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Information Technologies Officer
Civil Air Patrol, San Angelo Composite Squadron

Bio:
Alan comes to the squadron from Goodfellow Air Force Base.  He is an enlisted active duty member of the United States Air Force and hails from the 17th Training Support Squadron.  He lives on base with his wife and daughter.  He holds a bachelors of science in Digital Media from Greenville College in Greenville, IL, an associates in Information Systems Technology through the Community College of the Air Force, and began work on a graduate degree in late 2008.  He was recently accepted to USAF Officer Training School and will be leaving in January 2010 with a commissioning date of April 13th 2010.

03 August 2009
I made some big changes over the course of the last week or so.  The Members Only section in the top menu has now moved over next to Home after you login instead of to the far right.  The reason that happened was because of the implemenation of new CAPF 66 sections.  The expanding menu was too large for the page if viewing the page at 1024x768 resolution or lower. 

The CAPF 66 sections now comply with CAP web use policy to secure all cadet information to squadron members.  Lt Col Strickland now has the ability to edit the content of all CAPF 66s right on the website and I provided him a tutorial of instruction for that. 

I also revamped the Cadet Member Roster and Senior Member Roster pages to match eServices rosters.  Our Help Wanted section has also been updated to match current squadron manning.  Our Personnel Authorization has been updated and moved under Staff in the top menu as well.

Behind the scenes I cleaned up some clutter in the database and removed a few dead links and non-updated pages from Staff.

I'd like to officially welcome SM Brian Codd to the ITO team.  He will be assisting me until I leave for OTS in January when he will assume primary responsibilities for this site.  As always if you have suggestions or content for the website please feel free to email them to me or to SM Codd.

06 January 2009
Well no news is good news right?  Other than doing minor visual cleanups I haven't had to touch this site.  We have a new IT guy in the squadron.  Thanks to the cadet incintives we have been doing lately, Cadet Hermes is now learning to be our squadron's Cadet ITO.  Welcome Cadet Hermes!  Oh, and Happy New Year.

30 June 2008
I'm never upset when all I have to do is do touch maintenance on the site and don't need to post anything here for months at a time!  Recently 2Lt Augustine and I made some organizational changes to the site.  The front page now has more room for stories as we removed the Who's Online, Latest, and Popular modules and moved the pictures module over to the left.  I added the new graphic to the frontpage as well as updated the Join CAP! article to have more information.

It has come to my attention that the PT videos aren't working in Internet Explorer.  I've found that Internet Explorer no longer handles embedded media in the same way as it did in the past thus rendering the embedded player useless.  However, there are other ways to see the videos.  I personally recommend installing Mozilla Firefox.  Firefox is a browser just like IE that is faster, more secure, and is totally free.  I've been using it since version 1.0 and they just release 3.0.  This browser is leaps and bounds greater than IE.  Give it a try!  (Cadets ask your parents before you install anything on your computer).

11 Apr 2008
Yay I got promoted and started my initial training for mission scanner!  In website news, I changed the 24 Hour Pack and 72 Hour Pack pages to be static content and made them a sub-menu for Emergency Services under Staff in the top menu.  I updated the Help Wanted section in the Member's Only section for the new track 228 Drug Demand Reduction Officer.

24 Mar. 2008
The laptop "overhaul" went great.  I was able to take a complete image of the laptop before reinstalling so if some data is not back in the "right place" then I can go back to the image and retrieve it.  It's running pretty smooth right now.  Let's keep it that way!
In other news I've finished my training for my ITO tech. rating.  Yay!

17 Mar. 2008
If you're asking "where did the website comments go?" I have an explanation.  During our last website problem with our hosting company Netfirms I believe we encountered a database error in which our commenting application was damaged.  I researched the problem we were getting which was an error when making a post "Wrong securitycode!" but to no avail.  So for now commenting has been disabled on the website.  The good news is that you can still comment on ANY topic found on this website by using our forum.  If you're NOT using the forum and you're a member of CAP you don't have en excuse!  Feel free to browse over to the forum either by clicking on Forum from the main menu or from the Top Menu bar to get commenting/posting!

16 Mar. 2008
OK I finally got around to checking out the squadron laptop and wow does it need an overhaul.  My professional recommendation is that it gets wiped clean and we start over.  If you have data saved on the laptop to include documents, favorite websites, pictures, or any other files saved on the laptop that you want you need to let me know ASAP.  If you don't let me know by 22 Mar 2008 (this coming Saturday) then it's too late as that's the day I plan to wipe it out.

