aaronkjackson.com

I have been working on site for Timberline High School Athletics for the last four years.  The site has become an important tool for the athletic department and used by the parents and student athletes to get news and information about the schools sports programs.

Through my experience with Timberline I have discovered that many high school athletic programs do not have a website or have a very poor website that is not well maintained.   I have been working over the past several months to create a hosting service that will provide websites for high school athletic programs.  The websites will be designed to be easily maintained by athletic directors, coaches, and team parents. 

AthleticHost.com will be using DotNetNuke (DNN) as the core platform for these sites.  DNN was chosen for the following reasons:

• The ability to have many websites (a.k.a. portals) on a single DNN installation.
• Site templates will allow for new sites to be quickly created.
• Built in hosting model that includes security and payment features.
• Skinning system that allows each portal to have its own look-and-feel.   This is important because many niche web hosts sites all look the same.  I want each school to have it’s own look-and-feel.
• A security model that will allow separate security configurations for the athletic director, coaches, and team parents.
• A good set of core modules.

Hosting at AthleticHost.com will be available May 1, 2010.

AthleticHost, Web Development DotNetNuke

I often provide web support for our clients.  One of the first things I do for a new client is to pull down all of the files for the site and import them into Subversion.  Often I find directories littered with backup files and lazy man version control (files copied and renamed with the date changed).   I am only interested in pulling down the files used by the site. 

To avoid hand picking the files I found the “Filename filter” feature in FileZilla.  It allows you to specify a regular expression filter.   Then you can drag-and-drop the entire root folder structure and only download the files that you are interested.

Here is a sample filter for a basic site:

.+\.(html|htm|css|js|jpg|png)$

You can use the “Filter conditions” option to reverse the filter and pull down all the junk files if you want to archive them.

Uncategorized

I am donating my time to rebuild wolvesathletics.com in ASP.NET using DotNetNuke.   It will be a significant upgrade for Timberline High School’s athletics website and offer them better capabilities for editing for coaches and team parents.  Since I am donating the time I didn’t want to hire a designer, so having no formal design experience I gave it a shot.

I am very interested in getting feedback about the design and what I can do to polish it up.  Please leave comments on this with your ideas.

Review the Wolves Athletics design concepts.

Web Development design, gimp, timberline, wolves