ReesClark.com
Momentum
Guests/Demo
Vowels and Consonants
Friends of mine on Facebook have been teasing one another about the spelling of their names. Rocky James Curtiss called out his friend and classmate Richard Curtis, about his missing S. So I hastened to point out the causes: "RE spelling, you have to remember the times back in the 40s. WWII caused all kinds of shortages. When I was born in 1943, there was a shortage of Es, so I'm Rees Clark, not Reese Clarke. In 1944 there was a shortage of Ss. So there are Curtisses and Curtises; it all depended on rationing rules that were set based on local availability. I'm surprised that the usually adept historian Jeffrey Handley didn't catch that. Now I know some people will attribute the differences to familiy legacy, but as any good Republican will tell you, it was all FDR's fault."
Slideshow
Testing new album feature
I'm testing a new album feature in the guise of a dedicated user ID, photog. Stay tuned.
A Celebration of Differences
Michael Says... A celebration of differences is a celebration of life.

We must learn to celebrate our differences, although distracted by the need to belong to an immediate circle of friends and people of like mind. We are all similar, but different; equal, but not the same; unique, expressions of life. We have value. These truths endure our ignorance, eventually making fools of those who fail to accept them, and empowering all who are able to discern that mankind is more alike than different. By focusing on similarities rather than differences, we discover common ground on which to build relationships that facilitate communication, trust and mutual respect.

A Celebration of Differences challenges our most cherished opinions of how we relate to those around us.

A Celebration of Differences requires that we open ourselves to new ideas, customs, traditions and values without abandoning our own.

A Celebration of Differences helps us to recognize that what we may have learned about others may not be true - but simply what we have learned. The truth is - we all count. We matter. We can make a difference if we dare to give ourselves permission to consider new possibilities, and new ways of doing familiar things.

A Celebration of Differences demands that we abandon the preoccupation with skin-color as an indicator of individual character. Greatness doesn't come in colors. Neither does honesty, loyalty nor kindness - all desirable traits in most cultures. Yet, if you look closely, these traits share a common attribute. The fact that I am great, honest, loyal and kind does not keep you, or anyone else from being just as great, honest, loyal and kind. There will always be enough of these qualities to go around, as long as we value those individuals who exhibit them.

A Celebration of Differences is truly a celebration of life.


Michael Twiggs, Chief Consultant, Twiggs & Associates

Twiggs & Associates

iCalendar Tool Upgrade
Our erstwhile technical director has upgraded the CIP Sitemaker™ calendar editing tool. Administrators can now easily add on-time and recurring events to their calendars, either from the public view or the editing view.

The editor can also control how many options are available to users. For example, the editor can already decide whether visitors can add events, and if so whether they require approval before they are displayed.

As the Sitemaker member management system is extended to all the tools (it now works only for blogs), SAs will be able to apply various permissions to the calendar and even to individual events. So a whole calendar or individual events might be public or private in as you wish.

Very cool.
Sitemaker Version 2
Version 2.0 of CIP Sitemaker™ from Clark Internet Publishing is now active. It adds several new features - like the web log - and contains numerous structural improvements. With the change the entire system makes a clear distinction between structure and content. This means that one can write and store pages of text, graphics, and other information without regard to their eventual appearance. Such things as colors, fonts, and page layouts are separately defined.

Continues...

Our blog's better than your blog!
We have just activated our web log tool in CIP Sitemaker. This blogging tool has some very cool features that set it off from the crowd.
  1. It's part of CIP Sitemaker™ and thus has a raft of exceptional companion tools. You can easily create and manage a wide variety of information. Some tools are included with every site.

    • contact form - receive email without publishing your address
    • a calendar - events can be public or private, and you can let readers add their own events
    • a photo gallery - show the world your new invention or pix of your family and friends

  2. You can expand a simple web log into a comprehensive site. Add, for example,

    • article list(s) - build a newsletter, case studies, reports
    • member management - sign up members and assign permissions

  3. The cost is very low. (Pricing is still to be determined. If advertising is present, right now it's free!).
Web Deacon™ sites for churches and their members
Web Deacon™ sites for churches and their members

This is a demo post connected to our new service, The Web Deacon™, which allows churches and other religious groups to publish sites and offer blogs to their members.

Confirmation

Our H.Katrina Effort
As a way to help push things in the right direction, we created KatrinaRelief.org a couple of days after the hurricane in the Gulf. Check out the Forums, the Directory and other features. The goal is to make it easy for peer relationships to form naturally between, for example, churches, businesses, and non-governmental organizations.

Katrina Relief

What a week!
Our main web server's primary disk system died at age six last week, putting us off line and out of business for a while. The backups we'd cultivated so long paid off, and we were able to restore service to our clients in only a few hours. We've sustained over 99.9% availability of our systems over the past eight years.
Editing Posts & Comments
Editing Posts & Comments
CIPI web logs allow one to embed either BBcode or HTML or both, and one can control line (paragraph) breaks separately, which means one need not worry about having paragraph tags. This post contains the effects of several freely mixed BBcode and HTML tags.

The posting interface consists of a text area for typing, code insertion buttons, and numerous settings lots of options. The user types text in the usual way. The user can insert the BBcode or HTML manually or by clicking one of the adjacent buttons after selecting a range of text.

The code insertion buttons work correctly on Firefox (Mozilla), and we think they should work correctly on other Gecko-based browsers. Resulting pages with posts containing BBcode or HTML has been shown to render correctly on numerous Mac and Windows browsers.

Sitemaker

Tuesday
I am at my neighbor Hermann's house. He and his wife Joy are kind enough to let me play with their computer from time to time, which gives me the opportunity to see my pages on a Windows computer, since I'm mostly a Maintosh user.

Ich bin bei meinem Nachbar Hermann. Er und seine Frau Joy erlauben mir ihren Computer manchmal zu benutzen, was mir die gunstige Gelegenheit gibt, meine Seiten auf Windows zu sehen, während Ich selbst meistens Macintosh benutze.
Alumni Lists
I'm adding some folks to the TCHS alumni rolls who attended the TC schools anniversary celebration in October. It's just a few at a time, but there appear to be a couple of hundred new names.