Websites by club members
Websites by club members (members in green, link to their linked sites in (blue)
Skip Mundy
The purpose of offering the following websites I’ve built in the last few years is to encourage SMMUG members to take a shot at preserving significant events in their lives by building websites. It’s really not that tough. I started with the Apple program iWeb. Unfortunately, Apple cast off that program, and it was picked up and improved by some former employees who put out a product called Sandvox. It did almost everything I wanted to do with web design, but when a program called Sparkle arrived, I knew this had the features I’d dreamed about. There are plenty of free tutorials and templates for both Sandbox and Sparkle available for people just beginning in website-building.
What else is involved? Buy a domain (mine costs about $20/yr.)
Find a host (mine is GoDaddy for $8-10/mo. – I’ve got 15-20 active sites and could add that many more for no additional cost). That price includes 24/7 expert help with any problems. They have been amazingly helpful.
So, you’ve got something to share with family (or maybe the world). Give it a try. You don’t have to be a power user or an expert.
Singer Car
There is a back story to this site – one of my earliest efforts started 45 years ago! I had bought a 1954 British Singer Roadster which was in pieces and parts in various boxes with a rusted and rotten frame and body. I faced a massive restoration with very little skill and needed some way to organize steps, parts sources, correspondence, research, costs, etc.
I began with paper and pencil and through the years graduated to an Apple IIe, then a Mac Plus, then a Mac SE where I met FileMaker. This program allowed me to list parts and organize photos and total costs, and a lot more. I was just starting to learn the program (with a lot of help from other SMMUG members) when FileMaker announced a contest with the first prize of two plane tickets anywhere in the U.S. Since I’d already built a pretty hefty FileMaker database, I decided to enhance it with some graphics and do some relational connections to the various parts and enter it into the contest. As a fledgling Mac user, I didn’t expect to win but rather to use this contest as motivation and a learning experience. To my great surprise, I won 2nd place and started to receive boxes and boxes of software and books, but alas, no plane tickets!
Years passed, children were raised, other sports cars were built and rebuilt, families moved across town and the Singer mostly remained in boxes while parts were bought from all over the world. Finally, in 2016 I ran out of excuses and promised my wife that the Singer would finally get restored.
I tore apart the FileMaker databases and put all of the lists and photos and notes and sources into a website meant to just be a reference to me and the various mechanics whose expertise would be necessary to get the old girl rolling again.
It’s still a work in progress, but as you can see if you follow this site to the last page, it is starting to look like a viable British roadster 64 years after its birth. The advantage of a website is that whoever works on my Singer has access to ALL my background information.
Years rolled by. I built special websites as my children got married and tribute sites as friends and family died. I learned to use websites as journals that eventually morphed into blogs. I used a website to market and sell an inherited dragon collection. After retirement, my websites became travelogues – some spun off into books and then galleries of my drawings and photographs. I’ve done sites to help others like the Historic Preservation Alliance. However, now I just make sites to help me an others remember key events.
This is a quick sharing site for my best photos from the last decade. It was suggested by Matt Kloskowski as the first step in his new class Fresh Start. Thanks, Matt, for the nudge. The site features the best 10 photos from each of the last 10 years. Click on a year below to see them. The criteria I used was very subjective, but I chose “artful” compositions I liked and generally tried to avoid “family” and “calendar” examples.
This site was done after a particularly wonderful trip to New York. It started by modifying a free template offered on the Internet by a young person vastly more skilled than me. I have no idea (and don’t really need to know) how the various wipes and peepholes are programed. They are just available via Sparkle.
Here is another idea which hopefully pushes beyond the annual boring Christmas letter.
Panama
This is my latest effort that incorporates some more slick animations offered through free templates to bozos like me. Thanks, dude!
Gary Rozenzweig of Mac Most
Gary Rozenzweig has come down to the Springs to talk & demo for us various Apple topics. He runs a website full of cool and very useful videos, Apple News, Apple Rumors, a weekly newsletter, and a Q&A forum. Take a look at macmost.com, and you will find a wealth of easy to understand Mac tech information. There are also pay-for courses on important things for Macs, and sometimes free courses, like the FREE course on Mac security, which is becoming more important every day.
Jeff Jensen
A site for a friend who runs a tree service in Colorado Springs. Trees Plus Landscaping . Advice about fire mitigation, and a video of the Waldo Canyon fire to illustrate what can happen at the edge of Colorado Springs.