Dean & Jason

Dean's the cut-n-paste hack tinkering with the guts of the site.
geek claims- has had 4 linux boxes and 3 win pc's in his tiny home office. used them instead of central heat.
dad status- 3 girls own me, two by genetics, one by choice- I love them dearly.

Jason's enjoying the "content" & "user-base-development" side of life.
geek claims- ask him to edit this post with his response! (waaaay too much heavy routing iron for a dsl/home lan [smirk])
dad status- awsome wife who's compiling their first child process, due for completion- spring 05. (I told you not to use the old P3 500mhz for that!)

for the most part, you don't.. not until we get A LOT more traffic and a much more active userbase. but soon enough we'll need moderators in the forums making sure the right posts get into the right place, and that people are behaving themselves...
eitherway, future Moderators & Admins will need to be active community members that we know well enough to trust with the awesome overwhelming power that ripples through our being.

In the menu, there's an item that says "Submit News" .. .click there, fill it all out, preview it to check it over, then press submit.

A couple of hints and pointers.
a) if you're going to be typing a while, use a word processor first and cut and paste it over later. that way you can save it and not worry about losing it, and you can spell/grammer check it. (save yourself some trauma)(no, I don't always do that, do as I suggest, not as I do. I know, I'm a horrid role model)
b) there's to fields to enter text into- the top one is the "teaser" area. your intro paragraph, your overview if you will, the second is where you can get much more elaborate.
c) as far as putting images in stories- my suggestion is upload them to a gallery, right click on them once they're there to find out the full path to it (i.e.- http://geekdad.org/images/logo.gif )then add that to your story. typically in such a fashion: (open carat) img src="http://geekdad.org/images/logo.gif" width="150px" (close carat)notice the width comment, cause you don't have much room in a normal news article, and you don't want a full sized image taking over the screen. that should be about right.

PostNuke is a php / mysql (among many db's) based CMS, or Content Management System. Its a relatively simply to setup, simply to maintain framework for all of the bits and pieces of data that make up this website. It makes it easy for a community to collaboratively interact, with minimal (hah! I can't believe I typed that) effort.
[ammendment- the basic structure is effortless, the fine tuning and customizing is eternal]

As to why I'm using it on geekdad? it's what I know best. I'm no programmer, no genius, no competent hack by any stretch of the imagination.. but I can get PN working. Yes, I know there are many others out there. some easier, some harder; some more flexible, some more secure; some probably even smell like llama ears... but in the end, this is what settled itself on to my harddrive.

Use this site! Invite others!

Submit news, post comments, post in the foums, respond to posts and comments, bring your friends!