WebMaster Notes

SUMMER To-Dos:
*Go through entire website and change old volunteer names & email addresses to new ones for all committees, etc., using names in Signup Genius. Simultaneous searching in Gmail is an easy way to get email addresses.
*Get updated officer biographies and photos if possible.
*

Save for updates:

Playground Renovation Committee Begins Work


The new Playground Renovation Committee will focus on the upcoming renovation of the school playground facility. Committee members will be meeting with potential vendors, reviewing design options, and presenting recommendations to the PTO and school principal, as well as working with PTO leadership on budget development and fundraising. 
Committee members are: Jill Appert (Committee Chair), Sandy Augustein-Collins, Peter Gigante, Jeff Keller, Sean Ryan, and Chris Weaver.
Many thanks to all parents who expressed interest in our Playground Renovation Committee. 






Save for Annual update. Will need to post again at the end of the year (with new SIG!)
PTO Volunteer Position Signups OPEN for 2015-16
Sign up ONLINE!
New Parents? Don't be shy! Come give it a try!
Birchwood's PTO recruits parent (and grandparent!) volunteers on a rolling basis and during an annual spring "Volunteer Drive" to be PTO committee chairs and members, and/or "day-of-event" helpers.  You can sign up online or email us to volunteer or find out more about a position. The current committee chairs will be happy to answer any questions about what's involved!
IMPORTANT NOTE TO LAST YEAR'S VOLUNTEERS: If you've never volunteered (especially if you're new to the school), it's a fantastic way to find out more about Birchwood and get to know other parents.  Experienced parent volunteers are great resources of information for everything you need to know. 
If you plan to continue in a role you held last year, that's great!  Please sign up to confirm that you're definitely still interested, and to help us keep the volunteer signup organized (it's a lot of people to keep track of).
Long-Term To-Do List:
1.  Keep eye on calendar updates.  Shilpa is handling all. 
. Write instructions how to upload & edit images


TIPS & TRICKS:

"Jumping" or Linking to files or text within your site  (this has been pasted into the Google Drive Handbook):Pit

You can link to files on your site and to different areas of your site so visitors can more easily navigate your content.

Linking to files on your site Linking to text on your site

If you want to quickly and automatically create links to significant areas on your page -- often called anchor links -- you might consider adding a table of contents to your page. However, if you want to customize these anchor links or use them to link to areas that are not formatted as text headers, you'll need to add these links individually:

  1. Navigate to the page that you want to be the destination of your anchor link and click the Edit page icon, which looks like a pencil.
  2. Click Edit HTML on the formatting toolbar.
  3. In your page's HTML, you'll need to surround the text that you want to be the destination of your link with a snippet of HTML. For example, if you wanted the destination of your link to be a line of text talking about your dog, Fido, it would look like this:
    <a name="AnchorName">The early years of Fido the magnificent</a>
    In this example, you'll want to replace AnchorName with a name that reflects this link's destination.
  4. Click Update to return to your page, then click Save to preserve your changes to the page.
  5. Navigate to the page where you want to place the link and click "pencil icon Edit page."
  6. Highlight the text you want to turn into a link and click Link.
  7. Select the Web address tab and enter the full URL of your new anchor link in the box below Link to this URL. If you use Google Apps, the full URL of your anchor link will be http://sites.google.com/a/DomainName/YourSite/Page#AnchorName, where DomainName is the name of your organization's domain, YourSite is the name of your site, Page is the page that contains the destination of your link, and AnchorName is the name you used to mark the destination of your anchor link. If you are not a Google Apps user, the full URL of your anchor link will be http://sites.google.com/YourSite/Page#AnchorName, where YourSite is the name of your site, Page is the page that contains the destination of your link, and AnchorName is the name you used mark the destination of your anchor link.
  8. Click OK.
  9. Continue editing your page or click Save to preserve your changes.

I had a problem where I would insert a Picasa Slideshow in Google Sites and then, even though the Album is public, the slides just won't show, no error message, nothing, just no slides.

Background
To create my albums and edit the permissions I would login to Google and choose "Photos" from the black bar at the top.  This then redirected me to Google+ Photos.  The whole time I thought that I was using Picasa, embedded in Google+.  This was my first mistake.  Google+ Photos and Picasa Web Albums look similar but they are not the same.

Here's the problem and the solution
The Picasa Slideshow uses "Picasa Web Albums", which is separate from Google+.  When I went to Picasa Web Albums (Google for Picasa Web Albums and click the link) there was a Privacy Policy window that I had to accept first.  After doing that, my slideshow in Google Sites started working immediately.

In hindsight, the following two things were clues:
The "Share" link in Google+ Photos is something like "plus.google.com/photos/<long number>/albums/<long number" and the link generated by the Picasa Slideshow gadget is something like "picasaweb.google.com/<long number>/<album name>.  If I pasted the Google+ Photos link into the settings box that pops up before inserting the Picasa Slideshow in a page, then it would say that URL is invalid.

If I pasted the link, generated by the Picasa Slideshow, into a browser, I got a page not found 404 error.  If I pasted the Google+ Photos link into a browser it all worked fine.

Thus, big thing to remember - Google+ Photos is not the same as Picasa Web Album.
Subpages (2): savedmaterials Workspace
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