Web Construction

This page addresses the issues associated with the building and maintenance of this web site. It also accounts for the process used to build the site and the theory behind how and why it was built in this manner.

The Layout/Design

Based on the Edward Tufte model for display of visual information, this web site is designed to provide as many links as possible on the front page and on every page. The navigation is constant throughout the site, so no matter where you are you needn't back track in order to navigate. Ease of use is a huge consideration here. The other consideration is having all the information on a single page, for instance the tournament summaries include the summary, results, photos, and captions. One needn't move from page to page. These large pages may take 10-15 seconds to download, but you only have to do it once. Another design consideration is managing the 7,000+ images in such a manner that visitors can access larger versions, without having to take a hit on their bandwidth. Clicking on an image (they're all expandable now) always yields a new window. The advantage is that if the images weren't loaded in it's own window visitors would have to hit "back" and potentially reload the page main page. This site is designed with the idea that bandwidth will increase for us all over time. And so what may take 10 seconds to download in 2005 will only take 2-3 seconds in 2008 (a prediction).

The Archives

The Archives are the core of this site. Below is a brief account of the phases of this monumental task. Basically it's a matter of building the library for the purposes of achieving an organized research facility.

Phase II of Archives

(BTW - Those of you that wonder about this project, just ponder all the academic research papers that go unread. At least this research won't be gathering dust in some dark corner of a basement library. Also, who's to say it's not at least as scholarly and valid? Doctoral theses have doubtless been much less substantial than the history presented on this web site.)

Image Naming

Finding your photo will now be very simple

With nearly 3,000 photographs on the website, and more being added each month, there was really no way to provide a quick method for members to find their favorite photos of themselves and/or their playing partners. Thanks to Google's Image Search and some clever hacking Walburg has scored another victory for the nerds. The new "Photo Finder" drop-down menu (see above top of main page) makes finding photos incredibly easy. Simply click in the box, enter the first letter of the person's last name, select the person whose photos you wish to view and voila! From there you simply click on the photo until it displays in it's full size. Trick: Most images exist as a 320 x 240 and as an 800 X 600. If the image you pull up is only 320 and you'd like to view the larger image (if it exists) then in the URL Address window, add "-lg" in front of the ".jpg". This will conjure the larger image. Beware: This feature is bandwidth intensive, as it loads not only a thumbnail of the image, but also the page which it is on. Usually those pages are the tournament pages complete with all photos of that event. If you have a speedy connection there won't be a problem, but if you're on a modem, you'll have to be a little patient. Also: Some members have yet to have a photo on the web site, and so some names will come up empty.

How it all works

Maximum Length of File Name:

The following file name serves as an example of the most characters an image may contain. Anything longer will not be properly burned onto CD. It's 55 characters long.

Dscn0454-efriedman-phigaki-sdesimone-scoresheet-lg2.jpg

Naming images

Properly naming images not only helps build and maintain the site, but recently (2/2003) the Google's Image Search was added to the site. In order to maximize the effectiveness of image searching all the image file names had to be altered. The renaming optimized their meaning and stripped them of unnecessary characters, like the "DSCN0158" part of the name "DSCN0158sdesimone01.jpg". In the future, to preserve chronological sequencing, files will include two or three digits (based how many images there were). Recently I've been renumbering them to start from 01. All of the tedious renaming of image file names can quickly be accomplished using "Flash Renamer" software or the like. Once they are renumbered go through all images and add info about who is in picture and what their doing. Names are always first initial, full last name, like "ebiglin", "sdesimone", all separated by dashes. The base name of all images would contain the image number, the names of the people in the photo and the "-lg" code if the image was the large version (800 x 600 rather than the standard size of 320 x 240). Once the base name is given, the descriptive codes (see below) are applied, but only to the larger versions of the files.

Below is the master list of words added to image names. These are usually only applied to the larger version of the image. Were we also to apply the descriptive code to the small versions the Google Image Search would find the smaller versions in addition to the larger versions. It is assumed that people looking for images will really want to see the larger version and so this will filter out the small version.

(i haven't been doing this recently, left off around beginning of 2003, or thereabout)

Examples: A typical image file name might now appear as follows (these are not real photos. Also, newer naming convention (see below) includes date and camera model info):

Advancing system of image file naming (10/10/04)

Over the past five years I've developed a better and better system of naming the files in such a way to provide maximum information in the file name. File names can be up to 55 characters long, and generally that provides enough space for all photos except group shots, where over 4 people are included in the shot. As of October 2004 the file names generally tell me the following information:

Past naming conventions

In the past my naming system was very basic. The following are examples of a much more primitive naming convention. One can generally assume the following about photo prior to October of 2002. (when the club purchased the Canon PowerShot s30): 1). the photo was taken by me, 2). it was not named as well so that in order to figure out when it was taken you need to look at the path, i.e. which tournament folder the image is located. For shots taken. The best resource for which camera used on these early photos is the web page Aaron's Camera History, which gives approximate dates of when each camera was in use.

