If you seen the New Alert Box posted recently, you would have seen a behind the scenes look at what it takes to run this web site. At the same time, there is a lot involved with maintaining all the social media sites, video and photo management, and hosting this site.
Thanks to social media and content management systems, this web site wouldn’t be easy to maintain. WordPress powers this site along with MySQL for database management and DreamHost who is our hosting provider. WordPress is a blogging management tool, also known as a content management system, that was designed to easily maintain a blog. It is easy to set up, easy to work with, and the hardest thing is providing content.
Plugins allows web masters of WordPress to add extensions and functionality of the site. This site has a few.
- Alert Box which is hidden MOST of the time but is used to give alerts to changes in schedule or locations of our events.
- Newsletter management powered by MailChimp.
- Visitor counter, to count visits to our site. The count is at the bottom of each page.
- Article counter, to count visits to each page. The count is at the bottom of each article.
- Calendar, so we can have a dynamic calendar on the right side of articles and pages.
- Contact form, so you can contact us without using an Email client.
- Podcast management, so you can subscribe to our video and audio podcast on iTunes or any podcast device.
- Social Media postings, so you can share our articles to your friends.
- Comments, using Disqus and Facebook Comments.
- YouTube, so we do not have to put drag on the performance of the servers. We actually have the ability to go LIVE on YouTube, but that will be in the future.
These tools allows us to concentrate on content.
Antonio Edward, web host, page designer, social media strategist, and Microsoft Office 365 administrator is constantly working on the web site, maintaining the social media pages, monitoring the podcast feed, and administering the Office 365 account for high efficiency and productivity so we can provide entertainment and performing arts to the San Marcos community.
Stay tuned, more to come.