Category: IT stuff

I was having a quick look at the PTC Media forums when I got home form work and noticed that Cubmaster Chris had made a posting saying he’d been putting some of the older Leader’s Campfire shows back on line. So I went and had a quick look to see what was there. For one of the shows was a link to a podcast I’d never heard of before, so I thought I’d take a look. However, the site turned out to be a dubious one selling certain medical ‘products’! I thought I’d made a mistake, so I had another go and it did redirect to the dodgy site. Oops! So I let Cubmaster Chris know and the link has now been removed and site seems to have gone as well.

It made me think of this thread I’d seen on the Escouts site a couple of days ago. The Group had taken its site down and let the registration of the domain lapse. However someone had reregistered the domain, put most of the Group’s pages back up (quite easy if you know where to look), but had changed some of the links to direct people to more dubious sites.

Now neither of these occurrences are the fault of either the Leader’s Campfire or the Scout Group’s people. If anyone is to blame it is the spammers (I could think of slightly less polite ways to describe them), who have taken perfectly legitimate domain names to be used for immoral purposes. In fact the one who used the Scout group’s site is at the very least guilty of copyright theft.

So what can be done? To be honest I don’t know. But if you do buy a domain, especially for your Group, Troop, Pack or whatever try to hang on to it. The one for our Group only costs me around £9 for two years so it doesn’t break my bank!

The thing is that if I let it go and a less scrupulous person got hold of it, the reflection on our Group would be bad. After all, we’ve had a presence on the web for over 9 years now and a lot of different searches point our way.

I always think it’s a shame when someone connected with a Scout Group / Troop etc. spends time, money and effort to create a site and then lets it slip or never updates it. There’s nothing worse that seeing a site with

all over it or that it was last updated sometime in 2003!

So the moral is always keep you domain registered to someone in the Group and if they leave get it transferred to someone else. Also keep your site current and up to date!

I was listening to Jerry’s Scoutmaster Minute Pod Cast show 17 on Saturday (where do you get the time Jerry???), and one of the things he and his guest Shawn were talking about was promoting their Packs and Troops. When talking about Pack / Troop etc. web sites, one of the suggestions Shawn had for these sites was to have a calendar. He suggested Google Calendars as a good, free solution. I was aware of Google’s calendars, but had forgotten about them.

A few weeks ago, I totally redesigned our Group’s site (I went from a Joomla based one to a WordPress one) and I found a calendar plug in, but it didn’t work properly! You could see the current month, but not go forward or backwards – most unhelpful! Anyway, after Shawn’s suggestion, I’ve put the Google Calendar into our site (which was easy) and I’m now in the process of populating it. The main thing is that it works ‘out of the box’ and is free. These are both important for organisations where there isn’t a lot of ‘computing knowledge’ (not meant as in insult, just an observation) and they don’t want to be spending oodles of money on non activity and meeting related items. Job done!

I got me thinking of all the computing ‘freebies’ out there that can be used by Scout Leaders to promote their Groups / Troops etc. without spending lots of money on commercial products. So below is a non definitive list of programmes that can be used on your computer to help the promotion and organisation of the Group / Troop etc.

However, a quick thought. There seems to be a considerable number of Scout Leaders (I’m using the all encompassing UK term here) in the US, who take the time and effort to produce web sites, blogs and pod casts with the purpose of passing on their knowledge and experience to others in the movement, especially the BSA (makes sense to talk of what you know!). I enjoy reading these and listening to them all and keep coming across new ones all the time (just listening to An Hour A Week? by Cubmaster Chris for the first time). And while these are interesting and provide good ideas, they all, of course, relate to the BSA, which runs their Scouting slightly differently to the SA. So where are the blogs etc. in the UK? The answer is, I don’t know! My blog has started to become more Scout based in the last year or so, but I still talk about other stuff. But I haven’t found anything similar. Escouts provides forums for Leaders to discuss issues.
In the mean time I’ll still enjoy reading and listening to what my colleagues across the Pond have to say!

So here’s the list of useful, free programmes –

• Ubuntu Linux – Got a PC and don’t want to have a less than legal version of Windows on it and can’t afford to buy one, then try this. A relatively straightforward operating system, which comes with most things you will need to surf the net and type stuff. Does need a bit of technical know how though.
• OpenOffice.org – Want to type letters etc. but can’t afford Office (this isn’t going to be an anti Microsoft rant – see later), try this. It has a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation functions which are all compatible with MS Office.
• PDFCreator – Make all your documents available to all by being able to create PDF files.
• Firefox – A great browser which has lots of add on’s available – IE Tab, Morning Coffee and Foxmarks being my favourites.
• Windows Live Programmes – Windows Live Writer (which I’m using to write this) to publish to blogs, Windows Live Photo Gallery to view and fix your photos and Windows Live Messenger, MSN Messenger as was. There are a few others, but these are the ones I use. See, told you the list wasn’t and MS bash!
• Paint.NET – A image manipulation programme, which is almost as powerful as Photoshop and around £600 cheaper!
• WordPress and Blogger – Provide free blogging software and hosting.
• AVG Free – Popular anti virus software. Something to never be without, especially if you use a PC!
• Zone Alarm – Popular free firewall software. See above.

There is loads more out there, just check out File Hippo, but that will do for my list! A lot of the above are cross platform, but some are Windows only.