About SCAtoday.net
SCAtoday.net is a news portal website offering news, information, and discussions free of charge to members of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), and to others interested in the history of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
This is a totally not-for-profit web site, a true "labor of love" run by an all-volunteer staff and funded out of pocket by its Publisher. We welcome participation by members of the Medieval Living History community, and we are always looking for news reporters, editors, and correspondents from around the world.
While our title, SCAtoday.net, may suggest that we are exclusively oriented toward the Society for Creative Anachronism, that is not the case. We welcome news stories, event announcements, and other contributions from any Living History group within the loosely-bounded time period of 600 CE to 1650 CE, and from historical organizations that do not necessarily include "living history" (for example, museums, historical art galleries, university history departments, etc.).
SCAtoday.net is an independent publication not affiliated with nor endorsed by the Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc. While most of our staff are members (and even officers) of the SCA or its branches, we do not presume to speak for the SCA or its Board of Directors. We are an independent news source.
Guidelines for Contributors
SCAtoday.net welcomes contributed articles, links, and other content from our readers. This page explains how to contribute items so that they fit into our editorial format and policy, making it more likely that we will be able to publish what you have written.
Prerequisites
To keep spammers from clogging our system with garbage, we required that contributors be logged in with an SCAtoday.net user account. If you do not have an account yet, you can visit http://scatoday.net/user/register to create one. It takes only a few minutes, and you also will be able to customize the appearance of the SCAtoday.net home page.
Requiring contributors to be logged in also allows our editors to obtain your email address from the database, so we can contact you with questions about articles you contribute. (The email addresses are not visible to the public, only our senior staff.) This can make all the difference in the world if we are unsure about copyright permissions, for example.
What Kind of Article?
There are several different types of content you can contribute, depending on how the article will be used on the site. Here is a guide to the most common types, so that you can select the appropriate type for your article:
- story
- A story is, very simply, a news item with no web link. Stories will appear in our main newswire on the home page, where readers can see the "teaser" (or lead) and can click on the headline to see the full article. Stories start at the top of our newswire and are "pushed down the page" as newer items are published. Eventually, they scroll off the bottom of the newswire page, but they remain in our archives indefinitely.
- webstory
- A webstory is exactly like a story, except that the webstory has an associated web link or URL. Usually, the webstory contains a summary that we publish on SCAtoday.net, and the associated web link points to the published version of the full text of the article. If you are contributing a news article that you found on another site on the web, this is the type of node to create on SCAtoday.net.
- weblink
- A weblink is not a pointer to a news item, but rather is a pointer to a permanent web site or a major section of a web site. Unlike stories and webstories, weblinks do not ever show up on our newswire. Instead, they are immediately filed by category into the links directory for permanent reference.
- event
- An event is an item that goes on our event calendar rather than on the newswire. If your group wants to promote its event, please feel free to contribute a notice. We recommend, in general, that you put only basic information about the event into SCAtoday.net, and provide a URL to the official event web site. This way, changes and additions to your event will not make the SCAtoday.net notice outdated.
- recipe
- Readers are welcome to share a favorite feast or modern recipe with SCAtoday.net's audience. Please post only your own recipes, or those that are in the public domain by virtue of their antiquity. (Note that translations of historic recipes published elsewhere are copyrighted by the translator and/or publisher, and we cannot reprint those here without permission.)
In general, if you are contributing a news item (that is, something that is temporal in nature), then it should be either a story or a webstory depending on whether there is a URL associated with it. If you are contributing a link to a web site, rather than a link to an individual article on a web site, then you probably should make a weblink. Events are self-explanatory.
If you are still not sure, even after reading these instructions, don't worry. We can convert from one type to another, although it's a bit of extra work that might cause a delay in publishing your item. You are also welcome to contact us for advice.
Our Editorial Queue
For legal reasons, no article, forum post, or comment is ever published on SCAtoday.net without being reviewed by one of our staff editors. This is for our protection, to prevent our site from being used in ways that might subject us to litigation, and it is for your protection, to keep the site from becoming a dumping ground for spam, pornography, political and religious solicitations, chain letters, and similar junk.