Camera abbreviations

s30 - Canon Powershot s30
g3 - Canon Powershot G3
cr or rbl - Canon Digital Rebel

Photographer abbreviations

none - Aaron Walburg
ka - Kelly Alvarez (using the Canon Powershot s30)
jp - Jim Peretti (using the Canon Powershot s30)
rt - Ryan Tabibian (generally using the Canon Digital Rebel)

Other abbreviations

d1 - "Day 1". If the event is a 2-day tournament I'll sometimes separate the days by adding d1 and d2 to the names.
d2 - "Day 2"
240 - image size is 240 x 180 pixels (an older naming method)
320 - image size is 320 x 240 pixels
lg - "large" version - image size is 800 x 600 pixels, or, after April 2004 800 x 533 (when the Digital Rebel is used)
ss - "Super Size" version - image size is 1600 pixels wide, often by 1200 tall
 

Anomalies to the image-naming convention

Some people share the same last name and first initial, and so the second person who comes along has their abbreviation modified. Here are the names we modify (anomalies in bold):

John Scott (member) gets to keep his abbreviation of jscott
Janet Scott (of UCSF) get janscott
Jeff Bordalampe (member)  keeps jbordalampe
John Bordalampe (Jeff's son) gets jnbordalampe
Mark Steppan (member) keeps msteppan
Matt Steppan (Mark's son) gets mtsteppan

Players with tragically long names
Occasionally a player will have an unusually long name. In Such instance I always have to make creative tweaks so the names fit into the database and web formatting structure. As a last resort I'll abbreviate the first name into an initial, for instance "Adegboyega Aladegbami" became "A. Aladegbami." Below is a list of the longest names since 2001.

Adegboyega Aladegbami
Katherine Hetherington
Hank Vanderhulst Jr.
Russell Greenwood
 

Photo Finder Will Work Better over Time
~3/1/03?

The Photo Finder (top of main page) relies on Google's Image Search. The images on this site were all recently renamed to optimize indexing. This renaming took about a week of assertive efforts, as there are approximately 4,000 images. The photo finder may not proved the precise link to the image when you attempt to click on it, however it will take you to the page where the image exists. You simply need to scroll down and locate the image on the page it takes you to. Over time, as Google re-cache's the images, the photo finder will work much better, but for now it's a little rough. 

Google Upgrade makes our 'Photo Finder' utility more powerful
2/18/04

Amazing foresight on behalf of our webmaster has enhanced our Photo Finder (drop down menu above). This utility relies entirely on the Google search engine which combs our site for key words embedded in the titles of our images. The feature isn't incredibly accurate, however it's better than nothing and quite clever I might add. Google recently upgraded it's search engine, adding 1 billion web pages to it's search engine. This directly improved our Photo Finder, for our web site, which has grown tremendously, was re-cashed by Google's search engine. Moreover many of the images were renamed (tediously) so that the key words were embedded into the image file names (see naming images section). What results is a more robust and accurate search of our images. One example of an imperfection in the utility is that often images seem unrelated to the desired query. For instance the search for "Statuesque", which was meant to key into images in which a golfer displayed a classic swing garners an image of Kelly Alvarez, Russell Greenwood, and Bob Sternbach hamming it up at Bennett Valley last year. These gentlemen has no business showing up in a section for classic swings.

(FYI, the utility conjures a thumbnail of the image it found. Click on the thumbnail generally enlarges the picture. If that fails then you can still obtain the larger version by scrolling down on the page. Also, some of the categories are empty. Over time more images will appear. This is a growing repository.)

History of Club News Converting to Web from Paper Newsletters:

• 10/23/2001: of 596 NCGA associate clubs, 58 have websites.(9.7%)
• 1/1/2005: of 840 NCGA associate clubs, 153 have websites. (18.2%)

The NCGA discontinued its paper newsletter contest following the announcement of the winners at the NCGA board meeting in October of 2003. UCGC submitted a printout of several web write-ups, and received a third place trophy. UCGC thus remains the only web site ever to receive an award from the NCGA.
 

Web Site Maintenance Issues

The Server
This site has been hosted exclusively on Microsoft IIS platform. Generally it's the most current version of this platform. It has been hosted on various computers, all managed by Aaron Walburg. As of May 2004 it's been hosted on a Dell Dimension 8300, which is running Windows XP. This means that only 10 concurrent web sessions are possible at any given time, but the site isn't in breech of this but a few times each week.

HTML Software:
Since I was always wary that some day another person might need to take over the web site, I've used Microsoft FrontPage for building the site. It's not my first choice, however the interface is fairly simple and I do appreciate the Shared boarders feature, which makes the navigation feature (left column) easy to add to every page of the site.

FrontPage Trouble Shooting:

One issue which was recently encountered and resolved was a problem I was having accessing some of the pages inside of the FrontPage application:

Problem: While trying to open a directory while within FrontPage, received following message, and the directory failed to open:

"The server "" timed out. The current request did not complete successfully."

I performed a web search for the above message and adding "FrontPage folder access"

I found a site which indicated that recalculating the web seemed to fix the problem. With this solution, which wasn't quite decipherable to me:
owsadm.exe -o recalc -w / -p 80 -m <DOMAIN>

So did a search on:
"how to recalculate the web xp" and "recalculate the web xp"

Then on own just did this, which solved the problem:
1. Start > Programs > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services
2. Burrow to specific web, in this case "ucgc"
3. Right click and select "recalculate web"

This is a maintenance issue, and will probably best be performed at least annually. Certainly anytime the web is moved to a new server, this procedure should be performed.

See also Optimal Web Settings for additional information.