Once more into the breach, my friends!

OK, so I'm not the world's greatest blogger, I guess. How many times do I have to fall on my sword?

Anyway, it's now been a month since my last post, and that is not what I signed up to do. BUT...it has been a good month. Not only did I go on vacation to the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, but we are now officially a Department. I am now the Department Head for the IT Department, which makes me the CIO, I guess.

Getting closer on a number of the initiatives I promised; the forums are pretty much ready, just waiting for the authentication methods we have to devise. Looking at a couple - quadodo is one, and then the Drupal auth method, too. Leaning towards the Drupal methods as it will save some time down the road, but may be a bit more work. We have to decide what pieces of information we need to require to register and identify you guys. Membership number is a given, but then what else? ZIP Code? DOB? Working on that. We don't want SPAM and 'bots in the forum.

I am working on a straw man of a new page design that we can roll out with the new CMS effort. This will be more of a portal implementation, and I hope that it will closely align with Tony Koester's vision of branding everything which is not tied down as part of nmra.org. There was even some talk of discontinuing Scale Rails and just having a web version. Personally, I don't think that is a good idea, but I am not on the BOD. So, we'll see what happens.

So, at the BOD meeting, I understand that all the Motions were passed, so we have some new Standards. Information on this will happen when Di gets back home and sends me the updates. Basically, S1, S2 and S4 were updated, and some changes were made to RP25, I think. Full information can be found on the NMRA home page in the News section.

Lots of new chatter in the new Regions and Divisions Yahoo Group which Bill Kaufman set up. I encourage you to join this group if you are not already a member. Much good information.

OK, that's what I have for tonight. I will do my best to get back to a more regular schedule - my intent is weekly, but if I can come up with more information I will do this more often.

I encourage you to visit the home page which has new Region information it. The focus has changed from a lame "Webmaster's Choice" which I seldom updated after Roger gave it to me, to a more relevant "Region Focus" which I hope makes things more personable and local.

Until next time....