When you contribute an article, it goes into our "editorial queue" to await approval. This queue is stored in a relational database that is extremely reliable and backed up at frequent intervals; even if our server should crash, it is very unlikely that your article will be lost.
If you contribute something that is time-sensitive, such as a notice about an event that is coming up in just a day or two, please feel free to put "[TIME SENSITIVE]" in the title. We will attend to such items as quickly as our modern-world schedule allows, and we will remove that "flag" text from the title before we publish.
Likewise, if you need to tell us something about your article for editorial purposes, feel free to include this in the body of the article. Just clearly indicate that it's an editorial note and should not be published with the rest of the text, and we will remove it before approving the article.
Editorial Schedule
If you look at the posting dates and times on our newswire, you will probably get the impression that we have a team of people working around the clock to bring you the latest news. It's a nice illusion, but the fact is that we use an automated scheduling feature in our software to have articles appear on the newswire at nicely-spaced intervals rather than clumping all together when our editors happen to have time to work on the site. Remember, this is our hobby, not our job. Like you, we have our real modern-world responsibilities, and like you, we spend a lot of our spare time at events and demos.
Our editorial calendar is typically scheduled three to seven days ahead. We review and edit contributions and schedule them to appear at appropriated times, based on our experience with what seems to be popular with our readers. Believe it or not, certain types of articles tend to get more reads if we publish them at certain times of the day or on certain days of the week. (Who says web publication is all science and no art?)
The point of mentioning all of this is so that you will understand why your article may not be published for several days after you contribute it. We intentionally "bank" articles in the queue a few days ahead, so that we do not run out if we happen to have a couple of slow news days in a row.
You can scan our Hall of Fame page's statistical summary to get an idea of how far out the editorial schedule goes; the "items approved for automatic publication in the future" statistic provides this information. Since we typically run 3 or 4 stories per day, divide this statistic by about 3.5 to get an idea of how many days into the future the schedule currently goes. This isn't an absolute indicator of how soon any given story will run, however, since we do not run stories in sequential order, and we will often "bump up" the priority of a story that is very timely versus others that are less time-sensitive. For example, a story naming the new Royal Heirs right after a Crown Tournament will run very quickly, whereas one describing an archaeological find may be in the queue for a week or more.
Copyright Issues
SCAtoday.net is a non-commercial, nonprofit web site, but we are still required to strictly comply with all applicable copyright laws and treaties. Beyond that, as members of an organization founded on the principles of courtesy and honor, we will not knowingly use someone else's work without their permission. Articles contributed to SCAtoday.net must therefore meet one of the following criteria:
- The person contributing the article is the original creator of the work, and is implicitly giving us permission to publish the article by contributing it.
- The contributed article to SCAtoday.net is an abstract or summary, written in the contributor's own words, of another published article, and we are linking to the full text of that article.
- We, or the person contributing the article, have specific permission from the creator of the work to publish it on SCAtoday.net. (This may include a "blanket" permission, such as a person who has told us, "You have permission to publish any articles I post on XYZ email list." Or it may include public notices where the notice itself contains a message indicating that it may be freely republished.)
- We believe in good faith that the material is not copyrightable or has been placed in the public domain.
What does this mean to you as a contributor? The short answer is, "Don't past entire articles from other web sites or email into our contrib form unless you wrote the article." People often do exactly that with entire articles from CNN, Yahoo! News, and other published sources — and we absolutely can't use these. If the article is of great interest to our readers, we may assign one of our reporters or editors to write an abstract of it so we can link to the original, but this takes a lot of time. If we don't have a staff member available, we simply have to reject the contribution.
If you see an interesting article online, and you want to contribute it to SCAtoday.net, don't cut and paste the entire text. Instead, write up a brief summary (even just a couple of sentences is perfectly fine) in your own words, and contribute that, with a link back to the original.
