me to approve messages but please be aware that it may take longer for you message to get sent since I’m not always available to monitor the held messages queue. I would suggest a couple of things:

  1. Please do not copy my address if you are sending a message to the reps list. Several times I was unaware that an email was in the held queue because I was addressed directly. I am subscribed to the Reps mail list. If you are sending an email to that address you do not need to include my address separately. I will get it.
  2. Consider sending your message only to the Reps list. Messages get flagged if there are too many recipients. I’ve observed that often the addresses copied are also members of the Reps mail list making their inclusion redundant anyway.
  3. Reduce the use of attachments. These can be problematic, especially if they are large. Oftentimes, a document that you are attaching is better just entered directly into the body of your email. You might also consider just creating a post on this website and linking to it. This has the advantage of giving your message a wider reach and being more efficient on space and bandwidth requirements.

As always, if you have suggestions or comments, leave them in the comment box below.

Completed This Month

  • Upgraded wordpress to 4.1.1 and list-category-posts plugin
  • Changed the look of category posts in pages that use them
  • Adjusted the ordering of the landing pages
  • Added an Engineering Fair landing page which should be updated
  • Modified Mentor Nights landing page
  • Revamped the Council Meetings landing page to hold agendas and minutes.
  • Created a Member Society Announcements page to hold society-specific posts from PSEC Reps
  • Took a look at Events Manager plugin. I will report more at the Council meeting

Upcoming

  • Upgrade site software to version 4.2 after evaluation.
  • Prepare for switching site over in June (?)