Message from the manager

[ForumManager]

The City's website is finally online.
It has some very nice features but the content doesn't warrnt the very LONG wait!

[S.E. Marshall-Jones]

In regards to "www.thecityofyoungstown.com" - I believe someone or a company threw that site together. The city's e-mail addresses all end with @cityofyoungstownOH.com and although there nothing at that web address yet, I believe that will be the web addres of our city's site. Someone must have gotten lucky and bought the other name.
Sadly - it is a shame that our technilogically savvy city has not gotten to the 21st century where the internet is concerned. We have people more than capable to creat a professional, technical site and why it is taking so long I do not understand. (I have created sites including the long needing an up site www.youngstowndrc.com)
Oh well, just a comment.

[ForumManager]

The smileys can be found at this link with several other sets.

http://www.penthesilea.ch/yabb-smiley-sets/

There are copyright restrictions and use other than a non profit discussion board is subject to the author's discretion.

[Diggitt McLaughlin]

Is there any way I can download the penguin smileys to use in my email?  Thanks --
Diggitt

[AllanY2525]

Hi Maxina,

I am thinking about adding a section to my website
that would list historic homes and properties in Youngstown
that are available for purchase.  In addition, I was
thinking about putting up information on some of the
pitfalls that one must look out for when attemping to
purchase them (I am in the process of buying the old
apartment building at Bryson and Woodbine streets, and
the bullsh*t has already started in dealing with the
city, unscrupulous realtors, etc).

It would also be nice to put information on the web
that can teach people how to apply for government
grants, etc to fix up these old buildings, how to register
a historic property, etc.  The real estate listings
(ie: national MLS system) simply do not contain enough
information.

If we are going to get more folks like me to either
come back to Youngstown, or invest in Youngstown, we
need to make people AWARE of the inexpensive housing
stock that is available in Youngstown, as well as what
financial aid is available to fix these old buildings up.


Anyways, that's my $0.02

Regards,

Allan

Webmaster of www.youngstownphotos.orgfree.com and group
owner of the YTownHistoricHomesBldgs group on Yahoo.

[ForumManager]

SOOOOOO Sorry...

I was VERY wrong about the city's website address...
thank goodness.  BUT -- where is the real site?
When will we see this incredible web creation we've been waiting for? It better be incredible after this long....
with bells and whistles and data out the whazoo.

Thanks very much for the input about the board.  I am going to check that one out and another one called xoops to see which can integrate features easier...EASIER is always better for me.  xoops can also import yabb (in theory)  The lack of MySQL was the reason I kept to this cgi forum script - no MySQL necessary.  But now I have MySQL and I can't wait to take  it for a test drive. I'm like a kid with a new toy!

maxina

[yfdgricker]

As for what you could add to the site...

When upgrading the forums, you might want to look at pphpbbFM (phpbb Fully modded) at http://www.phpbbfm.net. It's a great board with lots of bells and whistles already added in. In addition to the basic forums, you can do multiple attachments, subforums within forums, maintain a links directory (I believe), portal capabilities and much more. I use it over at www.youngstownfire.com for my forums and I don't use half of the features that it contains. There is even a calendar integrated into phpbb so you can post topics and link them to a calendar of events.

I'm not sure if you are using a MySQL database backend for these forums or not but I believe one is necessary for phpbbfm.

Also, I believe that the current YaBB 1 Gold - SP1 can easily be imported over to phpbbfm so the posts will be retained.

You would even set up something like a Youngstown News forum w/ different topics as subforums like for instance

- Youngstown News
  - Road News
  - Fire News
  - Police News
  - Airport News
  - Construction News
  - Sports Scores
      .
      .
      .
  - etc etc etc

Just a though.
  

[yfdgricker]

well in the case of www.cityofyoungstown.com there is only a basic page online with very little info and news from August of 2004. AND THERE ARE ADS on the pages... I can't believe that!!  Just what we need -- to be greeted by ads on a GOVERNMENT website. What are they thinking? ...sorry that should go into another post.  

Must stop venting about the whole city website issue! meeeeeeow! hiss hiss

Close but that's not the city's site address.

The domain name for the city site will either be WWW.CITYOFYOUNGSTOWNOH.COM (note the OH at the end) which is  owned by the city of Youngstown or  WWW.CITYOFYOUNGSTOWNOH.ORG which has been aquired by LightGov. So it could be either one or both.

Belive me if that WAS the city of Youngstown site, I would meet with a lawyer because the city and the taxpayers got s-c-r-e-w-e-d.

However, who knows how long we will have to wait for the 'official' City of Youngstown site since the site was awarded in Feb 2004 and we are still waiting.

[ More about this in the following post...
http://ytownpc.com/forum/forum.pl?board=ingen;action=display;num=1097554250 ]

[ForumManager]

Hi Folks,

I have been considering revamping the entire YTOWNPC website for a long while.  Just haven't had the time. The website hosts this forum, classifieds,community calendar, the polls, e-cards  and the directory of links (which needs a major update due to people not reporting their dead links). I've also been trying to build a mall with free listings for local businesses that provide online sales  but that's also on a back burner.

When I originally put this site together I used the best FREE and lowcost scripting I could find but it has become outdated by today's standards. The new software that is out there now integrates many of the separate features I use into one portal type arrangement. I will be testing new software offsite to see what I like and what works well on the server and hopefully I will be able to find the time to implement some changes and give the site a new look.

Where do you come in?  Why am I telling you all of this?

Well I've seen some very interesting posts about what could be done online to promote our community and requests for sites that offer in depth information.  I need to know what you folks want.  Do you want lists of city and county contacts?...or just links to other outside websites.. well in the case of www.cityofyoungstown.com there is only a basic page online with very little info and news from August of 2004. AND THERE ARE ADS on the pages... I can't believe that!!  Just what we need -- to be greeted by ads on a GOVERNMENT website. What are they thinking? ...sorry that should go into another post.  

Must stop venting about the whole city website issue! meeeeeeow! hiss hiss

Anyway, give me some ideas for content...what do we need?
Feel free to request anything.  I can't make any promises about what I can fit in and I don't know when changes will be integrated.  I just want to know what you'd like to see included.

YTOWNPC is pretty much grandfathered into the major search engines and comes up high in the rankings... I'd hate to change the domain name of the mahoning valley pages at this point.  Although I could do a permanant redirect on individual pages and let the googlebots roam.  The mall site domain is mvmall.net...but nothing is there as of now.

Please reply to this post with your ideas!

Maxina