Lloyd Helferty, the RHN Bulletin Editor has distributed the August/September edition. You can view it online here with Adobe Acrobat Reader (available on-line free of charge from Adobe’s website).

The new web site is almost finished. Mostly we need text changes on the front page (there is too much). Other than that, here a quick update of the other sectiions:

RHN Bulletin: an archive of PDF versions of the newsletter. Some thought will have to go into whether some or all of each issue is converted to HTML.

Events: a listing of upcoming events, culled from the newsletter. We could use a web-based events calendar system for this, but someone would have to keep it up to date.

Photo Gallery: I experimented with several free galleries. If people are really interested, we can set one up for the club. For now, I created a Flickr.com “Richmond Hill Naturalists” photo Group. The photos that appear in the gallery page are pulled from this group, so if anyone in the club would like to contribute photos, please let me know by leaving a comment here.

Resources and Links: I’ve linked to a few Ontario naturalist resources, etc and a few other things — even a weekly cartoon! I wanted to have relevant headlines appear here using RSS feeds, but have only the greenpages.ca feed (it’s sort of ok).

RHN Blog: I think this feature could become the backbone of the site and serve as a simple content management system. We can set up posting accounts for anyone who wants to contribute stories for the newsletter, club news, field trip reports, etc. Blog headlines can appear automatically on the frontpage of the site. Also we can allow anyone — or any RHN member to leave comments in the blog.

Membership: web version of the membership form.

Contact Us: a way for users to leave comments about the site or messages for the club executive (not finished)

So that is where things stand now. There is still some tweaking of graphics and colours to do. I’m really hoping people will start sharing photos via Flickr so we can use some other images on these pages. Comments and suggestions from RHN members would be appreciated. Finally we still need to register a domain, pay for a hosting service and move the content.

This is the initial intro message on the blog to welcome members and the general public to the new site. Any RHN member can be authorized to post in this blog. It provides an informal, but structured place to post meeting updates, field trip reports, sightings, etc. It is also possible to embed images, sound and video into these blog posts. In addition, authorized RHN members will be able to post comments on all blog entries posted in this space. Blog headlines can also dynamically appear on the main RHN site page (and can be accessed as RSS feeds by other sites and individuals).