Editor’s Page

Welcome to the second online edition of the Promenader. We invite you to visit often, and take advantage of the fresh seasonal updates, which we post on the first of March, June, September and December.

After publishing the first issue on our newly updated RAF website in December 2014, we breathed a collective sigh of relief … and began listening to your feedback, both online and in person.

The response was overwhelmingly positive, with kudos to the development team and the publication volunteers. A few errors were spotted and immediately corrected—exercising one of the many benefits of our new online existence. And let’s not forget the many club reporters who take the time to gather and submit their club information.

For those who are interested, statistics of the first issue may be found by clicking HERE.

A small number of readers reported trouble with navigation, but in most cases this was due to their lack of familiarity with some of the ins and outs of web browsing in general. We are doing our best to make navigation instructions clear, but if you see ways to improve them, please let us know via email to promenader@rochester.rr.com.

The email notifications we sent out on December 1 did not reach all registered subscribers. In a dozen cases this was due to errors or omissions in our address list. The rest could due to “spam” filters blocking or re-directing our email, but we currently have no good way of knowing for sure. However, here’s a way for you to help with that:

If you know someone who believes they are on the subscriber list but did not receive an alert email from us, please ask them to contact us via email to promenader@rochester.rr.com. Their email should tell us that they did not receive our alert email. If they don’t receive a reply from us in a few days, they should send another email, that I will answer from my personal email—which should hopefully get around any spam filter.

The most significant “problems” reported by readers had to do with printing. A particular issue was the fact that, unless one spent a lot of time on formatting, printing certain sections required a large amount of paper and ink. Several club presidents went to the trouble of printing selected sections (mainly: Club News, Features and Schedules) and put them out on the flyer table for members to browse during dances. Even though this affected a relatively few people, it was a big enough headache that it’s worth addressing in detail.

It turns out that by figuring out the scale settings that work best on your system, you can greatly reduce the number of printed pages and still get a clearly readable result. It’s still a lot of pages, but it’s the only option for those who wish to share hard copy with club-mates. (Another alternative for some might be to bring a WiFi-enabled tablet device to dances and let others browse online.)

To make printing easier, we have found a way to save folks the trouble of working out the scale settings on their own. A few days after the publication date of each issue, we plan to post print-optimized PDF versions of each section for readers to download and print. They will be posted to a free on-line file service called Dropbox. We will post links to these files in the FAQ page that covers printing. (Click HERE to go to that page.)

Clicking a link on that page will result in a PDF download of the corresponding Promenader section. The downloaded file will be pre-formatted to give you what we think is the best trade-off of type size and page count for that section. You may print the file or simply keep it for future off-line reference. Printing these PDF files will not require any special settings.

Thank you for taking the time to read all of this. We hope you will share any thoughts you have about improving the Promenader or other parts of the website. We continue to make progress on the publication process to lighten the load on volunteers. We also plan to add features to the Federation side of the site, so we hope you will come back often to browse.

Peter Emmel
2/18/2015
Interim editor of the Promenader
email to: promenader@rochester.rr.com
voice mail: 585-732-1004