Blogs

Updated!

1. Layout
2. System Upgrades
3. Security Updates

Also, awesome paddles from eons ago.

It is unsurprisingly normal on the University Florida campus, just days before the 2010 Southeast District Convention kicks off. Unbeknownst to most of the students here, there will be over 800 Kappa Kappa Psi and Tau Beta Sigma members on their campus the next coming weekend. That weekend, April 9th-11th, will be one of the busiest this Spring semester at the University of Florida. With the Orange and Blue Debut spring football game, the annual Dance Marathon benefiting the Children’s Miracle Network, in addition to the SED Convention, there will be plenty of hustle and bustle on what is usually a calm campus on the weekends. The University of Florida is no stranger to hosting conventions and conferences. But the Beta Xi Chapter of Tau Beta Sigma and the Alpha Eta Chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi have been working for an entire year on what is, in retrospect, just a speck on the long list of university events.

“[It’s like] turning in a senior thesis that 1000 people get to read. Work on it for better or worse…I’ll just be happy to turn it in,” says Andrew Schrager, Beta Xi convention coordinator, offering up an analogy for what his experience has been like. Schrager, as he prefers to go by, has been an active Sister since Fall 2006 and was immediately thrown into responsibility when he was elected as the chapter’s 1st Vice President of Service in Spring 2007 after another Sister stepped down. He served in the position for a year and half, making sure that the Beta Xi chapter was going above and beyond with regard to service. Schrager is no stranger to service as he is also an Eagle Scout. The history major, graduating this May, and headed to Florida A&M University for law school in the coming Fall loves service and prides himself on dedication. Strong-willed as he is(and a great dresser), it was no surprise that Schrager stepped up to submit the bid for hosting the 2010 Convention. “I didn’t anticipate us getting the bid since our DLC bid fell through,” he said. Schrager was also chair of the committee that put together the bid for District Leadership Conference. “There were some other really good bids for SED convention…[but] I felt excited about winning the bid, but I also had a knot it my stomach.”

And so it began.

About a month after the 2009 SED Convention at the University of South Carolina, Schrager and Taylor Sawyer, the Alpha Eta convention coordinator, divvied up the responsibilities and started reserving rooms. Schrager said that he wanted to showcase the University of Florida campus to the Southeast District and change convention to make it better for attendees. He was also concerned with space and wanted everyone to have adequate space to put on a successful convention without having to do too much walking. He envisioned the district convention resembling ComiCon, but he soon realized that getting what he wanted would be no easy task. “District convention is not [chapters at] a university putting on a convention. It’s the Southeast District Convention at the university…the university’s chapters do not get much say in what is going on.” In the beginning, Schrager thought that he would be more involved in the actual convention, hoping to make changes in the scheduling and business. He was quickly informed that this wouldn’t be the case. In addition, he found it to be frustrating, having to deal with so many people who aren’t always on the same page. “It can be difficult to coordinate between your chapter, your brother chapter, the district, and the university.” The chapters and the district may want one thing, while the university may have something else in mind. As a result, Schrager has elected to take on most of the responsibility as he as found it difficult for too many people to be involved in the coordination process. “It’s hard to keep everyone on the same page. The chapter’s role is primarily to raise funds.” It’s been a bureaucratic process, he says of dealing with the university. There is no one centralized person to talk to and each facility has its own coordinator. The Center for Student Activities and Involvement wants to be more hands on than they should be. And simple requests require hours of talking and negotiating with several different departments.

Despite the ups and downs, he anticipates a decent convention. They’ve tried to make it as cost efficient as possible, with better budgeting, generously sized hotel blocks, and just simply understanding the financial situations of others. The registration fee is only $25. In addition, they’ve brought back the reading band, for which over 200 Brothers and Sisters have signed up. “Everyone has the space they need and this is the cheapest convention in years, and as a result, more people can attend,” Schrager said of this year’s convention. While prepared, he does not expect next weekend to come without its bumps. “When you’re planning such a massive event, the minute details can be overlooked and cause a bump in the road down the line.” He laughs. “So nothing will go [exactly] smoothly.” He also mentioned that you have to prepare for extremes.

