Webmaster's Updates

06/02/2010: OVER 19,000 CATS

This is how many cats the CFA Region 3 entry forms have sent to your cat shows over the past 4 years and with virtually zero spam for the past 2 years. This is the actual log count for how many times our show and HHP entry forms have been used to enter a cat in a show in Region 3 since April 2006, when I started keeping logs to help the Entry Clerks verify “lost” entries. Of course, if a club uses their own entry form on some other server, I do not have that count.

What we do know is that exhibitors prefer our entry form because they are consistent from show to show and multiple-entry friendly. They also appreciate the fact that since 2006, the Region 3 forms have had less than 1 hour down time.

How hard is it for a club to use the forms? Just send club name, show dates, entry clerk info, and if you accept PayPal, your Club PayPal email address to receive payments. The entry emailed to the Entry Clerk is formatted to fit the most popular entry clerk program, making it easy to use. Your Region Website has forms available for regular entries, HHP, back-to-back shows and Agility or other special purpose entry forms.

More than 19,000 cats entered with no lost entries in spite of ISP email problems, entry clerk hard drive crashes, etc, etc. Our backup logs show the name, email address, show and date/time of entry. If an entry gets lost or trashed going through the email system, we can get you the log to contact the exhibitor for any needed information. For security reasons, no other information is available. But, at least you can know Who, How many cats  and When they entered. Of course, if a club uses their own entry form on some other server, I can’t help find lost entries. Or stop the spam entries, either.

Club managers, if you do not have your Webmasters, Show Managers and Entry Clerks getting your flyers, show updates and entry forms on your Region 3 site, you are losing entries.

02/09/10: Welcome to a new year here at the Region 3 Website! Looking at our site versus some of the others around, I think we need to do some minor updates and give the site a new look this year. I am thinking new headers and a new menuing system, maybe just a drop-down from the top with multilevel categories to speed linking to the lower-level pages and photo albums. I think it is time to retire the "buttons" on the left side of our site. Send me your input on this, as I would like to have something new just in time for the new show year.

Also, we are working to add features to the website. If you have some ideas for new features that you think will be used, drop me a line with your ideas. One of mine is to add some rotating photos of our top cats. (cats = cats, premiers, kittens, HHP -- all the top kitties!) to the front page. What say you?

Just one more thing. This website is sponsored and maintained by me. It does receive a lot of traffic, and I update the site regularly and also maintain the vendor list and region 3 members email list. The show schedule, email and vendors lists will be updated if you a) send me updated information or b) request information be posted and send a link that I can link to or use to obtain useful information from and c) a few things I find, like schedule updates on the CFA website. I also work closely with our Regional Director and board members to provide timely and useful information. If you do not see your favorite vendor listing or your email address is out of date or your club information is out of date or you do not have your flyer or online entry on our site, it is because you did not send it to me.

06/08/09: Lots of news here. First, Congratulations to all who were honored at the GSR Awards Banquet this weekend. I am working on the Awards photo album, parts are up now and I anticipate completion this week.

We are working on a more dynamic Web 2.0 interactive site. While the overall look and feel of the site will not change, many of the pages we now have will be converted from html files to database files allowing for more and friendlier user options on our site.

01/15/09: All of our online entry forms have been moved from one of my hidden sites to our cfagulfshore.org site. This has shown a remarkable improvement in processing times and reliability of delivery of the forms to your Entlry Clerks. This was an unexpected consequence of the move, since both sites were located on the same master server. The move was made for security reasons. We had spam attacks, and several attempts by unauthorized parties to use the forms.

01/18/08: I have contracted for new, updated web servers. The first one is installed, and, as soon as I am finished testing the server, I will be moving our Region 3 site to the new server. We should see improved performance, and I will have enough storage space availble to continue the historical transfer and updates from the old site to our new format. The move should be transparent, with no downtime.

Other upgrades available soon will be webDAV compliant show calendars to allow users to update their local schedules with our show information.

The CFA Gulf Shore New Site

It has been a long time coming, but we are finally here with a new site. The site had an overall plan to be easy to use and navigate. It is also important that it will look right on YOUR computer. I have taken a great deal of time and effort to try to accommodate the various systems and browsers that have been visiting our site.

Without getting technical, you can control text sizes displayed, plus we accommodate all normal resolutions from very small screens (some horizontal slide bars may occur on a 14" monitor) up to the newest 24" wide screen LCDs. The new site was fully tested on a wide variety of current and obsolete browsers (including Opera 9.x set for small screen which emulates Opera-compatible hand-helds) and found to be very viewable and easy to navigate. Soon to come are special show calendars and current events you can download into your calendars or view on your cell phone or BlackBerry.

All of the data files from the old site have been down loaded and carefully preserved on my local system. Over the next few weeks, I will be going through all the data and putting up more information on our site. The older information with little current interest will be placed in an archive directory, thereby maintaining the tradition of having the largest, most informative and BEST regional site in CFA.

It is a great honor for me to be Webmaster and caretaker of the CFA Gulf Shore Region 3 web site, and you can be assured that I will continue to find ways to make the site better and more interesting for all our users.

Please direct comments for changes or improvements directly to me so your Board of Directors can be assured that we are presenting the information concerning Region 3, our Clubs and you in a timely manor.

I hope you enjoy the new site, and look forward to your comments and suggestions.

George Snell
Webmaster
CFA Gulf Shore Region 3