Seemed like there were more than 20 people.

I’ll book another of these “ATE” meetings.

What’s going to happen is you’re going to loose important traffic and you wont even know how to measure it since they will be at someone else’s site. They could even be your competitor.

siteware.com.br

For instance if there is a site called siteware.com, then don’t bother with siteware.ca since people will still go to siteware.com. Even if you say “Siteware dot C A. That’s a dot C A domain and not a dot com”. They will still go home and type siteware.com.

I actually own Siteware.com and I am aware that there have been some other business called Siteware in different countries. I get some of their email and probably some of their Web traffic.

Here is an example of a typical email. What’s happening is they’re typing siteware.com but forgetting the .br.

I’ve been getting stuff like this for quite some time. I asked them if I could show these screen prints so here they are.

The event right after is called ModLab and it’s the open house for one of the labs where I work on my projects.

It was fun but I found that it didn’t run smoothly since ModLab starts a little early often and you can’t easily have the two activities going at the same time.

I talked about SEO a bit. I mentioned the importance of the H and A HTML tags. Also the vocabulary of A tags in your in-degree of lings.

In a nutshell Tara Vachon boarded her pet for a temporary stay at the Ottawa Humane Society and they euthanized her pet.

This is so sad and unfortunate that I can hardly bare to read the story. I am sad for Tara Vachon’s loss.

Of course other people are appalled and even outraged by this event. My friend from high school said he had sent a letter and was waiting for a response.

I went to the Ottawa Humane Society Web site to see if there was a response. I could not find anything. Just in case the organization wasn’t very versed in the use of Blogs and Web sites, I sent them a note to find out if they have a response in their Blog. Here’s the dialogue.

Yesterday at 5pm to email I found at their site:

http://www.ottawasun.com/2012/04/13/they-cut-my-dogs-life-in-half

Is the above article about your organization? — Darcy Whyte, Inventor, Artist

Today at 10:30am:
Yes.

Mandy Chepeka

Manager: Communications, Ottawa Humane Society, 245 West Hunt Club Rd., Ottawa, ON K2E 1A6, Tel: 613-725-3166 ext. 261, Fax: 613-725-5674, Emergencies: 613-725-1532, www.ottawahumane.ca

Today at 10:35am:

There’s no response to the article in your blog?

People are outraged by the mistake.

This is a serious event and I was disappointed that there had not been a response in the Blog. Not even a mention. Not their side of the story, not condolences, not an explanation.

This is an example of an organization may not be benefiting fully from their internet presence. They missed an opportunity to explain their position, express regrets and talk about improvements to their process.

They wrongly think that the blog is only for pumping sunshine. But it can also for responding to events such as this.

I know some people are going to argue that there hasn’t been much time for them to make a response.

1) They can respond to the situation even before traditional news does.

2) It’s important to respond fast. This is a sensitive issue.

3) A lack of a response through that channel reduces the authenticity of their Web site and the trustworthiness of the organization.

The ATWE format is fun as people just ask me (and each other) questions. I am booking some events with formal presentations as well. The last event with a formal presentation brought the venue to capacity so I may need to enforce the RSVPs or get a bigger venue.

Dan dropped in and decided to create a new blog on fish and fisheries. I’m supposing he will come to the next meet-up to set it up or start learning to add content.

Steve came by with his new camera. It’s a cool sporty camera that works underwater as well. I helped him crop, re-size and insert one of his first images into Canadian Energy Issues. We used GIMP.

To crop an image with GIMP you first load the image. I like to have a GIMP icon on the desktop and then drag one or more JPG files from a camera onto the GIMP icon. Once in GIMP, you grab the selection tool (top left tool) and draw a square around the area of the image you wish to keep. In the menu select Image then Crop to Selection. When the selection tool is active you can have it constrain the aspect ratio using the check box towards the bottom of the toolbox.

To re-size an image with GIMP simply use the menu Image then Scale Image. There is a little chain link beside the height and width box. That locks in the aspect ration so you’ll usually want the chain link to be in the “linked” state.

When you exit the image it will prompt for saving and you’re ready to upload the image to WordPress.

Steve also invited Rachael who is also going to work with WordPress. Her band  iCarumba! will be attending the open mic at the Royal Oak Canal (221 Echo Drive) on Tuesday the 17th at 8:30pm.

