Website Access - Features and Benefits

Now you have found us some of your curiosity will be satisfied here Find below here the different possibilities of web access for different people / members. Everything in green is an addittion to the former feature and benefit lists.

Site Visitor:
You are not logged into the website and will see the following features:
Home - Getting Involved - History of NaFoF
Clubs
Event Calendar
Contact; Make sure you let us know your first and last name, so we can give you an account to the website - with this account you get notifications of events and our weekly newsletter straight into your inbox.
Blogs
Recent Posts
Website Help

Potential Member:
You have requested a log-in to the website (fill in contact form and ask :) and when you have received the 'An administrator created an account for you' email, you can log in by clicking the link provided in that email.
>Please check your spam box - some mail accounts will flag the email as spam - please mark the email as not spam to prevent other email from the site from going into your spam box
>Please don't forget to set yourself a new password!
After all that (you are logged in) you will see the following features:
Home - Getting Involved - History of NaFoF
Clubs
Event Calendar; You will be getting notifications by email when a new event is posted, related to your club. When you go to the website to look at this event, you will see where the event exactly is and you will be able to contact the event organiser through the website (click on their name and hit the contact button).
Contact
Blogs; You will be getting notifications by email when a new blog entry is made (this will be most likely be the latest weekly newsletter).
>My Account; You can add a signature and upload a picture. You can also manage your subscriptions here with regard to which types notification emails you'd like to recieve. Be aware to keep the two password fields empty if you don't wish to change your password again.
Recent Posts
User List; If you are looking to contact someone specific, like your club's chairman. You'll be able to review all the other website user's profiles and you can contact them by email through the site. This protects the reciever's email address.
Website Help
Log Out

Member:
Once you have handed over your hard earned cash your account will be upgraded by a website administrator - you wont get a notification of this - you can see your website membership level in your user profile or on the user list. If you haven't previously had a website login you'll recieve an email regarding your new account (see the potential member information above).
After all that (you are logged in) you will see the features of a potential member, and in addition, the following:
Comments; you can add comments to the bottom of various website posts such as news and events - (like; 'Book me a plate, please').
Blogs; You will be getting notifications by email when a new blog entry is made (this will be most likely be the latest weekly newsletter) and you can leave a comment. Now you also have the possibility of writing your own blog - set the 'Content visibility' to Public (to see for all), Registered Potential Members (and all levels above) or Members (all paid up Members only)! If you also pick a 'Club', whomever is registered at that club will get a notification of your blog and your blog will appear in the 'River of News' of that club (this all of course after your entry has been approved by the site moderator, as you understand that inappropriate postings will not be published :)
Members Area
Log Out

Committee Member:
Same as Member, but with added features and benefits to make sure you can 'do your job' ;) For examples; have a look in the Member Area..
>Blogs can be set just for you and your committee buddies.

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As we have just launched this website, not all is ironed out completely and we will be adding features and updates on a regular basis. This also means that we would like to ask you to contact us (use the Contact form or the Feedback button on every page) if there is anything incorrect, not working or doesn't make sense. This will help us enormously with the development and betterment of our site!
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How to use the Event Calendar

When you click on 'Event Calendar' on the left in the main navigation, the calendar will open for you at the present month. If you rather want to see the whole year, a week or even a day - you can easily pick that option.

You might be only interested in anything that has to do with food (we do like ours!) - click on 'Food and Drink' in the first box. Hit 'Apply'. All 'Food and Drink' events will come up and ready for you to explore! You can now browse forward and back in time as well.

Needless to say; that's how the whole calendar works - you want something specific - pick it and hit 'Apply'.

To pick multiple options: hold the Ctrl-key while you click one by one, hold the Shift-key while you click the first and last for selecting all and in between.

Browsers

We have tested this site with several browsers as identified from the following independant list based on market share.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Most browsers are free to download and use there is no reason not to try alternative browsers and see if others better meet your needs; security, performance & features.

