GEORGETOWN EAGLES

Read the special report for new users.

This website can be viewed as a set of small sites: a team site for each team; and a single resource site with information shared by all teams.

It is easy to tell what kind of page you’re at, and where you are in the website:

• Team Pages : the masthead identifies the team, and the menu has more menu items:

  

• Resource Pages : the masthead does not identify any particular team, and the menu has fewer menu items:

  

Finally, the title of each page — at the top left of the white portion of the page — indicates where you are in the website:

• The title begins with “OUR TEAM” if you are at a team page which can be reached via the OUR TEAM menu item. The rest of the title identifies the page, e.g. “OUR TEAM : News”.

• The title begins with “INFORMATION” if you are at a resource page which can be reached via the INFORMATION menu item. The rest of the title identifies the page, e.g. “INFORMATION : Maps”.

• The title begins with “HELP” if you are at a resource page which can be reached via the HELP menu item. The rest of the title identifies the page, e.g. “HELP : FAQ”.

There are three major ways to navigate throughout this site: using text links, graphic links, or the horizontal menu at the top of each page.

Text Links

Text links work as you might expect: they are blue or purple, depending on whether you have visited their destinations recently; pointing to a text link makes an underscore appear under the text.

Graphic Links

Clicking on some graphics will take you to key places:

• Clicking the masthead where either the GBA logo the unofficial Eagles logo appears will take you to the resource site home page, i.e. to the page titled INFORMATION : Overview of Team Sites.

• Clicking the masthead where “Georgetown Eagles” appears will take you to the current small site’s home page. If you are at a team page, therefore, it takes you to the team site’s News / Home page; but if you are at a resource page, it takes you to the resource site’s home page, the page named INFORMATION : Overview of Team Sites.

• Clicking the black arrow at the bottom right corner of any page will take you to the top of that page.

  

• Clicking the webmaster’s logo, which appears at the bottom left corner of every page, will take you to his website.

  

• Clicking a button in a row of buttons appearing near the bottom of every team site’s News/Home page will take you to other websites of common interest. Try them out!

  

Horizontal Menu

Each page has a horizontal menu near the top of the page, in the page banner. For most menu items, pointing to a menu item reveals a dropdown submenu. (If no submenus ever appear, see “Why don’t drop-down menus work with Internet Explorer 5 or 6 on some PCs?”)

A working sample of the menu appears below. Note : menu items appear in various colours to help remind you where the menu items will take you; for more about this, see “Some menus have gold text, some white, and some bright blue. Why?”.

Point to the various menu items to see what happens, and try out the drop-down submenus:

 
All pages have G.B.A., AAA TEAMS, INFORMATION, and HELP menu items. Team pages also have OUR TEAM and (in pre-2011 sites) OUR SCHEDULE menu items. The order of menu items is slightly different for older team sites.

The menu choices take you to:

• G.B.A. : the official Georgetown Baseball Association site.
• AAA TEAMS : a submenu with a list of known Eagles (AAA) team sites, including sites made by others. Normally the list is only for the current season, but during the period where one season is ending, and another is starting, lists of teams for both seasons appear in the submenu.
• INFORMATION : resource pages; this menu item has a submenu, depicted on the right:
  • Colophon : issues related to the site design which may affect how the site works.
  • Overview : an overview of the team sites.
  • Legal Notices : a copyright notice, the site’s privacy policy, and disclaimers.
  • Links : useful links.
  • Maps : maps to places where we practice and play.
  • Reports : a list of special reports which offer useful information; for each report there is a separate page.
  • Tournaments : a list of tournaments, with links to team pages detailing each tournament.
• OUR TEAM (only for team sites) : pages in the team site, with information about the team; this menu item has a submenu, depicted on the right:
  • News : a list of recent news items, a list of upcoming events, and buttons to find traffic information, weather information, Major League Baseball information, baseball books and media, and Halton Hills information.
  • Roster : the coaches and players.
  • Sponsors : sponsorship information, and a list of the sponsors.
  • Confidential : confidential information, including contact information for the coaches and players (password protected).
  • Photos : a small photo gallery; this page may be absent if there are no photos.
  • Contacts : how to contact the team.
  • Calendar : this lists, month by month, all events taking place during the year, including holidays, practices, games, and meetings.
  • Games : this lists all games, including regular, exhibition, and tournament games, with scores for completed game, and a summary of the season record.
  • Tournaments : this lists all tournaments; for each tournament there is a separate page which gives details about that tournament. The separate tournament pages cannot be listed here, because they depend on the team.
  • What’s Up : this lists information extracted from several other pages, including news, upcoming events, the game schedule, the season record, and the calendar. This page may be especially useful to handheld devices, because all of the most frequently wanted information appears on this one page.
• HELP : help on using this site, in the form of a FAQ.

Note : the red triangle in the menu bar indicates the menu to which the current page belongs. The menu depicted above indicates that the current page belongs to the HELP menu.

This depends on the team.

For a Georgetown Eagles AAA team, go to the AAA Teams page by clicking on the AAA TEAMS menu item. If the team is not listed on that page, then no site for that team is known.

For other GBA teams, go to the GBA site by clicking on the G.B.A. menu item.

For baseball teams belonging to other organizations, check out the INFORMATION : Links page.

