Publishing minutes to the site
In order to post the minutes on a website, the notes were composed in Word and saved in HTML format for many years, when the Clann began using the Yahoo groups list, it became common to post the minutes in the original Microsoft Word doc format. While using Word makes it easy to compose a readable document (if you own Word!), Word does *not* generate standard HTML, and HTML created from Word is not easy to get onto the web without massive intervention. (Caveat: you can throw a MS Word saved HTML doc right up on the web, and it will display OK, but since it's non-standard HTML, don't expect to be able to easily integrate it into a themed website like this one).
We might argue back and forth the relative merits of Word / Frontpage vs. Open source alternatives, but the bottom line is we need to create a document specification for minutes that is easy for anyone to comply with. The content of the minutes is fairly well understood - the disagreements we have had about that lately regarding required detail aside. The digital format of the minutes is not.
An alternative, just popping into my head now might be some kind of Word macro which cleans up the code, or possible a Word template which creates only the formatting we want. Forms are good. However, not everyone has Word at home believe it or not - so I'd like to stick with free software.
However the minutes are generated, they eventually need to be converted into standard HTML for inclusion on the website. In my opinion, the Sencha should type the minutes in something that will create standard HTML easily! From my experience, it's best if we define a small subset of HTML that can be used.
For instance, we might create a spec that defines the header as bold, the subsections as underlined, the attendance as a bulleted list, the What News as an ordered list, etc. Then we know what tags will always be used and could create a template or a form.
For me, it's easy to just write it out in HTML, since it's no more arcane than ogham or runes, in fact it's English so it's easier to understand. But, given the success that Aonghus had with that doctrine on the AOL site, I think we should settle on something WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).
Google Docs should do this (though I haven't tried to import the minutes I typed up in that as yet), as well as Open Office (though I am sceptical if anyone will be willing to install that if they already have Microsoft Office). I think we might be able to standardize on N-vu which is available for Windows, Linux, MacOSX, as well as other operating systems, and is open source and free. (It's the old Netscape Composer after it was removed from Mozilla). I think it may be the way to go for anyone who wants to create better formatted HTML documents for inclusion on this (or any) website.
It is also possible to incorporate a WYSiWYG editor (called tinyMCE) into Drupal, but I doubt the Sencha will want to be forced into typing the stuff up while online.
It seems someone actually sells a product called
Word Cleaner that puports to do the job for you, but it's a shame we have to waste time doing it all.
It's a much more commonly discussed thing than I thought at first. Here's a good article about it on MonkeyFlash.
- Printer-friendly version
- Login or register to post comments
Posting Minutes
I took a few minutes to document the procedure that Faellon and I used successfully last time to post minutes on this site last time since it seemed to work fairly well.
Quick Answer
Seems that if you save the Word doc as an RTF file, I can just paste it right in. It's got very basic formatting, but it maintains a lot of the structure and it's always easier to add proper formatting here and there where needed than to strip out all the bad.
Minutes Example 2
There is an example of a PDF archive of an old minutes writeup here.
Minutes Example
An example of an HTML post with multiple pages submitted in the Drupal 'book' format can be seen in Spring Meeting 2003.
Although creating the HTML for this simple posting is relatively simple for bold and list effects, the table creation is more difficult, and I don't expect anyone to be typing in tags really. This example actually came from the most egregious example of Word and it took almost an hour of work to get it massaged into a format that would go into the site cleanly.
The point is: If you don't want to be bothered with learning any tagging, it would be best to just write up the notes in Notepad or a similar plain-text editor. If you must write something up in Word that is destined for posting on the site, skip the fancy formatting crap and just save it as plain text. Don't bother saving it as HTML, it creates more work to undo everything Word will do to it. Word is great for creating a presentation document piece, but here the presentation is done by the theme of the website. Feed the website plain text.