06 Nov 2009
WDMA administrators can post news items. The news is for getting information out to the entire group. The news is available when folks visit the site. There is a choice to make the news item visible to the public or just for members. Posting public news keeps the community informed about what’s going on with the Wallace Deer Management Association along with other related news items of interest.
The WDMA members can choose to give their harvest to several charities, to the landowners or keep for themselves. I added a feature to keep track of donations. We also made a report to show what each of the charities or other donations receive.
A new feature displays the lunar phases for hunters interested in using that while choosing a stand. Some of the hunters use the phases of the moon when deciding when and or where to hunt.
03 Nov 2009
Google Apps for Domains has more than three plans for groups interested in using Google’s GMail, calendar and other web-based applications.
- The Standard Plan is available for free.
- The Business Plan is available for an annual cost of $50 per user per year. Each user gets more storage for email. The Business Plan also comes with 24/7 phone support and a 99.9% guaranteed uptime.
- There are also Education, Non-profit and Government plans. These plans have more features than the Standard Plan at less cost than the Business Plan.
WDMA is only using email from the Google Apps. Allowing Google to manage email alone saves the group from a lot of administrative work.
DreamHost makes it easy to configure WDMA’s domain to allow Google Apps to handle its email. You make the changes in DreamHost’s web-based administrative panel. From menu use Domains > Manage domains > click Edit under Web hosting for the domain. There are a number of options to work with Google Apps on the next page.
I created several email accounts for the officers and for administrative purposes. The group’s officers got a quick go through for using GMail.
21 Sep 2009
WDMA members can now easily add deer harvests and notes. All it takes is a couple clicks.
Adding a harvest makes it easy to enter or select relevant data. A basic report is also available to show the WDMA’s harvest information when entered. There’s a summary available too with accumulated totals. These reports are valuable tools for deer management. The reports also help communicate with the land owners.
Any member can post notes to share information of interest to others.
Ruby on Rails makes it so simple to add and link the data. Extending the WDMA website is easy without creating a complicated mess.
14 Sep 2009
Not all the features are working yet but the guys are using the website to coordinate their hunting. The site is live!
The larger audience uncovered some new issues. I appreciate the work-flow around Ruby on Rails more because of how smooth it is to resolve this stuff. The guys can see their reaction put to immediate use. The fixes and improvements are happening before their eyes.
Agile Web Development with Rails is a good resource for someone starting out with Ruby on Rails and the Agile style of development. That was especially useful since time is very tight as well as the budget. Doing quick prototypes of features helped the guys to see and test what they were asking for. We could abandon an unwanted direction and focus elsewhere without wasting time. Time that is in short supply.
The guys have a great understanding of deer management. Most used PCs casually and were definitely not into programming. Creating the web site with Ruby on Rails allowed us to stay in the domain of deer management.
30 Aug 2009
Picked up the family pack at the Apple Store in the Christiana Mall.
Backed everything up on the MacBook Pro first. Let Time Machine do its job and then cloned the hard drive. The process was pretty automatic. When it done there were only a couple of things that didn’t work but I knew that ahead of time. I had already downloaded updated versions of software to work on Snow Leopard.
Jacob did his MacBook next. He didn’t worry about backups or Time Machine. I didn’t hear about any problems. He was in his room working on it so I guess it went well.