Scoutlander

As a webmaster I was maintaining our website on a generic provider with a HTML pages and a lot of blood sweat and tears to keep everything looking right.  New features and neat functionality were strictly up to my skill and ability to search the web for cool scripts.  Well, thanks to a server crash and some unrelated life stress we were forced to change providers and/or find a new way to do things.

After some serious searching I came across Scountlander (at www.scoutlander.com) where I discovered that I could join the ranks of hundreds of other troops, crews and packs that were already hosting there for FREE.  Well, given that our troop budget is always running a little tight this seemed like a really good plan.  I immediately jumped on the site and started checking out the features.

For the technical readers, the service is provided on what appears to be moderate servers on fair bandwidth and the site is written in asp.  The only complaint that I have had is the update speeds when making changes to the site, other than that everything has appeared to work perfectly.  If you're an HTML programmer and want to be able to tweak everything you will be disappointed.  The site uses Telerik's RadEditor control and they strip the Javascript and other scripts out of your documents before saving.  Also, it does some pretty standard HTML formatting that sometimes stomps on "cute" HTML or style tricks.

The site is fairly responsive and for the prices it's downright exceptional.  The site features a public and a private section with the ability to allow users to edit the pages directly on the site.  Users are authenticated by a known email address and a site password.  In my testing no user information was every provided to a 3rd party and no spam or other email has resulted from using the site (which is what their EULA says, but I always like to make sure).  Non-troop users get to see the public side of your site while authenticated users get to see the public and private sections of the site.

Posts on the site can include text and pictures and if you're interested in hosting something that just cannot be posted through the editor it also allows iframe tags (note that you may be reading this blog through an iframe on www.bsatroop506.com).  Inserting images is easy and the format of the site is straight-forward and easy to understand.  The page structure allows for a single level of pages under the root (no nesting of pages in the site map).  If you get creative though you can create pages that are not displayed in the menu and link to those pages (even though they are hidden) from visible pages.  This allows you to create a deeper page structure for your site.

The site was created before the advent of the Troop Webmaster position.  This means that there is not ready facility for giving a scout access to change pages on the public site without giving them full administrative rights on the site as a whole.  To solve this problem, I have my scout edit a page in a staging area in the private site and then when it's ready I use the organize content feature of the site and simply drag and drop the page content into the public site.

One of the best features of the site is the Knowledge base.  By posting articles in the knowledge base you can easily search for them at a later date.  What's more, other troops, crews and packs will have access to your sage thoughts and advice when they do a global search from their site.  It's a great way for scouts to expand the general knowledge base other other scouts from their experiences.

Well, I didn't do a really in-depth review of Scoutlander in this article, but I hope I gave you enough to let you decide if you want to start a site and see if it works for you.  You've got nothing to lose and if you don't like what you've got when you're done, just don't use it.

Yours in Scouting,
Dave