Greetings from South Dakota!
Wow, this is cool, CENJARS has its own forum! Nice work Brian, the whole site is a massive improvement over the old one and it's really slick. I know this must have taken a lot of work.
I just wanted to say greetings to my fellow rocketeers back in the NY/NJ area from out here on the Great Plains. If I'm honest, there's only a few things besides family that I miss from NY and NJ; CENJARS launches (and events) are at the top of the list. Bagels, pizza, and fresh seafood are next, ha ha!
Would you believe that there's only one NAR section in the entire state of South Dakota? Would you also believe that purely by coincidence my house is about 15 minutes from the launch site of that club! I swear, I didn't know! The section is called the South Dakota Rocket Jockeys (#785), and they usually launch on the first Saturday of the month (except for winter....I'm told it gets down to -40° here and that's not including wind chill!) Unfortunately, this weekend's forecast is calling for some wicked thunderstorms and heavy rains out here, so they've already pushed it back to next week. Hopefully the weather back east is great for the annual CENJARS picnic.
Here's a few photos from the first launch I attended out here.
I'm looking forward to hanging out with everyone here in the forum.
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Good to hear from you John. You guys look like you found a good flying field. We're a little jealous at the moment - yesterday a couple of good rockets went into the pond, and it was pretty darn hot. But at least we don't have to worry about shattering our nose cones off in that frigid winter weather you'll be having in a few months.
Maybe your section could host a National event and we'll come out to see you. We'll bring bagels!
Regards,
Eric
Quote from John Falcone on August 4, 2022, 10:02 pmWow, this is cool, CENJARS has its own forum! Nice work Brian, the whole site is a massive improvement over the old one and it's really slick. I know this must have taken a lot of work.
Thanks John! It's been a lot of work but it's a labor of love! There still much more I want to and need to do. For example, Jeff just posted some video links in the forum which broke formatting. They should have been added using the [link] button in the editor; however, I'll have to look at the forum's filter PHP functions to see why it didn't sanitize his links. I wouldn't mind if there was a way to limit the display size of videos in the forum but YouTube has some really anal wrapper functions keeping them in control of the content. Besides, we now have a Gallery which can accept YouTube and Vimeo links.
The old site was exclusive. My goal here was to make the site inclusive. All one need to do is create an account. New users are limited until I or any Admin can be sure they're legitimate and then, change their roles to allow Gallery posting and other functions that may come in time. One thing I've been contemplating is a shoutbox for real-time communication with other members. I created one on the Aural Moon internet radio site, so it's pretty much an already done project. I just need to incorporate it such that WordPress updates don't break it. I've already learned a valuable lesson with the OpenWeatherMap plugin. I updated OWM and everything I had done went Uber-wonky. I'm hoping I've fixed that by using the OWM supported custom templates feature. Next update will tell...
Kevin helps out quite a lot too. He laid out the initial site theme, the Forum, the Calendar, and several other details. He knows the WordPress and plugins maze pretty well but he's no coder. I've been adding custom code that does things like the "next launch" displays on the main page. That is all driven from the Calendar too, so all that is needed is to add the event in the Calendar and my code mines that info from the database to present it on the Home page. I added a little more animation to the popup Calendar that's displayed when hovering over the Come Fly With Us At Our Next Launch! banner just yesterday. Also, I like the background image alot. It was posted in the Facebook photos and I believe it was from the 50th Anniversary launch. I'd love to get brief video of a similar vein to animate that background. I might have to stage something next launch.
Did you know that NAR has a website excellence award? I'd like to see CENJARS in contention; however, since it's been the same few clubs that win each year, I'm sure that it's a "good ol' boys club" thing with little chance of breaking into.
Quote from Admin on August 9, 2022, 9:17 am
For example, Jeff just posted some video links in the forum which broke formatting. They should have been added using the [link] button in the editor; however, I'll have to look at the forum's filter PHP functions to see why it didn't sanitize his links. I wouldn't mind if there was a way to limit the display size of videos in the forum but YouTube has some really anal wrapper functions keeping them in control of the content. Besides, we now have a Gallery which can accept YouTube and Vimeo links.
This issue has been fixed!