How to improve the CRV web pages (or create your own)

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Think one of the CRV web pages isn't as good as it could be? Or – more dramatically – an important topic is simply not there and not even discussed? Feel that urge to be an author singing in your blood?

Easy way:

  1. Point your browser to some page you consider not good enough.
  2. Click "view source" in your browser's "view" menu.
  3. Edit that source using a plain text editor.
  4. Email me the resulting plain text at warren.wds AT gmail.com.

Note: "plain text" means plain text. It does not mean "Microsoft Word" which can store a file containing a single word of text in about 100 kilobytes (?!) and is only readable by those who have Microsoft software. Plain text is readable by everybody, whether associated with Microsoft or not, and consumes only the storage it has to. Microsoft's notepad seems to work.

More details if you really want to do a great job: You can either improve an existing CRV web page, or create your own new CRV add-on web page, as follows:

  1. Point your browser to some page you consider not good enough.
  2. Click "view source" in your browser's "view" menu. This gives you a view "underneath the hood" of what the "source code" for the page is (unformatted plain text) as opposed to the nice finished product (typeset by your browser).
  3. Grab that plain text and copy it into a plain-text editor such as "notepad".
  4. Edit it to your heart's content.
  5. You may want to run it through a spell checker or an HTML validator (here is the same thing but based on file upload instead of telling it a URL).
  6. When done, email the edited file to me at warren.wds AT gmail.com preferably with a subject line that gives me a clue what I am getting. [Email me only plain text files. Not "Microsoft Word" files.] If you are worried your modification may have "broken" the page (i.e. destroyed its validity as HTML...), please warn me so I can look out for that and try to fix what you broke.
  7. I will post the improved page (unless I think you are crazy, in which case we'll think of some way to compromise... so far [Nov 2005] I have never rejected anything)
  8. Repeat process on new page! [ WARNING: on pages like the endorsement page which are "active" this process could take longer because I have to keep the active programs that talk with those pages happy. If you want to create a new page ab initio, then grab a CRV page that looks like the page you want to create, and edit it to transform it into the page you create. Please use only basic HTML not XML, and not javascript or java. You can get HTML books on how to create web pages from the library, but for most basic stuff you should be able to work without a book simply by emulating the CRV pages that are already created. For special characters in HTML see this. ]

The easiest way to create new pages is to copy an old page from CRV resembling your planned page, then just edit that copy to totally replace the content with yours.

Also: If you have web design knowledge that exceeds ours – which wouldn't be too hard – you could be very helpful... you can take over key tasks for us, such as designing a money-donation feature or an online-election feature...

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