Activity Diary Introduction

Activity Diary Introduction

Saturday
21 February 2015; 3:09 p.m.

Re:  "neighborhood watch"


It seems to me that the key to a neighborhood watch program (which we can implement ourselves without it bearing an official Neighborhood Watch name) is for activity to be recorded then reported amongst us neighbors.  The ease at which this is possible directly effects whether or not the program will be successful.

The previous attempts at information recording have failed.  They required people to web-browse to a specific page, log in and use word-processor type tools to add information to a list.  This remains the way the Resident Directory is set up.  (At the moment, I've been too busy to think of a more elegant solution for that directory.)  There was also no "push" notification with this system.  Instead, users needed to go to the page and "pull" information from it to see if changes occurred.

I use email.  Simple.  Reasonably universal.  And therefore familiar – people need not learn anything new.  And if they have an email address, they are hopefully in the habit of checking it regularly; so again hopefully, this will not cause any additional burden.

I have recently begun to use Blogger for a personal diary and have become aware of some of its functions.  Blogger allows people to subscribe to receive changes via email.  Blogger also allows us to email up to ten people whenever a change is made.  (These are "push" notifications.)  There might be more elegant solutions, but this is the one I am familiar with.  One benefit is that we can stay within the Google family of products, so we need not open a new account, search for an appropriate name, etc.  Although I could begin a new Blogger account, I am highjacking what I already created to add this Activity Diary.  We should be able to easily distinguish among posts.

Posting messages to Blogger required more research and jiggery-pokery.  Although posting can also be done by email, the email must come from skykingmeadows@gmail.com.  The easy solution is to enable automatic forwarding of all messages, which is what I have done.  This means that all messages received by skykingmeadows@gmail.com, are immediately and automatically posted publicly on the Blogger site.  At this point, there is not enough participation to worry about being flooded with messages – we can only hope to get to that level.  This can be revisited should the need arise or until someone can implement a better solution.

I'm an old man.  So I think the pinnacle of human achievement was reached when we discovered email. ☺  You kids these days with your Facebook and texting . . .  You'll need to set up a Sky King Meadows account on Facebook on your own – and someone else can look for a text-to-email application if you are really into texting . . .

I did however create a Twitter account (@skykingmeadows), more to reserve the name than anything else.  And I think I have it set up so that all tweets, including direct-messages, are automatically forwarded via email to skykingmeadows@gmail.com (and hence, automatically posted publicly on Blogger).  I am not interested in Twitter enough to investigate it further; so this is something else I to leave to others.  Suffice to say, that it looks like you can use Twitter to add items to this Activity Diary as well, but not receive notifications.

And I leave this Activity Diary to be as broadly or as narrowly defined as each person wants.  Each person can create their own custom email spam filters or simply ignore messages they find irrelevant.  (But again for us to be worried about spam, about too much email, at this juncture is way premature.)  Using certain conventions, like beginning each email with "not urgent" or "archive" or "info only", will help people weed out messages they are not interested in.  And for the sake of us older folks, please don't use abbreviations. ☺  Activities might include not only suspicious activities requiring immediate community attention ("that red car has now been around the block three times"), but can also record "historical" information regarding our neighborhood ("first snowfall this season" or "bad wind storm last night" or even non-actionable "car window broken out last night, police report number pending, photo attached").  

I have a some technical notes to write, but I need to wrap this up.  I've spent all day on trying to resolve this to some sort of mildly satisfactory conclusion and I'm getting tired.  Please send me your email address if you wish to receive emails notifying you of activity.  If I receive more than ten, I will try to do some magic.  Otherwise, you are welcome to subscribe to this "blog" at any time.

Thank you.

– John Hofman
johnhofman69@hotmail.com (public email address)


e/c:  Ryan Lancaster (president, Sky King Meadows Homeowners Association)

blind e/c:  to those residents who wish to be kept in-the-loop, for your information and records


time code:  6:18 pm

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