Hi!

Well, sorry about not posting last week. Got caught up in a whole lotta stuff like work and family and other things like that. I had hoped that with the end of college basketball that I could get caught up on things, but the wife insisted that we get the summer vacation confirmed, so spent a fair amount of time handling that. I am happy to report, for those who care, that it has been handled and the family is confirmed for a week on the beach before the Convention (Gulf Shores in June...anybody else gonna be there?). And, I'm almost done updating my commercial sites and getting THAT stuff out of the way.

So, what's new? You should see that there are some new ads on the home page advertising the new contest events at the National. I have a few other miscellaneous updates to make, including the March AP updates. One thing I am trying to do is to see if it makes any sense to use XML to do those updates. If so, I can have Rick make the updates in Excel and just send me that file, and then I can save that.

On the Twitter front, we are getting a lot of SEO folks following us. I think we have 14 followers now, and a couple of them are even model railroaders. On the other hand, the Facebook group is up to 175 members. Go figure which social network is more popular. I'm thinking that Twitter is probably not a method we are going to use to communicate with the membership. But, nobody seems to be taking leadership on the Facebook forum.

On the substantive front, both the wiki and the forum are now "production ready." Those following this blog can check both out at http://www.nmra.org/wiki/ and http://www.nmra.org/forum/ and even sign up if they should so feel inclined.

We are still working on the Content Management System (CMS). Those technically inclined may be interested to know that we have selected Drupal as our first stab at this. If it doesn't work for us, we'll look of Joomla. British Region is already looking at Joomla. My personal and professional opinion is that Drupal will serve us better, but we'll see. As soon as we can get the directories and permissions good, we'll start customizing it. This is important. Let me say it again....this is important. What it lets us do is to have the page owners do their updates themselves on the main part of the site. This lets the IPC concentrate on breaking news and allows the various dept heads to update things like member status, AP updates, Minutes, and so forth themselves.

What else? Well, we're looking at the NMRA database and seeing how we use that to make a user authentication file for the wiki/forum/site so that we can offer additional services to the membership. We'll sort that over the next month or so.

Tuning in to "As the NMRA Turns" we see that, like many soap operas, not much has changed in the last two weeks. Sniping is still occurring, and facts and reality are being summarily ignored. I swear, if these people were actual journalists, most of them would be fired for failing to check sources and facts before publishing articles. That's called irresponsible journalism at the least, and libel at some point. The big thing last week was whether or not the NMRA was in compliance with the PCI regs. I am pleased to announce that we are. As a surprise to a number of people who seem like they would like to see the NMRA in non-compliance with Federal regulations (we are, by the way...). Any credit card number you input on the NMRA site and NMRASTORE is secure. Anyway, Leone is putting up a vigorous front trying to defend some sense of reality, but he may get overrun eventually. Sort of like Johnson at Shiloh, but that's another story....

The good news is that May 1st is coming soon and the election will be decided one way or another. I figure that it will give the "talking heads" on TRAINEDITORS more fodder to use for making traffic on the Group. Don't know yet if it will have any more substantive content than it does so far, but it sure does make for interesting reading. Helps me out when the fiction section of the library is backed up.

Speaking of the Library (see what I did there...?), we should be able to unveil the new Library site shortly. We have talked with Brent, and have revamped the Library to put it in the same template as the rest of the site. As we did that (thanks, Scott!), we have made it easier to search and find things on that site. Frankly, the old site was a disaster. You couldn't find anything, had to click 5 or 6 time to get to someplace where you actually had reasonable content....gak. Let's be frank....it was ugly. Scott has straightened that out and it looks a WHOLE lot better. Anyway, stay tuned, its coming, as soon as Brent gives his ok.

OK, I'm going back to updating my commercial sites for another hour or so, then I have to get back to the backlog of NMRA requests. In the meantime, I'll keep rocking out to Styx on the radio and see what's coming next....

Hey, we have the Kentucky Derby and Cinco de Mayo coming...get festive!

Later.