Website

Members - This page offers a few words of introduction and instruction about how this website is used in our club.

Technical Details

This website is built on Google Sites, a free service for writing websites. We suggest reading the Google Sites Getting Started Guide for a tour of its capabilities.

Features are extensive and online documentation is plentiful. Your webmaster can answer most questions you might have. However, Google's technical support is limited to Google Sites Help Forums.

How to Edit

We encourage members to participate in our website. You may add stories, write up events, update the calendar, publish pictures and maintain your own "members pages". This is risk-free because Google Sites retains a revision history and the webmaster can always revert an undesired change.

You can log in to https://sites.google.com and, if you've been authorized, then w7bi.com will show up in the list of sites you can edit.

Google Sites allows only one "owner" and allows as many "editors" as desired. Contact Barry K7BWH (barry@k7bwh.com) to get editing permission.

How Add SquakBox Newsletters and Store Files

Our website contains SquakBox newsletters in PDF format and other files. Here's how we do it.

  • Files are stored on Google Drive

  • Google Drive is managed by Barry K7BWH (barry@w7bi.com)

  • Anyone with a "name@w7bi.com" account can add and delete files.

  • As of April 2022, also authorized are Joe DeCuir and John MacDuff.

  • People who are authorized ("editors") can upload files, edit pages, and modify the navigation bar.

  • It is important to keep all our club files in this one place on Google Drive. For the sake of our sanity, there should be just one place to store things.

  • To change folder authorization, log in to drive.google.com and open our club folder "Issaquah Amateur Radio Club - Attachments".

  • Select a sub folder and click "Manage access". A popup will appear where you can add or modify rights. Expand the screen shot below and make note of the highlighted important areas.


Why Are There Security Warnings?

In our website you might see security warnings from time to time, depending on your browser settings: "Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely".

Click "No" in order to see all the content on the page.

A few words of explanation might help. The security message was more common around 2010 and has mostly disappeared with browser improvements since then.

Google Sites is based on a secure connection technology "https:". If a web page includes a non-secure item, such as an image from another website, then your browser may pop-up this dialog box. The message would help you recognize malicious web pages in sensitive situations such as in financial transactions. However, for the Issaquah ARC club website it only tells you that a web page contains some off-site resource item such as an image.

You can add our website to your "Trusted Sites" list so that you no longer receive these warnings.

Email Reflector

A desirable feature is a way for members to send email to the members, while protecting the addressee list from view.

Google Groups is designed for exactly this purpose. We created the group Issaquah Amateur Radio Club and members are welcome to join the email reflector and enjoy the benefits. All club members have received an invitation and most have joined.

Membership Roster

A desirable feature is to have a club membership roster, while carefully protecting private information. Our tradition is to update and distribute a printed roster every year in the spring time.

We do have "Google Groups" to support the idea, but allows only the group managers to see the distribution list.

Private Pages

Anyone can view this website, no special permissions are needed. Google Sites do not support individual page level permissions; if a site is public then all its pages are public. The work-around is to create another site in w7bi.com that is restricted to group access, and then link to its pages when you need to protect information. Too see this idea at work, here is what we've setup: here is a link to our private pages.