Sanjay came by to work on his blog and the them DynamiX. I helped him work through some of the theme configuration including custom menu and widgets.

I’ve been using EventBrite to handle RSVPs for the events. It’s working out quite well so far. It’s way less work than using email. Last night we had 5 people in total and there was one no-show according to the EventBrite registration. I’ve heard of other people’s efforts at organizing meetups and events and getting a lot of no-shows. This can be an issue with venue reservations and so forth so the plan is that if this turns into an issue I will start adding a $1 fee to the registration.

Canadian Energy Issues

Steve Aplin did a brief presentation on how his blog has impacted his interests. He mentioned that it lead him to many new connections and opportunities. He also showed a custom plugin that he added to show Ontario’s energy production and CO2 production.

Inserting images in your blog

I did a presentation on how to insert images.

-The use of eye-fi cards in cameras. This isn’t necessary but it’s a great convenience to have your pictures automatically transferred to your computer. It also can clear the camera’s memory as it transfers so it gives the appearance of an infinite camera memory.

-Re-sizing images with Gimp. Gimp can also be used to remove red-eye, crop, change brightness, contrast and many other types of image editing. I showed how to drag and drop images onto Gimp to save steps.

-Re-sizing images with Image Resizer. This is a cool drag and drop tool for shrinking images for insertion into your blog. I have version 5 and I noticed the site has version 6. I’ve not tried version 6 yet.

-Adding pictures to a post using the built in WordPress image uploader.

-Adding pictures to a post using “Faster Image Insert” plugin.

We also talked about a few other things such as how to insert a video from TED.com or youtube.com. In a nutshell you visit the video in it’s repository and click the share or embed button in the video. You will be given an embed code that you can paste into your page or post. You need to switch the edit session to HTML view (instead of Visual view). You can change back to Visual view once you’ve pasted.

Backing up came up as well. One way is to go to Tools/Export in the WordPress Dashboard. This only backs up your text data content. You must also back up the file system that contains all your images. You can use FTP or SSH for that. I’ve been using WinSCP which should work for both FTP and SSH.

There are a lot of people in our group that don’t have a blog yet or need help so I have booked two “Ask the WordPress Expert” sessions where I will not give a specific presentation but instead we can help people with their questions.

Some of us went for an after-social at the Highlander.

We currently have 5 seats left for the Monday WordPress meet-up in Ottawa by the way.

The current plan is:

6pm: Social

6:30: Presentation on Inserting Pictures Efficiently (Darcy Whyte)

7:00: Case study (Steve Aplin)

7:15: Social

1) Blog oriented sites vs. Page oriented sites. Dashboard/Settings/Reading allows us to decide if a user visiting our URL sees the blog or a specific page. In the event you decide on a specific page, it’s a good practice to create a dummy page called “blog” or “articles” and set that as a “posts page” (do this on the same screen). This allows the user to see the blog content.

2) Content in sidebars, footers and so forth: You can use Dashboard/Appearance/Widgets to place content into sidebars.  It’s simple drag and drop. How many sidebars you have is template specific. What content you can drag is plug-in specific.

3) You can have a clickable image in your sidebar using the Text item. The following HTML shows a clickable picture. The picture is uploaded to Dashboard/Media and then we get the URL of the media after uploading. We add the URL of the media to the “src” attribute. Add the URL of any page to the “href” attribute to have the image click through to the page. Below that is an example of a clickable email. The “p” tag means paragraph and it adds a space just before the title “Inventor-artist”.

<a href=”http://mambohead.com/about/”><img src=”http://mambohead.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/bubbles001_160.jpg”></a>
<p>Inventor-artist.
Contact: <a href=”mailto:darcy@siteware.com?subject=Mambohead”>darcy@siteware.com</a>

4) Pages are hierarchical. Some templates may have flyouts to render child pages. Pages are orderable (each page has an order number that you fill in).

5) Posts have three navigation methods that can be given to the user. Reverse chronological, category and tags. Categories are also hierarchical.

6) Avoid deep hierarchies.

7) Some templates allow you to suppress pages or categories from the user interface. But you can also use a custom menu to prune your user interface. Dashboard/Appearance/Menus can be used to create a menu. The menu can contain pages, categories or a custom URL. With custom URL you can add a Tag, an external Web site or a link to anywhere in your site.  After you create and save a menu you can then assign it to Menu 1 position or Menu 2 position. In many templates these are just two layers in the header.