This took a lot longer than expected.

The old website had grown in size and complexity over the years using many different approaches to website authoring  and asp.net applications. It was fundamentally flawed in that it was not compliant with web standards such as CSS and as a result would not always work on all browsers and platforms. It was also hard to maintain. For this reason the site had to be rebuilt from the ground up and as it turns out there was a lot of ground and up.

After putting the old site together and maintaining it over the years with some design assistance from Richard Carvalo (who has since left Cal Fire and this website)  I at first thought I could accomplish this myself. After working under this delusion for a few months it became obvious that I lacked the artistic talent and knowledge of standard web authoring practices and time in my life to do this in a reasonable time frame . So we hired a pro to work with me.

Alexis Kestler  ( http://www.alexiskestler.com/) has put in many hours with me over the past months and produced all the artistic elements of this site including the animated intro and page designs and graphics. She also has kept me on the righteous path of conforming to accepted web standards .  She has put together the great majority of this site. I would recommend her for anyone needing a website.

My area of expertise has been the behind the scenes programming of applications and features of the site including the membership logon and control, the grievance database, member profile self-editing , the auto loading of content into the news pages and database driven home page, and the random loading of photos into the home and members only home pages. More nuts and bolts stuff. If you're interested, the site makes extensive use of ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server. Alexis designed the pages using Dreamweaver and I would convert he pages to ASP.NET pages for the functionality using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. It seems to work pretty well.

There are many challenges to building this site . It is fairly complicated and has the ability to present a variety of content from many different authors without the intervention of specially trained personnel. Remember, there is no paid staff dedicated to web site maintenance.This is something else that had to be built into the site. Once this site is up and running the only recurring expenses are the fees from the hosting service which are about $80 /month.  We want to save your hard earned dues money after all.

Some new features -

1. We have an animated intro. You can skip the intro if you like by clicking the Skip Intro link at the left bottom of the intro. You can also set your Favorite or bookmark to the actual content home page which is at www.cdffirefighters.org/cdffirefighters.aspx

2. The news pages should be easier for non-web-savvy folks to upload content to including photos and other graphic objects. This should make it easier for all our contributing union officers to get content with graphics to members in a timely manner.

3. The member logon now has a Mail Me My Password button that will email your password to you provided we have your email in our database. If you haven't done so yet , please put your email address along with other info into the Edit Profile page here. Requires member logon.

4. The grievance database. This application has great potential. The goal is to have every grievance that this union has pursued in a database that every member can use to look up an issue and see how it has been previously resolved. The user will also have the ability to click a link and then have a PDF of that grievance at their disposal to present to management. We are most of the way there. The database is up and working but the PDFs of the original hard copy grievances have yet to be scanned. We are working on it now and hope to have this complete in the first half of fire season.

5. RSS feed on the home page from the IAFF. This is the list of articles that appears on the bottom left side of the home page. It is updated every ten minutes and contains summaries and links to current articles at the IAFF web site.

6. In the course of putting together the artwork for the site it became obvious that our union logo was looking a little shabby. We commissioned a graphic artist, Matt Bail (click here for website ) to redo our logo in various forms. He has done outstanding work and we look forward to more work with him in the future.

7. The navigation menus expand as you click on items with sub-pages so you can see where things are located on the site. Clicking the Members link for instance shows all the sub pages of that section so you can go directly to what interests you.

8. Something you cannot see but will help greatly in getting timely content to the site is a database driven administration page where the lead homepage articles and hyperlink lists can be updated by anyone with authorization and requiring only minimal training.

9. New photo gallery. The new gallery is database driven and will make maintenance and searching much easier. It will also make uploading of photos to the gallery much easier and so we will be able to post the photos you submit much faster. Hey, the 2008 season has begun and we don't have any photos yet. Send them as always to webmaster@cdffirefighters.org

10. Each News page has a link titled "Printer-Friendly Version of Displayed Content that does just that - it opens the displayed content in a new window without any page header or navigation links so it can be printed cleanly. By popular demand.

We are also working on other features that we will bring online as they are ready. Some of these are:

1. An outgoing RSS feed from our site listing the latest president briefing, supervisor , retiree, rank & file and 5 most recent news stories . The feed will contain short descriptions of each, along with hyperlinks. This RSS feed can be read from any web browser or Blackberry, iPhone, etc.  We still have to determine how the content will be loaded but it should not take too long to get out there. We will have a link on the home page when we do.

2. News pages for Districts and Chapters. I will create a news page for any District or Chapter that wants one. You just have to promise to actually post stuff on it. Send me an email if interested - webmaster@cdffirefighters.org

3. Someone besides me will answer the webmaster email. You would be amazed at  the amount of filter-savvy junk that I get. I hope to have help checking this email soon so I won't take so long to respond to you.

4. A members-only photo gallery where members can upload their own photos to share. The technology is already in place, we just need to think out how to prevent abuse. This will also help get photos up faster and as good acceptable ones come up we can transfer them to the public gallery.

5 Database driven union officer contact lookup. We currently just show plain html page listings. The database will make it easier to maintain and search. We'll get this as soon as the other stuff above is tackled.

OK, there are going to be things wrong with this site. As I write this I know that the Honor Guard and Auxiliary pages are broken . I will get them back up as soon as Alexis gets back from New York since I lost the art work for them. Sorry about that.  We have tried to go over the site but there will be broken links and such because it is a large complicated site. Please send me an email if you find broken stuff or if you have suggestions for improvement or added features.

Your webmaster,

Bill Tomkovic