Saving your Members List is one of those necessary chores you should get into the habit of performing on a regular basis. We recommend no less often than once per quarter--every ninety days--no more often than once per week, depending on the volitility of your membership and what you want to do with the product. If all you need the list for is a backup of records in case of catastrophic loss of your club and your membership doesn't change much over a three month period, once per quarter ought to do it. If you find that your membership changes considerably in the course of a month, then you might want to consider making a record more often.
What good is a copy of your Members List? If something should happen to your club and you need to restart, all you require to send out invites to the new club are the profile names of the members. You don't believe? Check out the Cathouse_Colony_01's story under the Club Successes!! item in the Club News section of this edition of the newsletter. Of course, if you are an experienced HTML coder, you can make your list into something much more. But, for those of us who are not blessed with HTML talents, we offer the following credible description of "how to save a members list."
Step One. In your browser, open the Members section. On page one, click the right button of your mouse. This will bring up a short menu of viewing options for the current document. About half way down, you will see the option "View Frame Source" in Netscape or "View Source" in Internet Explorer. Click it.
In Explorer, it will bring up a Notepad document containing the HTML code for the page being viewed only, inclusive of the standard Notepad document options. In Netscape, this will bring up a grey screen of the first page without document options. Because there is this difference, we will be describing the process differently for the two browsers.
Step Two: Explorer Version.
In the Notepad document, click the File options and select "Save As..." It will be preset to save in a temporary file location in your browser or Windows directory which has been assigned a temporary file location, and it is often difficult to find later. It, also, wants to assign the filename "member_list[1]" which is a .txt format file by default. Locate the file folder you want to save the document to and rename the document "members-date-pagenumber.html" Close the open Notepad. Go to the next page and repeat until you have saved all the pages of your Members List. If you use the file name provided by Explorer noted above, make sure you change the [1] in brackets to [2] (Explorer calls them all page 1 and must be manually told it is page 2 or 3, etc. or it overwrites the page designated as [1]).
This copy procedure will render an exact copy of the Members List as it appears in your club. Clicking a profile name, if you are connected, will bring up the profile of the person. Unfortunately, the links between pages will not work. Don't feel slighted; they don't work in the Netscape version either. We will tell you how to install a link that will work at the end of the Netscape instructions since it is necessary for both.
Step Two: Netscape Version.
A multi-task operation--you will require two Windows in the taskbar--your browser and an empty Wordpad document. Wordpad is one of the Windows Accessories that comes stardard with Windows95/98. If you've never used it before, you will find it by clicking: Start > Accessories (or Programs > Accessories) > Wordpad. Clicking on the program name will immediately open an empty document window.
In Wordpad, go to the File menu options and select New. This will bring up a short menu of the file format options available. Select "Text Document," which will turn off some of the formating options not required for this process including the one which will remove the HTML code (you want to keep that stuff).
Place your cursor on the grey screen of the source document--this is a separate window labelled "Source of" followed by the name of the page you are looking at. Depress the keyboard keys CTRL and the letter A. The entire page will be highlighted (the background behind the text will change from grey to dark blue and the text from black to white). Depress the keyboard keys CTRL and the letter C. The entire highlighted section will be copied into your RAM memory buffer (you shouldn't see any change). Now, place your cursor in the empty Wordpad document and depress the keyboard keys CTRL and the letter V. The text from the page will appear in the document. Return to the "Source of" page and close it. Go to the next page of your Members list and repeat.
If your membership is short, you can post all the pages of your membership list to this single document. However, we do not recommend using a single document if there are more than 100 members. Each page of members is about 12 KB, therefore a document of 100 names would be about 60 KB in file storage space, making it a little slow to load and taxing the limits on what your browser will display properly. When you reach what you think would be a comfortable display, in increments of 20 names, save the document as "members-date-pagenumber.html" in the folder you want to use. During the save, you should receive a warning message which reads: "You are about to save the document in a Text-Only format, which will remove all formatting. Are you sure you want to do this?" Click "Yes." Now, open a new empty document as described above and continue.
The document rendered by this method will be exactly like the one in Yahoo! except it will contain one or more pages, depending on how many you recorded, and the link buttons between pages will not work. However, if you have an online connection, the links to profiles will work.
Step Three.
The links between pages do not work on your copied editions because of the way they were coded by Yahoo!. In order to link your pages, you will have to install a link of your own (or rewrite the Yahoo! one). Inserting a link is bit easier, especially if you have no HTML experience, so we provide those instructions. However, you can skip this step if you don't care about linking the pages. Simply clicking on the document in the folder will open your default browser with the page showing and you can go to the next page by changing the page number in the location bar.
To add a link, open Wordpad. Pull down the File options menu and select Open. This will open a small directory window labelled "Open." Use the "Look in:" bar at the top to surf to the folder in which you have stored your Members lists. Use the "Files of type:" bar at the bottom and select "All Documents [*.*]" to show you all the files in that folder. Choose page one.
Scroll down to the bottom of page one. At the bottom, you will see these three commands: </center></body></html> Put your cursor in front of the </center> and type as follows:
<p><br><a href="NEXT DOCUMENT NAME.html">Next Page</a><p>
<a href="PREVIOUS DOCUMENT NAME.html">Previous Page</a><p><br>
If the current page is called: members-20010330-1.html the next document would be members-20010330-2.html and the previous document would be members-20010330-#.html where #=the last page in your member list. Similarly, if the last page in your member list, the next page would be page 1. Repeat this addition for all pages.
And that's all there is to it.
Volumne One; Issue Ten, Page 1
Volumne One; Issue Ten, Page 2
Volumne One; Issue Ten, Page 3
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