elcome to the New New York Flyers Newsletter. I'm Richard Garland, newsletter editor and secretary of the NY Flyers, and I've been on the job for just under a month. It has been a very busy month indeed since taking office at the annual meeting on January 15th. One priority I set for myself when I took office was to revitalize the New York Flyers Newsletter. And here it is, chock full of articles and in a completely new format.
The New York Flyers Newsletter has always been available to members only. We have made it a priority to protect the privacy of our members. The newsletter has often contained information about members' trips, their weddings, their families, etc. that many would prefer not to be thrown out on the web for all to see, and we respect that sentiment. However the newsletter also contains a good deal of information that is in the public domain and does not pose any particular risk to the privacy of the authors or to club members.
I am thinking of ways to make selected parts of the New York Flyers Newsletter available to the public, but no change will be made until the views of all interested parties are heard. That includes your views. If you have any suggestions in that regard, feel free to let me know: there a link at the bottom of this page for just that purpose.
In this day of information overload, one of my guiding principles is the information you get should be your choice. Instead of bombarding you with more information than you want, or can absorb, I will strive to make the information you get from the Flyers to be of your own choosing, starting with this newsletter. It is now web based with each article forming a separate web page, so you can read just what you want, and hopefully it will be easy and intuitive for you to find what you want from the front page, or for that matter, from any page.
You can also bookmark any article or email a link to a particular article, which should make it easier (and quicker) to get back to an article you find interesting that you didn't have time to finish.
We have lots of interesting content in this issue, some of the type you've seen before (FootNotes, President's Message, this column, member profiles) and some that are new ("The Awards Gala" and "Beyond Central Park" sections), and we hope to keep them coming.
We will have a standard set of articles in each issue, primarily those in the section (see the side-bar at the left). The next section, will also be a regular feature, although the articles within it will change from issue to issue. It will contain member profiles and other articles about particular members or groups of members. Other sections such as are a one-time occurrances, but we hope to have a few of those during the year. A section of articles on the NYC Marathon comes to mind. And lastly is a new section we would like to keep going if we can generate enough content.
Each section also has its own "personality". Not only will the content be related, but the typography and page style will be similar for the articles within the section. The best example is section. We've used the snow flake image from the invitation you received for this event as a page background, a very beautiful effect. If you haven't noticed yet, click on one of the articles in that section using the sidebar on the left, and you'll see. Then you can come back here.
You can now print what you want, and just what you want. If you want to print out a particular article, just click on the print button (in the upper right corner of every page) and a printer-friendly version of the page will come up together a printer dialog box.
The New York Flyers Newsletter will take advantage of the vastly increasing bandwidth of the net (and the ubiquity of digital cameras) and will always rely on plenty of photographs. But the space on your computer screen is not increasing - in fact with lap tops and iPhones, it's decreasing! So instead of cluttering up each page with a lot of small photos, I decided to stack them up behind one another. In fact, almost every photo in the entire newsletter is actually a set of photos, some with slideshow controls and some with a note explaining how it works. Here's the general rule: click on the photo and the next one waiting behind it will appear. Those few that are really single photos are in places where there's no point in having more than one (such as the thumb nails showing the authors of various articles). Usually when there are a lot of pictures in a set, you will get the slideshow controls. When there's only a few, you'll just get a note explaining how to manually scroll through. And in very rare cases a slideshow will already be running when you bring up the article.
We have embedded a few streaming video (YouTube) files and several Flash based slideshows to a couple of articles. These use more network resources and may cause some degradation if you are using a low bandwidth connection. In every case, you of course have the option to not view them, but I've kept them short and put them in only when I thought they added real value to the article.
The publication of the New York Flyers Newsletter has suffered over the last few years from several problems, most importantly, competition from other media and difficulties in getting and publishing quality content. Hopefully this new format will help address the first issue. As for getting content, it is, and always was the major difficulty.
When the board discussed this a month ago, the consensus was to commit to a quarterly schedule. But I am hoping that we can do better than that. But that will be very hard unless we can somehow get content flowing into the pipeline, And that leads directly to the next issue of this note -
If you like what you see (or you have ideas on how to make it better), help us keep it going. I know, you're busy, I'm busy, we're all busy. So hey, this is New York. "Busy" is a way of life. But busy or not, I need help:
And you know what? There's a little box right below this. See where it says "Click here to send a note". You can do that, anytime. No, you won't wake me if it's 3 AM. Please tell me how we can work together to make this a better (and more frequently published) newsletter. Thanks.
could not end this page without saying a great big Thank You to all the folks who helped bring this job to a successful conclusion. I am hard put to remember them all and name them, but I'll try: I constructed a box below the comments & suggestion box, and in it I have tried to put down every one. Please forgive me if I slipped up and forgot someone.
Now I'd better end this here before you fall asleep
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Many Thanks to One and All —
For early support in getting started:
For much encouragement:
Contributions:
Photography:
Proofreading and Editing:
Expert advice and suggestions on web design and other issues:
For work in getting the newsletter live on the web:
For those I Forgot:
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