28 Feb. 2008
Well I'm sure some of you have noticed the website was having an issue during the past few days on the frontpage.  Our hosting company Netfirms erred (yet again) and took their sweet time (yet again) to fix the issue.  But everything is fine now.  Yay.

In other news I have been a total slacker at getting SIMS loaded on the squadron laptop.  This task has coincided with my move and with me getting an HDTV and an XBox 360.  MAJOR DETTERENT TO WORK ENSUED.  But I promise to get it on there ASAP.

01 Feb. 2008
Again, this has been a great month and a half of website editing.  We have had so little to do!  Dave and I are continuing to update the content as events occur and other than posting the squadron, group, and wing, news we haven't had to make very many changes to the website.  Yay! 

I had an interesting occurance lately.  I use the same type of format on my website http://amorford.homeip.net and the comment capability module on this site is also on my site.  Well someone somewhere wrote a hack that sends a webcrawling bot around looking for that particular comment module and it posts a URL 20 times on each post.  However, that only can occur if Guest posting is enabled.  SO, if it happens to us we'll just have to disable guest posting which means you'll have to log in and then post.

I picked up the squadron laptop at last nights meeting and will attempt to establish what I've been calling a baseline on it.  A level of nominal performance and "see what this baby can do".  Depending on its performance I may recommend an upgrade but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

I'm still researching SIMS (the database application for records keeping within CAP).  I plan to load it up on the laptop and try it out.  Hopefully it will help with getting our squadron in this century of record keeping.

12 Dec. 2007
Wow!  It sure has been nice not having to post any changes here for a while.  The website has only been updated with content as of late which is nice.  SM Dave Augustine is keeping the content fresh on the frontpage.  I do want to outline some of the rules we are going by as far as categorizing certain things.  For instance, if an item we post on the frontpage is older than 7 days old it gets taken off the frontpage and can then only be found in the Latest News section.  If it's older than 7 days but isn't pertinent information anymore it is then moved to the News Archive.  Likewise, if an item has been sitting in the in the Latest News section for more than 30 days it's moved to the News Archive.  If an item doesn't have a place on the page anymore at all then it's simply unpublished from the site.  If you are missing something on the site that you KNOW was there you can either try searching for it or simply This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it Dave or myself and we would be happy to copy and paste that item in a reply email to you.

04 Dec. 2007
You might be asking yourself...where the heck did the Cadet Page from the old site go?  Well to be quite honest with you...we asked ourselves that same question!  Well it's back WITH the famed Ribbon Checker website!  You can click this link or find it under Staff in the top menu called Cadet Programs.  Happy browsing!

02 Dec. 2007
We recently discovered some things on the site that were not compliant with CAPR 10-1.  All pages now reflect the new title "Civil Air Patrol, San Angelo Composite Squadron".  GTM3 references have been changed to GTM Level-3.  All staff command position titles have been changed.  Additionally, each staff page has been updated to reflect the new page titles.

I removed three duplicates of the "links or references" warning since we already have that information at the bottom of each page. 
I found some text on the Flight Ops page that was a different color and had a blue bar down the left hand side.  I made the color change and removed the blue bar. 
I moved Maj Clements picture on the CC page to be in the content rather than floating above it (reduces scrolling).

27 Nov. 2007
Wow we had some major problems over the weekend.  Sorry about that but some things were out of our span of control.  Netfirms (our hosting company) figured out our problem and worked to correct it relatively quickly.  Sorry for the troubles!

20 Nov. 2007
You may notice the website seems to look a little bit different everyday.  Bare with us!  We're sorry if any of the changes we make interfere with your use of the website but it isn't feasible to do maintenance in the wee hours of the morning...mainly because Dave Augustine and I like to sleep during those hours. 

New items of note are as follows:
When you login you will see Members Only appear in the main menu and now the top menu.  The top menu item gives you a drop down list to select from.
You should also notice the Staff item in the top menu (you would have had to if you're reading this) which is also a drop down listing.
Where'd the other banner go?  It's been merged with the other top banner to improve browsability and simply to take up less room. 
Newsflash items are below the main menu above the Login form. 
Latest News in the top menu is now TX-023 news and is a drop down listing of latest news, archived news, and our mission log.

Other than that not much else has changed.  Keep checking back for updates!