Contact SCAtoday.net
Cookies at SCAtoday.net
SCAtoday.net uses cookies as a part of its technical design. A "cookie" is a small quantity of data that is sent to a browser by a server, and which is stored either temporarily or permanently on your local computers.A cookie is not a program and therefore cannot contain malicious software such as viruses. Cookies are always associated with the domain of the server that sends them.
Our site uses cookies to allow users to navigate between pages and remember registrations. SCAtoday.net is committed to not using "cross-domain" cookies, that is, cookies sent or retrieved by other servers for advertising purposes. Cookies created and used by SCAtoday.net will be used solely by this site to support personalized features and will not be used for marketing purposes.
Some banner advertising companies use their cookies to track your surfing across multiple sites among their affiliates. This is accomplished by having the banner graphic actually be fetched from their server, not from the web site you intended to visit. You can (with most browsers) configure your computer to automatically reject such cookies. In any case, SCAtoday.net emphatically does not use this kind of cookie anywhere on the site.
It is the policy of SCAtoday.net to make the site work as much as possible without cookies enabled, but for some features, this is not practical. Users may choose to configure their browsers to disable cookies, but may not be able to take advantage of the personalized features of the site.
If you are really concerned about the privacy features of the SCAtoday.net web site, and you are technically inclined, you are welcome to
download the source code and examine it for yourself. The source code for most of this web site is released under an Open Source license.
Hall of Fame
Statistics report for SCAtoday.net as of Fri, 2008/08/29 - 05:35
General Statistics
- This site's first publication was Fri, 2002/08/02 - 15:57.
- We have been online for 6 years 4 weeks 13 hours.
- Active registered user accounts: 4167
- Stories published in the last week: 21
- Stories published in the last month: 95
- Stories published in the last year: 1331
- Stories published since this site was founded: 7850
- Web links in directory: 278
- Items in editorial queue, awaiting approval: 76
- Items approved for automatic publication in the future: 1
Most Active Registered Contributors
Most Popular Articles
Links Policy
This document has detailed information for webmasters who wish to link to SCAtoday.net or to syndicate our content on their own sites.
General Links to SCAtoday.net
SCAtoday.net recommends that other web sites link to our main page
(http://scatoday.net/) if they wish to recommend our site to their visitors.
We appreciate such links, and we invite webmasters who link to our site to
submit their own main URL as a potential "partner site." We will reciprocate
the link if we consider the web site to be related to our topics and therefore
of interest to our visitors. We will not acquire "partners" that are unrelated
to our topics simply as a way to increase our traffic, and we do not accept
paid reciprocal links or banners.
Outbound Links from SCAtoday.net to Other Sites
In our links catalog are outbound URL links to numerous other web sites. These
are provided as a courtesy and a useful service to our visitors.
SCAtoday.net
has no control over the content of these sites, and while we try to keep track
of our links we cannot promise you won't occasionally find something out there
that offends you. We consider removal of offensive links on a case-by-case
basis, weighing the sensibilities of any one individual against the mission
of our site and our perception of the sensibilities of the majority of our
visitors.
If you run a web site that is related to living history, the SCA, or historical
research, and you think it would be of interest to our visitors, you are welcome
to submit it for consideration. We do not, in general, link to unrelated sites,
so if you are promoting diet pills, investments, or multilevel marketing we are not
interested.
Policy on "Deep Links" to SCAtoday.net
Other web sites are welcome to link directly to single articles or sections
of SCAtoday.net, but we do not guarantee that the URLs for such content will
not change in the future, nor do we guarantee a redirection link if they do.
In general, we don't object to these so-called "deep links," as long as you understand that they may not be indefinitely valid. The proper way to link to one of our articles is with a URL like this:
http://scatoday.net/node/#
where the "#" is replaced with the node number of the article. In an upcoming software revision, this format will change slightly but in this case we do plan to redirect to the new URLs (the "view" directory level is going away).
SCAtoday.net does not, however, welcome deep links to individual graphic files on our
site. The modern-world legal status of such links is currently the subject of
much debate, but at the very least we consider such links to be unethical
because they allow our graphics to be used out-of-context without our
permission.
