SOTO Group of Alcoholics Anonymous
Corvallis, Oregon
SOTO Group Webmaster Information
Welcome SOTO Group Webmasters!
This page covers some tips and tricks for maintaining the website, which was created during the pandemic era of Zoom meetings by Hal B.
The https://sotogroup.org website is built using a variety of free-to-use tools from Google. See the Online Services page for a high-level overview.
The primary tools are Google Drive, where our files are stored, and the wysiwyg website builder Google Sites. Log in with the group's sotogroup.dist21@gmail.com ID and password, which you can get from Gerry F or Julie L or Suzanne B.
Google Sites makes it relatively easy to add and modify pages, at least in comparison to writing HTML code.
In particular, it is especially easy to duplicate existing content and then modify it as needed, which reduces the learning curve and makes continuing a consistent set of styling much easier.
Here are how the files and web pages in Google Drive and Google Sites are layed out. Note the correspondence of web pages hosting the files in Drive:
Google Drive
My Drive/
Information/
Online Services/
Hosting Information/
Confidential Information/
Images/
Meeting Materials/
Meeting Readings/
Meeting Readings Slideshow/
Preamble, How it Works, 12 Traditions, Promises
Website/
Soto Group
Double-click to open the website in the Google Sites editor
Google Sites
Home/
Contributions/
Page for members to make financial contributions to group expenses
Phone List Form/
Form for members to enter their contact info
Group Service/
Waiting Room/
Instructions for people managing the Zoom meeting waiting room
Meeting Readings/
Preamble, How it Works, 12 Traditions, Promises
Go-By-Thingie/
Script for the Zoom meeting host
How To Host Meetings/
Instructions for Zoom meeting hosts
Online Services/
Information about the online services used by the Group
Webmaster Info/
This page
Website Editing Tips:
How to make files available for download in the website:
See https://www.howtogeek.com/747810/how-to-make-a-direct-download-link-for-google-drive-files/ for instructions...
Using the https://www.sotogroup.org/group-service/meeting-readings page as an example, the links under Available Slideshow Formats list links to PDF, PowerPoint, and Google Slides versions of the A.A. Preamble, How it Works, 12 Traditions, and the Promises.
The way these links were built was to open the:
Meeting Materials/
Meeting Readings/
Meeting Readings Slideshow/
folder in Google Drive and observe the Meeting Readings.pdf, Meeting Readings.pptx, and Meeting Readings files.
Next, open the
Group Service/
Meeting Readings/
page in Google Sites and observe the PDF, PowerPoint, and Google Slides links.
To make a Google document publicly visible on a web page, share the document as a link with “Anyone with the link” / “Anyone on the internet with this link can view” permissions, then Embed that link in the web page.
