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Notes for Contributors to the Souldern Village Website

Table of Contents

  1. Account details
  2. Editing the Website
  3. Licence
  4. Editing the Calendar
  5. Photographs and Slideshows
  6. Twitter
  7. Contact Form
  8. Email

Account details

The Souldern website souldern.org domain is registered (via Go Daddy) by Nick Oakhill on behalf of Souldern Parish Council.

This is an alias for the site https://souldern.github.io hosted on the free GitHub Pages service owned by GitHub accounts of David Carlisle and the Souldern Village account:

Name: Souldern Village
Email: souldern.website [at] gmail.com
Password: Google and GitHub passwords Lodged with the Parish Council for information

GitHub

The Souldern GitHub Organisation has the following facilities:

Website https://souldern.org (https://souldern.github.io)
Website sources https://github.com/souldern
  • Owner: Souldern Village account and David Carlisle
  • View: Public

Google

The Souldern Village account has the following google facilities:

Gmail (email souldern.website@gmail.com) https://mail.google.com/mail
  • Owner: Souldern Village: mail also forwarded to David Carlisle and Nick Oakhill
Drive (file sharing)  https://drive.google.com
  • Owner: Souldern Village
Sheets (Google Docs)  https://drive.google.com
  • Owner: Souldern Village

For example a spreadsheet is used to power the contact form.

Photos https://photos.google.com
  • Owner: Souldern Village

Using Google photos saves file space in github, and each slideshow on the site is backed by a google album.

Calendar https://www.google.com/calendar
  • Owner: Souldern Village account
  • Edit/Invite: David Carlisle
  • Edit: Nick Oakhill
  • View: Public
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@souldernvillage2838
  • Owner: Souldern Village account
  • View: Public (currently just one public but unlisted chapel video)

Editing the Website

In order to be able to edit the site you do need a GitHub account. Once you have a GitHub user name, Contact the site maintainers and ask to be added to the Souldern GitHub Organisation which will give you write access to the site.

Unlike some other public website hosting solutions, GitHub pages gives total control over the HTML in the pages that are served. This does give a lot of flexibility however does make editing the site seem slightly more technical at first. We do however use the default Jekyll site builder which means that you can post pages to the site without needing to know any HTML markup or have any software other than your normal web browser.

I will present different levels of editing instructions starting with the simplest and getting more technical later. Many people will only need the first level which will allow you to post announcement pages which will appear on the site and be automatically linked from the home page announcements section.

Posting a Markdown announcement via the website
Step by step instructions specific to this site.
Uploading PDF, Word, Images, etc.
Step by step file upload instructions.
Posting HTML pages
Using HTML rather than Markdown
Using git and editing the files on your local machine
The most flexible way to edit the files is to install the git source control system and edit the files on the local disk. Anyone interested in doing this is welcome to contact David Carlisle for tips. Github has copious documentation online.

Licence

As noted in the About page unless otherwise noted the text and images on this website are Copyright Souldern Parish Council, and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Note this means that any contributing editors agree to assign copyright to the Parish Council. Other licences would be possible but the CC licences are a standard and well tested licence for this kind of use.

It is highly recommended that some licence is used, to avoid problems with future edits to the text and general distribution issues. Care should be taken that any photographs obtained from the web should be compatible with this. Often this is not a problem even if the original is available in a more restrictive form, for example the 100th anniversary picture of a steam train on the viaduct was marked as “All rights reserved” which would prevent use on this site, however I mailed the author requesting permission and got a reply back the same day, a copy of which is in the Souldern Village gmail for the record. Similarly permission was requested and granted for the image of the pond in the site banner, again forwarded to the gmail account.

Editing the Calendar

Access to the calendar is handled separately to access to the website, anyone with Owner access to the calendar can “share” the calendar with another user via email from the “settings” page. Note as well as being available on the site if you use the button under the calendar the calendar may be imported into most calendar apps, eg on mobile phones, etc.

Twitter

Twitter have disabled the ability to have embeded search widgets, however there are still gadgets following @3parishesnews and@CherwellOnline twitter profiles are on the Three Parishes and CDC pages.

Contact Form

As a matter of policy I have avoided putting most emails on the website as plain text. The main exception being emails to the souldern.org domain (if these get affected by spam mail we can discard them and allocate new addresses without affecting people's main email accounts).

As well as the general “Contact” link under the home page, several pages such as Village hall booking, Ann's Book banner in the history page and the Community market page use a link to the contact form as an alternative to direct email to the relevant person. All messages sent by the form are recorded in a spreadsheet in the Souldern Village Drive account, and that spreadsheet then sends an email to souldern.website [at] gmail.com email account. That gmail account is in turn set up to forward currently to David Carlisle and Nick Oakhill's email, but other email addresses could be added. For simplicity just one email form is used across the site although if needed individual forms could be set up to mail direct to different individuals.

The form is actually backed up by a spreadsheet stored in the Souldern Village Google Drive account. All responses are entered into that spreadsheet. A script on the spreadsheet then forwards the response to souldern.website [at] gmail.com.

Email

The GoDaddy registration of the souldern.org domain gives access to 100 email forwarding accounts. This is managed by Nick Oakhill as the domain owner. No email is stored on GoDaddy or souldern.org servers but we can specify for each of 100 addresses of the form abc [at] souldern.org one or more “real” email accounts to which the email should be forwarded. (This can be any convenient email service such as gmail or btinternet or email provided by your employer, etc.)

At the current time the following email addresses are enabled at souldern.org:

The names have been written camel case here to make them easier to read but email addresses are always case insensitive, so davidcarlisle [at] souldern.org would also work. The Website [at] souldern.org address is equivalent to using the form on the site, and goes to the souldern.website [at] gmail.com account, which in turn forwards to (currently) David Carlisle and Nick Oakhill.

As a matter of policy we have avoided putting any email addresses on site other than souldern.org domain addresses, so if you are representing a local organisation and wish a contact address be added to the site, you should obtain a souldern.org address, or use the contact form (in which case any relevant messages will be forwarded to you by the site maintainer).