While Brothers and Sisters outside of Gainesville excitedly await the coming of convention, Schrager can’t say that he won’t be relieved when it’s all over. He’d like to relax and enjoy the time before he graduates. As the interview comes to a close, I ask Schrager if he has any advice for chapters looking to submit a bid to host convention in the future. He suggests that chapters reserve rooms early, even before they submit the bid, to ensure that they will have all the space they need, and to understand that hosting convention does not mean planning convention. “All the chapters could pitch in,” he says with a smile, “and we could build a facility with everything we need in a central location and just host convention there every year. It’d be like having our own Stillwater, Oklahoma in the SED with all the convention space we would ever need!” I laugh with him as we both anxiously away the looming 2010 Southeast District Convention.

Hello Everyone.

The site has undergone a lot of changes since the initial launch and I am officially giving it a release status of version 1.0! From initial launch, base functionality was intact, but since several features have been added on.

• The expansion of signup options.

• Wide implementation of the module Views 6.x-2.8. Pretty much everything is done with views. A complicated but very powerful tool.

• Addition of blogs. [EDIT for better explanation] Any user can create a blog entry. You can begin by clicking Create content. You must file that entry under a Blog Title. This blog title will appear under our new Primary Link, Blogs. When clicking the Blog Title, all entries under that title will be displayed. Any user can contribute to any Blog Title. However, there will be a tracker for your own blog entries as well.

  For example: Sister A creates a blog entry with title "Delicious Cake" and another entry with title "The Cake is a Lie." Sister B creates an entry with the title "Delicious Cake." Entries by both A and B will be displayed in "Delicious Cake." However, there is a page that will display all Sister A's blog posts from both "Delicious Cake" and "The Cake is a Lie."

  If my example didn't make sense, just click around and figure it out. We're all smart people here. Remember that blogs are public, so no sensitive information please.

I'm pleased with the site as it is right now, but I'm always looking for feedback. Any comments will be put into v1.01, and released by the end of the month. I would like to finalize registration sometime this week, so please continue registering for accounts! And if we could have users use the blogs on this site instead of another site, I think that would increase the usage of this site rather than having two sites that sisters don't check.

LISH
Charles

I recieved the backups from James from the old TBS site. Included files were sigs, documents, and sheetmusic. The midi files for songs were corrupted, so if you would like those back the songleader will need to make them.

This site was tested in Firefox 3 alone. Looking at it in IE7 is depressing. Recommendation: upgrade to FF or Chrome, hell even Opera. If IE isn't going to support CSS3 then to hell with them.

I have copies of the minutes but they are going to be difficult to enter in the website. I'm asking for help from anyone to enter in minutes on the site. Content creation is available to everyone who has an account.

Thank you to those who have currently re-registered with the site, and if you have registered, you will need to login and provide a user picture before your profile will be displayed on the sister page.

I'm glad to have this site on a sister server and I can provide this service for as long as you want it. I don't anticipate another situation requiring reentry of data. Now that it is here, it is manageable and as secure as anything online can be.

LISH
Charles

Use the site :)

The site has now been fully transitioned to my server. Rejoice! Unfortunately, I still don't have some data from the old server such as the user table and older files. That means each user will have to recreate their account.

The site is for sisters, so permissions have been simplified. If you're a sister, you get privileged information. If you're not a sister, you don't get any privileged information.

The main page can be sorted by content type. If you want to view just minutes, you can limit the view to just minutes. If you want to see just announcements, you can order it to view just announcements, etc.

Signups work well, now with custom fields including Name, Phone Number, and shift desired. These fields can be expanded to whatever fields you like. The creator of the signup can also administer attendance for the event with the future ability to track the number of signups attended by each user. Available and current signups also display correctly to Sisters in the sidebar.

The event calendar tracks all events, including signups and standard events. Support for all day events will be added soon.

Announcements carry support for images and files. So excel files can be attached to announcements now... Yeah.

The best feature, I believe, is the new mobile feature. When browsing the site from a supported mobile platform, the theme changes to a much more readable design. From your phone, you can create announcements, events, and signups and you can browse the site just like you would on a full browser.

As far as the older files go, if any other webmasters have ANY backups, that disc is floating around somewhere and it's gold at this point. Otherwise it will become the task of the songleader to remake the pdfs and midis.

LISH
Charles