Secure Link to Famous in the 70s under Google Groups

You are viewing the public "Blog" version of "Famous in the 70s" which is managed using Blogger.com. If you want to leave comments here you will need a Google Account or a GMAIL identity. A Google Account can also be used to identify you as a member of our Google Group, also called "Famous in the 70s", but this group is password protected for security.

Access to the secure site is available through an invitation by a current member. That member should contact you via an email to pre-arrange access.

If you want to go ahead with the registration of access, all that is required is a Google account or GMAIL identity. Your unique email identity and password are set up as you register for access to Google.

After requesting an account, your registered email in-box will receive a verification email from Google. You must click on the link within this email to follow the procedure to verify your identity to Google. This is set up to avoid spammers on the website.

After you have been invited to visit the password-protected version of this site, which is managed using a "Google Groups" website, please follow the underlined "visit" link below.

Famous in the 70s

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Collaboration

We are living in an "Internet-Centric" world - Applications that run on the web instead of your local machine will soon take over. Now it is even possible to do Photoshop editing Online. With this in mind, I believe we should shift our approach away from email and attachments to centralised web facilities. This Blog will provide a time-line and some flexibility in the way we distribute information - think of it as a consolidated email and newsletter and archive and forum all in one place.

To provide structure, a database if you like, I don't think we need SQL. We have started with an EXCEL spreadsheet and it won't get to more than a 1000 rows (and "I think there is a world market for about five computers" misquoted someone on behalf of Thomas J. Watson).

What we do need is collaboration.

I have looked at a few Wiki providers to see if they provide spreadsheets as "application" pages. Jotspot does but it is closed for further development. Blog sites do not include spreadsheets, but we can always link from here to there. So far, the best of breed appears to be GOOGLE Docs and it gives us spreadsheets and Word (TEXT) documents.

I have emailed some of you to help test this concept. You will need a GOOGLE account (or GMAIL) to try out the online spreadsheet. I think this approach will save us stacks of work in the long run. The concept will be to add a small group of validated email addresses as people who are authorised to update - then see what happens.

See: http://docs.google.com/support/


Just to clarify: my proposal is to have this blog for public discussion, photos, whatever, and the GOOGLE Docs spreadsheet is the central repository for the People list. No Excel licence is required, but a little bit of spreadsheet skill may be. To insert a line, for example, is straightforward - but the formula for joining the first and second name is needed and this can be copied and pasted from another row. Copy and paste of text from another source, like (say) a Word Perfect document, requires paste to be done via Ctrl-V (old school).

Until further notice: if you do add anything to the GOOGLE Docs spreadsheet while it is in test mode, please send a copy of the additions/changes to Tony.

Update: 24 May 2007

After further investigation, the requirements for secure access lead us to an application that is purpose-built to deal with larger groups of people. Google Groups has the capability to allow shared administration and content management of a common site with secure access. Please contact the author of this Post to be invited to the Google Groups web site.

http://groups.google.com/group/famous-in-the-70s

Test Mode (click on the Post heading to see comments)

As "admin" for this Group Blog, I have invited a few authors who may like to try this out. We will need some ground rules and a way of moderating comments. Currently, anyone on the internet can read this Blog. Let me have your feedback.

p.s. "Famous in the 70s" is just a working title for this group blog. Any suggestions for a better name - just post a comment here or email Les. ["FAMOUS" was the name of a Skills Reporting system that Len and I developed and ran during the 1990s.]

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