A Do-it-Yourself (DIY) Website
2022-09-07 - Strangely this article is the most read article on the website. We think there is great interest in DIY websites.
Around 2012 the Yellowknife Amateur Radio Society (YARS) decided to take control of its domain name and to build its own website, rather than contracting that out. This was a cost-saving measure but also a way in which to abandon the use of the increasingly defunct FrontPage software used to maintain HTML pages on the site. One can see the original site by looking up YKARS.COM in the Wayback Machine.
In 2012 we decided to make use of Joomla 1.3, an open source content management (CMS) program. The use of a CMS is how most modern websites operate and others in use include WordPress and Drupal. In 2012 Joomla was one of the most popular. In 2020 WordPress (which is actually a blog system rather than a proper CMS) was used by about 40.4% of websites on the Internet, followed by Shopify and then Joomla. On 17 August 2021, Joomla released Joomla 4.0. We decided to abandon Joomla 1.3 and work with Joomla 4.0.
On 23 August 2021 we deactivated the old site and embarked on creating a new site under Joomla 4.0 and its upgrades. All links on the website are gradually being verified and articles put through an editorial review. We will also be installing and using a mass mailing system that conforms to Canada's anti-SPAM legislation. Persons may subscribe. Also we will be setting up a blog type newsletter to replace our old newsletter, The Ensign. That newsletter was discontinued and taken off-line around 2015 for various reasons, despite its popularity.
Category Organization Follows Incident Command System (ICS)
This website is structured using the Incident Command System (ICS). That system is a standardized approach to the command, control and coordination of emergency response, providing a common hierarchy that can be used amongst multiple emergency response agencies. It is scalable up or down and so can be used in a relatively small organization such as YARS or a huge organization such as the armed forces. Those in the armed forces might see a similarity to the General Staff System (GSS), based on the 19th century French army system.
The ICS and its adoption by YARS is a key component to our orientation to emergency preparedness and our function in emergency management or civil defence.
The ICS is also an important management tool mentioned in the Northwest Territories Emergency Plan (2018):
6.2 Incident Command System
The Incident Command System (ICS) is an incident management tool designed as a standardized and
coordinated approach to managing emergencies that provides functional interoperability at all levels of
emergency management. ICS breaks up tasks into functional areas of Command, Operations, Planning,
logistics and Finance/Administration. The NWT EMO has adopted ICS as its response model for the
purposes of the NWT Emergency Plan.
Articles
We have systematically reviewed all articles, adding new articles and corrected most broken links. If you think that an article should appear or have comments, let Ian Rennie know. Registered users have the ability to login to our system and submit articles. They will be put through an editorial process before they are published.
Captcha
We started to receive some robot emails that were testing the contact page in preparation for the sending of spam emails for the soliciting of Viagra and mail order wives etc. This is very common. To counter this we installed a Captcha ("Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") system so that robots that attempt to do this sort of thing are defeated. Usually a user has to enter in characters that appear in some sort of image or count the instances of an item in a picture - in this case we were able to install such a system that is invisible to the user. We are touching upon the realm of hackers and artificial intelligence with CAPTCHA. Unfortunately this a reality of the Internet.
Updates
2022-09-07 - Today we updated the CMS to Joomla 4.2.2. We will probably implement 2-factor authentication in the near future to make the site more secure.
Joomla 4.0 has gone through 4 updates since its release. Joomla is a content management system (CMS) - the modern approach to running a website. Essentially a CMS is a database and the maintainer, through a backend, carries out data entry - so an article is a form of data. When a visitor visits the website and a link, they launch a query that reports on the data and dynamically formats it into whatever pre-defined format has been set up. Maintainers do not need to worry about any formatting and are effectively just data entry operators. Joomla 4.0 has gone through many updates since its release in August 2021 and we are now running Joomla 4.1.3 as of 11 May 2022.
As of April 2023 we are running Joomla 4.3 but we have also realized that with the upgrading our photo gallery has failed to function properly, so we have de-activated it. The website images generally link directly to our image files - unless they are in the public domain, in which case we just link them (saves space).
As of 2023-05-02 we are now operating Joomla 4.3.1. We also updated the footer copyright year.
As of 2023-05-09 we have solved the photogallery issue and have full capabilities. We have ditched the old web gallery system and installed the RC Gallery plugin. An Example of this is the restoration of the QSL gallery at http://www.ykars.com/index.php/amateur-radio/activities/qsl-card-gallery . We did the same thing with the abandonment of Luxcal and installed JEvents extension for the events calendar: http://www.ykars.com/index.php/events . In addition we have figured out how to make banners work properly as shown by the banner for this week for Emergency Preparedness week.
As of 2023-05-30 we are running Joomla 4.3.2.
As of 2023-07-12 we are running Joomla 4.3.3.
As of 2023-11-29 we are running Joomla 4.4.1.
Users and Mass Mailings
9 May 2022. We have set up the user features and users may login to access restricted articles and submit their own articles for addition to the website. These articles will go through an editorial review - to ensure there are no copyright violations or to check spelling and grammar etc. We have the capacity to accept articles in French as well as in English. The users are also subject to mass email-ings - and we make sure they are bcc'd and that there is a footer explaining how they got on our email list and how they can get off it - in compliance with Canada's anti-SPAM legislation.
Accessibility Checking
Interestingly the current version of our CMS has an Accessibility Checking feature. Many of the images (i.e. all of them on this page) fail that check but the text is alright. We think this is for visual accessibility by the visually impaired.
Images Issue
2023-07-02 - The image problem has now been fixed. Initially we attempted to make use of an independent gallery program CMS and that was quickly found to be incompatible with the underlying system. This is why our photogallery disappeared for a while. Eventually we used a simple gallery plugin for Joomla, the overall CMS and generated a library of images over the years. This also allowed us to start cleaning up our underlying subdirectories to free up space. In the process a number of image links were broken. Over the next little while we will correct these image links, so please bear with us.
More Testing
2023-07-12 - Testing way in which menus and listings of articles work - See Activities and the Linux sub category. The plan is to modify the listings under Activities so as to maintain a document repository.
Some Bandwidth Errors
2024-07-16 - We were getting notifications of bandwidth issues. Our thinking is that the images we had online were occupying too much space and being visited too frequently by robots. We have deactivated the photo gallery and also the activities pages.