It’s that time of the year again. The days are getting shorter, soon the leaves will begin to turn color and of course the new PSEC year has begun. Not a lot new to report since my last post. You can look there and at all my other posts if you want to catch up. Instead let’s look forward a bit to see what is in store (hopefully, and with your help) for this coming year.

I am now the PSEC secretary. I got the idea to volunteer for this position last year as I was finalizing the transfer over to the new WordPress site. Maintaining a site like this is a lot of work for one person so I’m going to look to delegate this year. The big advantage the new site has over the old one is that anyone with the ability to type can contribute. I figure that much of the site content is best maintained by the PSEC secretary. Things like posting meeting announcements, agendas and meeting minutes, maintaining the events calendar and things like this.

One of my goals for this year is to identify things that I think the Secretary should be responsible for with respect to the Web site and to establish policies and procedures for carrying out those responsibilities. I’ll continue to report on my progress on this as the year progresses.

The other main area of the website that we need to address is the Member Societies representation. On the old site we had a Societies page that had a listing of all the Societies with their list of officers and their contact information. That always made me a bit uncomfortable since we were putting phone numbers and email addresses on a public site without expressed consent. Having a WordPress site means that that contact information will be much easier to find, for good and ill. I would like to solicit ideas for how to give our member societies an appropriate representation on our site. I have an idea or two that I’ll present at the Council meeting.

Lastly, I am always looking for contributions from you. This is your website. The more contributors we have, the better it will be. All you need to do is register. Let me know what ideas you have and I will help you get started.

Miscellania

• I have set all the pseconline.org email aliases. They are, president@pseconline.org (goes to Sam), secretary@pseconline.org (goes to me), treasurer@pseconline.org (goes to Chris) and webmaster@pseconline.org (also goes to me). I encourage you to get in the habit of using these addresses even if you know the address of the person it goes to since they do not change from year to year.
• I added a Events Calendar page that syncs with our Google calendar
• Added Stop Spammers plugin. Mixed results. I report more at the meeting.
• I want to upgrade WP to version 4.3. Reportedly some improvements to password handling. Worth looking at.
• I created a Working Documents category as a place for people to store shared documents. I’ll demonstrate at the meeting.