We have tested this site with Apple Safari (S) 3.1, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), 7(IE7) and 8 beta 1, Mozilla Firefox(fx) and Opera 9.2. (the symbol in brackets indicates the symbol used on the above page). We suggest using the latest stable version of any given browser.

The site is designed for a minimum of 1024x768 resolution screen, it is very common now to have resolutions far in excess of this; a full HD TV is approx 1920x1080.

Please be aware that many browsers such as AOL, Maxthon and others are infact Internet Explorer with a new interface over them, therefore they may report themselves as Internet Explorer.

There are some known issues with a few browsers:
Apple Safari 3.1 - fonts appear thicker, almost bold
Google Chrome - no known issues.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 - No transparency on images at the top of the page (logo sits in a white block rather than grey graduation), round corners on plus logo are jagged, user mgmt scripts run slow. This browser is widely regarded as insecure - for your own data safety please upgrade immediately. Great browsers are now available for free.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 - no known issues
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 - no known issues
Mozilla Firefox 3 - No known issues
Opera 9.2 - Opera 9.x ignores valid CSS and uses Times New Roman rather than Aerial. AJAX opening of menus is ineffective. Menu icons do not line up correctly, user mgmt scripts run slow.

All browsers functionally work with this website, due to the enhanced presentation and rapid performance we recommend Mozilla Firefox 3 (It's just a shame so many websites have ignored the standards that we're supposed to be working to and optimised for Internet Explorer, which adheres to few standards correctly). IE8 will start to rectify this issue.

www.getfirefox.com - Firefox 3 is one of the fastest most standards compliant browsers available!

 

iCal and RSS

There are some great technologies that allow you to know what is going on in NaFoF-land. The two really interesting ones are:

 - iCal keeps you up to date with calendar information. 

 - RSS (sometimes referred to as Live Bookmarks in web browsers) informs you of newly added web pages to a website. 

 

iCal - Always keep your calendar up to date!

iCal is a protocol (computer language) to allow computer applications to share calendar information, this can be useful for syncronsing calendars between multiple devices and programs. iCal is used extenisvely to maintain calendars in mobile phones, PDAs and calendaring programs like Thunderbird, Outlook and Google Calendar.

You can add an iCal based calendar to Google Calendar, Outlook, Lotus Notes and to various devices such as most mobile phones with calendars (including Android based phones, Blackberries, iPhones). For google calendar (and Google Android based mobile phones); open Google Calendar in your computer web-browser, on the left under "other calendars" select Add then Add by URL then enter http://www.nafof.org.uk/calendar/ical.ics then select Add. The new calendar should now appear on the left and after a few minutes be added in a different colour on your calendar.

The website updates the information as soon as the website has new events added; however programs that use iCal update periodically; typically a couple of times a day. You can usually change the frequency of updates - so you always know what is going on with any last minute additions to the calendar!

The NaFoF iCal includes only future events, so events in the past may be removed from your calendar by the computer program displaying them.

iCal on Wikipedia

 

RSS - News Stories

Really Simple Syndication, RSS, is a simple protocol for distributing news to other computer programs so that users can read this at their leisure and without having to manually browse to and visit lots of websites.

There are many programs that work with RSS feeds (as they are typically known). Firefox treats RSS feeds in a similar way to bookmarks. You add an RSS feed and it appears as a folder in the bookmarks menu. By going to this menu the top and most recent headlines for the selected page will be shown, clicking on articles of interest will open that page in a new page in your browser.

Periodically the software will check for updates and show up to date changes to the website that the feed is coming from (known as a subscription).

RSS on Wikipedia

Facebook and Twitter

Did you know that you now can follow us on FaceBook and Twitter? Well, if not - now you do!

Click here to find our FaceBook page. You can request to join us and we'll let you in as fast as humanly possible.

And if you want to follow us on Twitter; click here. You can start following us right away (presuming you have a Twitter account yourself).