In the spirit of treating others as we would wish to be treated, SCAtoday.net
will not deep-link to individual graphics on other web sites unless we have
the permission of the site owner to do so. Our normal policy is to link from
our newswire directly to the full text of the referenced article or story,
but we will make reasonable efforts to construct such links in such a
way that they render the article in the full, normal, context of the
destination site, with advertising intact. Sites that wish to have us link
only to their main "home page" should contact our Editor-In-Chief to request
this; we will make reasonable efforts to accommodate such requests.
SCAtoday.net provides banners which you may freely copy and display on your site
provided that they are clickable hyperlinks that point to our main page,
http://scatoday.net/.
Privacy Policy
This document explains what personal and statistical data is collected by SCAtoday.net, and how we will (and will not) use that information. We are committed to protecting your privacy as we would protect our own.
Anonymous Statistical Information and Logs
As a routine part of running this site, SCAtoday.net collects information about its users and their computers, for technical administration and for gathering statistics. We do not ask specific permission to do this, but we also do not link this information with you as an individual unless you give permission, you request help
with a problem, we have reasonable cause to believe that you are attempting to compromise the security of our server, or we are compelled to do so by court order.
The information collected by SCAtoday.net for all visitors is of the following nature:
- Browser type (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Konqueror, Mozilla, Opera, etc.)
- IP address of your computer, or of a proxy server
- Domain name of your internet provider and hostname pf your computer
- Complete URL of each page hit (for statistical purposes)
All of this information is collected in our standard server access logs, which record every HTTP transaction; this is very typical of almost all web sites.
SCAtoday.net may release aggregate statistics, which do not identify any particular individual, as we wish, for any purpose we choose. Aggregate statistics in this context include such data as how many people have visited the site, which features are most used, how many registered users there are and from what geographic areas, etc. Statistical data will never include any information that can reasonably be used to identify specific individuals.
Registered User Accounts
It is certainly possible to use SCAtoday.net anonymously, and anonymous visitors are welcome to browse nearly all of the site's content. For various legal and technical reasons, however some features will not be available except to users who are logged in with a registered user account. Registered accounts are available for free, and can be created by any visitor with a reasonably-modern web browser; no administrator approval is required for new accounts. Visitors are requested not to create multiple accounts, and SCAtoday.net reserves the right to delete multiple accounts created by automated software and in other cases where we feel our hospitality is being abused.
When creating a registered user account, visitors are asked to pick a user name (called a "screen name" by some other web sites) and to provide an e-mail address, persona name, and kingdom of allegiance. This will allow users to login and have access to all features of the site. Any other information collected by SCAtoday.net is strictly voluntary, but may allow registered users to participate in forums, contributing stories, or being listed in a future online directory.
Stories contributed to SCAtoday.net will be attributed to the contributor by user name; visitors to the site can click on the user name byline to see the persona name and kingdom of allegiance but not the email address. Contact information will not be posted unless requested. Some features may offer an option to post anonymously.
SCAtoday.net plans to offer an online directory of registered users, listed by user name, persona name, and kingdom of allegiance. No other personal information will be given unless authorized by the registered user. Users may choose to provide additional information in optional fields, but the default will always be to show the
minimum amount of information.
SCAtoday.net promises never to sell or give your personal information to a third party without explicit consent of the user unless we are required to do so by a court of law or unless we have reasonable cause to believe the user is engaged in an illegal activity on our site. Note: Any probable evidence of illegal activity will be reported to appropriate law enforcement agencies.
At any time, users may request that personal information be removed from the database. We will comply within a reasonable time period after establishing the authenticity of the user's request. It may not be practical to remove data from the offline archives, but we promise to remove it from the active web server's database if requested. Login accounts will be disabled and all personal information removed from the database, but the empty user name will remain if it is linked to any contributed content. Exception: SCAtoday.net will not remove data from our database if doing so would violate a court order or subpoena.
