My name is Robert Adams and I am your Information Technology Officer. Information Technology Officer is a bit long and ITO sounds like a medical term, so I also will answer to the title of webmaster, as it is my job at this organisation to create the website, maintain it, and keep the SFDA on the edge of technology as it continues to grow. My future responsibility is to gather, organise, store and streamline the vast amount of information that darts in San Francisco generates!

2012 is our 40th year of operation and slowly but surely I am gathering all our old paperwork/stats/history from various people, some of which seem to be dead-ends, but 4 years later I get an email saying they found 2 boxes of photos and more history! So without further adou, this page will help document the websites growth over time, thank you for being curious about the technology and design side of our great organisation.

Back in 1995, I joined the SFDA while I was working out of the Union Ale House as their sous chef. In 1999, I presented to the board a 36 page mock-up web site which the board unanimously approved for deployment. In those days, I was told that the site looked like a porno site (because of the black background), circa 2000.

Joomla is the Content Management System that the SFDA's new web site is built upon. Joomla is written in PHP and stores data in a MySQL database. We are also using a template from Rocket Themes. They are the leader in dynamic Joomla templates. A template is a pre-developed page layout used to make new pages with a similar design, pattern, or style. The template is the glue holding all our data together.

 

We are also using Gantry Framework which amoung other things, allows us to quickly set columns and and rows in a very concise and dynamic way (960 Grid System). Another benefit of the Gantry Framework is it allows us to create on-the-fly redesign for mobile use.

The inner workings of the site are divided into sections and categorys. In this Joomla/Gantry web world, you won't see content until it's assigned a category and you can't assign a category until you assign a section first. I think your getting the picture now! At anytime we can "call up" one of these categories and have any articles under that category show up. Very convenient!

You can see our categories here.

We also have a Google calendar on our homepage and larger calendar in the site which is already chock full of dates you should remember.

As the screws get turned now that the site is no longer "new", I am now developing the special bells and whistles that our future holds.

EWMS, is the abbreviation for the new Electronic Web Match Sheet, I am developing.
Similar in looks and feel to our currently used "Electronic Match Sheet", (which is an exel worksheet, .xls), which captains fill out and send to the competition secretary for procesing the standings, results and rankings.

Here are a few things this new "web only" form will do:

• Compares match results using both captains form submissions.
• If the sheets do not match, an email will be generated for both captains of the match with the difference in the sheets so they can correct it. If neither captain corrects the results in 24 hours, the first results sent in will be considered official.
• Once the set of match sheets 'match', the information will be sent to the database for storage and also sent to the three live pages on the website in real time, Standings, Results and Rankings including high ons, high outs and the top five highlight leaders for men and women.
• Each match results will have 'extra' data that members can view like how many highlight points they earned, how many rank points they won or lost and an itemized highlight list, which should eliminate questions like "Where did my 120 go?".
• Accumulates end of the season data like playoff eligibility, most highlights for men and women, high ons and offs and a final trophy list, which will mean 99% accuracy in getting peoples names right the first time on trophys!

 

Any member that knows some coding language and wants to lend a programming hand, please email me. webmaster@sfda.org I am looking for help in Javascript, PHP and MySQL.

Robert Adams
—Information Technology Officer