Email Addresses
The email address provided when registering a new user account is not revealed to the public. Rather, it is used by the web server software to send out the initial random password for the account, and to send out a new password if you request it. SCAtoday.net administrative staff can obtain the email address from the database, and will occasionally use this to contact you for specific purposes, such as to ask a question about a story or forum post that you have contributed or to notify you of problems with your account. We will not publish the address, however, without your permission.
From time to time, SCAtoday.net may send out e-mail notices to all registered users for the purpose of notification of policy or technical issues. SCAtoday.net will not send out unsolicited e-mail for commercial or marketing purposes, nor will it make e-mail addresses available to third-party marketers unless specifically authorized to do so. There will never be an implied or implicit opt-in by default for any unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE, commonly called "spam").
SCAtoday.net may offer e-mail discussion or announcement lists, to which users may subscribe if they wish. Such subscriptions will always be strictly opt-in, with specific action required on the part of the user rather than a default opt-in for all users.
As a standard policy, if someone other than SCAtoday.net's editorial staff seeks to contact one of our registered users, we do not provide the email address of the user to that person. Rather, we ask for an email address from the person seeking the contact, and then one of our staff will send that address to the person being sought, allowing them to decide for themselves if they wish to converse with the person seeking them. Once the person being sought decides to respond to the person seeking them, the conversation is directly between the two individuals and does not involve SCAtoday.net staff members.
Email addresses embedded within a contributed article may or may not be redacted by our editorial staff, based on our judgment in good faith as to whether the person whose email address is indicated intended for that information to be published. For example, if we receive a press release or event announcement containing a contact email address from the person whose email address is in the announcement or someone we may reasonably believe speaks on their behalf (such as a colleague on the event staff), we will usually include the address in the published article. We will remove email addresses from published articles upon request from the owner of the address, however.
Securing Personal Information
SCAtoday.net takes reasonable precautions to safeguard the privacy of personal information in the database, but there is no way to make the system 100% impenetrable while still offering public access by way of the Internet. There is, therefore, no warranty of security for information in the SCAtoday.net database, and SCAtoday.net advises visitors not to share SCAtoday.net passwords with anyone, nor to use the same password for SCAtoday.net as is used elsewhere.
Syndication
Like many web sites, SCAtoday.net provides a "syndication" mechanism to allow other sites to display our headlines with clickable links back to the full story on our site.
SCAtoday.net's newswire can be syndicated freely on other sites, provided only the headlines and/or "teaser" information is copied and not the stories' main page. The syndicated headlines must link back to the story page on SCAtoday.net; you may not cut and paste our entire story onto your site without specific permission.
Currently our newsfeed supports RSS 2.0 format. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is an XML (extensible markup language) format standard that is compatible with a variety of news reader and web site content management programs.
Typically, programs that display news feeds will "poll" our site at regular intervals to see if there are new stories on the wire. We recommend that you set the polling interval to not less than one hour, though we do not specifically enforce that guideline unless someone abuses our site by polling at ridiculously-frequent intervals. You should also set your polling time to something other than "on the hour", to avoid having everyone pile on requests at the same minute.
The URL from which our RSS feed can be accessed is http://scatoday.net/node/feed . You can look for the little 
icon on pages where syndication is supported. This icon links to the appropriate RSS feed.
If you begin running our newswire on your web site, please let us know so that we can add a link to your site from our Partner Sites directory.
Terms of Service
These are the Terms of Service under which we provide this free web site for your use. By using this site, you agree to these terms.
- SCAtoday.net is provided free of charge to members of the Society for
Creative Anachronism, and to others interested in the history of the
Middle Ages. As a free service, we reserve the right to limit access, to
change or withdraw features or services, or to discontinue the entire
site at any time, with or without advance notice to you.
- SCAtoday.net is committed to full compliance with applicable copyright
law and treaty currently in effect in the U.S. As such, we will not
knowingly publish copyrighted material without express permission from
the copyright owner. Please refrain from posting copyrighted material
to our forums or including copyrighted text as part of a contributed
article or story.
- Small excerpted quotes from copyrighted material, or URL links to such
material, are welcome at SCAtoday.net as long as they are permitted under
the "fair use doctrine" of copyright law. SCAtoday.net's normal editorial
policy is to link to articles on other web sites, with a short lead or
abstract written by our own staff. A brief quote of the original article
is usually considered "fair use" in this context. We do not republish
entire stories, or substantial portions thereof, from other sources unless
we obtain explicit permission from the owner of the material.
- By posting messages to our forums, or contributing a story or article to
SCAtoday.net, or uploading a file, you agree that:
- You are the original author of the material you have provided to us,
or you have appropriately cited the source within the text of your
contribution so that we may establish permission from the owner.
- SCAtoday.net and its publisher have a non-exclusive, perpetual
right to publish the material on the Internet or in any other media,
without compensation or fee to you. You may also publish your material
elsewhere, as you wish, so long as you do so non-exclusively. Once you
contribute material to SCAtoday.net, you may not withdraw the granted
permission to publish.
- You remain the copyright owner of your material, but SCAtoday.net
is the copyright owner of the overall web page (or other medium) in
which your material is published.
- Publication on SCAtoday.net does not constitute endorsement of the
material or viewpoints expressed therein by SCAtoday.net or its
staff. You may freely disclose to anyone that your article or forum
message has been published on SCAtoday.net, but you may not state
or imply that SCAtoday.net endorses what you have said.
- The material you are contributing is not, to the best of your knowledge,
untrue, illegal, or libelous. (The prohibition on "untrue" material does not apply to material that is clearly and obviously a work of fiction,
parody, or satire.)
- The editors of SCAtoday.net are permitted to edit the material for
length, to correct grammatical or spelling errors, to reformat the
material to fit the web site's layout, or to remove portions
which violate our Terms of Service. If you are unhappy with the edited
version, you may appeal to our Editor-In-Chief to ask that your original
text be restored or the article withdrawn from our site. The decision
on this appeal is solely at the discretion of the Editor-In-Chief.
- You may offer material with no editing permitted, by explicitly stating
this constraint at the time of the contribution. If you elect to do this,
SCAtoday will either accept the material without alteration or will
reject it, at our discretion. (In this context, "alteration" does
not include reformatting to fit the layout of our site or correcting minor
typographical errors.)
- If you wish to allow others to freely republish your material, or to
place your material in the public domain, you may indicate this within
the text. SCAtoday.net will include such notice with your article if
it is practical for us to do so within the constraints of our site's
design.
- The following specific types of material are considered unacceptable on the SCAtoday.net site, and will be removed without notice if found in a forum:
- Chain letters, virus warnings, or other flagrantly off-topic messages
- Material which in the sole judgment of our editorial staff is patently
profane, pornographic, or offensive
- Material which we believe violates copyright or libel laws
- Racial, national, religious, or ethnic slurs or hate speech, threats,
or advocacy of any illegal activity
- Material which is defamatory or unduly derogatory of a specific
individual or group
- Overtly commercial messages, including multilevel marketing schemes
- Religious or political solicitations or advocacy, except for political
advocacy within the specific topic context of the area of our site for which the
material is contributed.
- Our intent is to maintain roughly a "PG" content rating on our site, with material that is appropriate to most adults and teenagers, and to maintain a civil tone of discussion even when there are strong disagreements about the issue at hand.
- This does not mean that you may not speak your mind frankly, bluntly, and
openly on political issues. It does mean, however, that the discussion is
constrained to civil discourse and that it focuses on issues and not on
personalities. The U.S. Bill of Rights gives you the right to free speech,
but does not require SCAtoday.net to provide an unrestricted soapbox. If
you want to be free from our constraints, you are free to build your own
web page.
- "Commercial messages" in this context refers to material of a marketing or advertising nature, where such material is not germane to the topic of discussion. It is permissible to mention a specific commercial entity, such as a merchant, in the broader context of a discussion or article
about a related commodity. For instance, within a discussion of period
tweedle glomping on a forum, you are permitted to mention that you happen
to be a merchant specializing in selling tweedles. The guideline is that
such messages must be on-topic and that the commercial portion must be
brief (a mention, not a lengthy advertisement).
- Discussion of religion in the context of historical research is welcome.
Advocacy or dis-advocacy of modern religious or spiritual doctrine is not.
Historical discussion of politics, or debate of current SCA political
issues (such as a proposed change in policy) is welcome. Advocacy or debate
of modern-world political parties, issues, or candidates is not.
- Some forums may be marked as being for children, and our editorial staff
will maintain a stricter standard of content in these forums.
- Everyone who posts content to the forums on SCAtoday.net is expected to
behave honourably, as a Lord or Lady of the Current Middle Ages. If, in
the judgment of our editorial staff, you have failed to do so, we may act
to prevent you from further such conduct on our site. This may include
a warning by e-mail, banning from forum posts, or termination of your
login account. If we terminate your account, our editorial staff may post
a notice in the relevant forum(s) stating that your account has been
terminated for violation of our Terms of Service, so that other posters
are aware of why you are no longer participating in the forum.
- Commercial entities whose web sites or e-mail addresses are linked from
SCAtoday.net, or which are listed in our directories, are not necessarily
endorsed or recommended by SCAtoday.net or its staff. Any business
transactions between SCAtoday.net visitors and such merchants are a private
affair between the two parties and do not involve SCAtoday.net.
DISCLAIMER
SCAtoday.net is provided as a public service to the members of the SCA and
to interested others, but it is not affiliated in any official or legal
way with the Society for Creative Anachronism, Incorporated. This web site
does not delineate the policy of the SCA, Inc., its organizational units,
nor any officers thereof.
Colophon
This Colophon describes how this web site is created and maintained, and provides credits for those who have contributed in a major way.
Technical Features
This web site runs on a content management system (CMS) called Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/). Drupal is an Open Source, free software application that stores all of the text and HTML content for the pages themselves, user accounts, security settings, search engine data, and so on. Drupal, like other CMS programs, allows people to concentrate on creating content while it handles the details of page formatting, navigation links, and other administrivia.
Large files, such as images, are stored on the server's filesystem, but all other content is stored in a relational database called MySQL (http://www.mysql.com/). MySQL is another free Open Source application, and it is powerful and reliable enough to be used in many commercial and industrial applications.
The web pages are delivered to your browser using the Apache Web Server (http://httpd.apache.org/), yet another free Open Source application, which happens to be the most popular web server on the Internet by a wide margin.
Finally, all of this software runs on the GNU/Linux (http://www.linux.org/) operating system, created by Linus Torvalds and improved upon by hundreds of thousands of other programmers. Linux is an Open Source, free operating system akin to UNIX™ but available from the Internet at no cost.
Graphics
SCAtoday.net doesn't have a lot of graphics, and that is intentional. We want the site to be heavy on content and light on pretty fluff, so that it will download fast even over dialup links. The graphics that we do have, however, were mostly created by Mistress Heirusalem Crystoma in their original form, then modified and composited by Justin to fit the page layout of the site.
Web Site Hosting
SCAtoday.net gratefully acknowledges the contribution of our hosting provider, NewTide Group. Byron Albert and Jason Dutt run this business together, with Byron providing the technical work and Jason taking care of the back-office business functions. SCAtoday.net's Publisher, Justin, first met Byron at a Linux User Group meeting and is proud to call him a friend.
Byron has gone out of his way to offer great flexibility, reliable service, and prompt resolution of problems to this and Justin and Milica's other web sites, and has worked closely with us to accommodate the special configuration requirements of these web sites even if we asked for things not offered to his other customers. We have hosted with Byron's company since about 1996, and the reliability and service have been superlative.
We don't, as a rule, do commercial endorsements here at SCAtoday.net, but in this case we will make an exception—we highly recommend NewTide Group for web hosting of small-to-medium-scale web sites.