The compete schedule would be a page with a record of all the team events: but no page has the complete schedule. Instead, different parts of the schedule appear on different pages, organized to make it easier to find information.

Most of the time you will find what you want — recent news bulletins, or coming events — on the team site’s News page.

If you want any tournament information, you can find the tournaments listed on the team site’s Tournaments page, and you can find details about individual tournaments on each tournament’s special report.

If you want game information — either the schedule, the results, or the season record — go the the team site’s Games page.

If you want a handy calendar of events, go to the team site’s Calendar page.

If you are a coach or manager and want to know about possible conflicts in the schedule, go to the Conflicts section of the team site’s What’s Up page.

This site was made by Chuck Upsdell. If you are interested in having a site for your team, see the page “Portfolio : Sports Sites”.

The small site which has information useful to all teams has a page with a list of maps. You can get to this page from anywhere by pointing to the horizontal menu item INFORMATION and clicking Maps in its dropdown memu.

When a site names a baseball diamond or other location — for example, in a schedule — the name is usually a link to a map. Click on this link to get to the map. For example, see the map to the Gellert 1 diamond.

You should note several features of these map pages:

• The bottom of each map has a horizontal bar which shows the scale of the map, so that you can judge distances.
• The map has icons showing locations such as diamonds and schools. While the cursor points to the map, a Legend appears at the bottom right of the map which indicates what the icons mean.
• The map has a reddish, cross-shaped pointer showing the current location of interest.
• To the right of the map — and also below the map, when maps are wide or locations are many — is a list of the locations of interest on the map: for each location listed there are brief directions, there is often parking information, and there is usually a link to a separate satellite map. For example, “ Gellert 1 (Georgetown South 1): in Georgetown, east side of 8th Line, just north of 10th sideroad.  P  Parking south of the diamond.  »  See satellite photo.”
• When there is a satellite map, icons appear on the map showing points of interest. This often includes a greenish icon with an arrow and star, depicted at the right: this icon shows the entrance to the location; clicking on it enables you to get driving instructions to that entrance. Note : diamonds are often not on official roads, and in such cases the icons showning the entrances will be at points on official roads which you must pass to get to the diamond; an example of this is the satellite map to Vaughan’s Concord Regional Park, where the entrance shown is at the end of the closest official road to the diamonds.

Each team site also has a page named “OUR TEAM : Games” which, among other things, includes a list and map of all the diamonds where regular games are played. You can click either on the name in the list, or click on the map beside it, to get to the map to the diamond.

Note : names of places on the maps may not be quite what you expect. For more about this, see What’s in a Name?”.

This depends on whom you are trying to contact.

To contact someone in the Georgetown Baseball Association, see the GBA’s Contact Information pages.

To contact a particular team’s coach, assistant coach, or other staff member — for team sites made by Chuck Upsdell — go to the team’s site, and then to that site’s “OUR TEAM : Contacts” page.

To contact this site’s webmaster, send an eMail message to Chuck Upsdell.

See How do I navigate through this site?: the information below the sample horizontal menu lists and describes the pages.

An icon like this    marks a menu item which goes to a password protected page. Such a page typically has confidential information: for example, email addresses of a team’s coaches and parents; to access the page, a user must enter a “username” and “password”, which a typically given by a team’s coach to coaches, parents, and players.

All team sites have password protected pages, but this icon did not appear in menus until 2009.

This site works well with all common modern browsers. There are minor issues with some older browsers: see the Colophon for details. The issues are more severe for Internet Explorer 5 and 6: see the next FAQ, “Why don’t menus work with Internet Explorer 5 or 6 on some PCs?”, for details.

No attempt is made to make this site compatible with Internet Explorer 5 after 2009: Microsoft stopped supporting this browser in mid-2010, so it is now unsafe to use it.

This site offers drop-down menus, but if you have Internet Explorer 5 or 6, you must have JavaScript enabled for the drop-down menus to work. This is because these browsers fail to support a critical element of the standards, and a bit of JavaScript is needed to make up for this.

This issue should affect few users: and even so, the site is still useable when drop-down menus don’t appear, since clicking menu items on the horizontal menu bar go to pages with the same choices as the drop-down menus, adding one extra mouse click when going from page to page. Those affected should consider enabling JavaScript.

Much of the information on the team sites is automatically generated when you go to a page, and such information is generated using the JavaScript language, which all common browsers support. But people can disable JavaScript in most browsers, either by setting a browser option, or by installing an add-on which blocks JavaScript. Many pages will display little or no information if JavaScript is disabled, and such pages should instead display a message asking you to enable JavaScript, for example:

“News and Upcoming Events Not Available: this page needs JavaScript, which is either disabled or not supported by your browser. Please enable JavaScript.”

People affected by this should enable JavaScript.

Some modern parts of this site have been designed to be more friendly to mobile devices such as cellphones: pages are simpler; most menus and information fit in a narrow space; and information has been omitted which is not likely to be needed by those with mobile devices. Even so, there is some information which cannot be made to fit — for example, game schedules — which still require horizontal scrolling.

A mobile device must have a sufficiently capable browser to work with this site. How well the site works will depend very much on which device and browser is used: many mobile devices and browsers will produce unsatisfactory results.

For parts of this site which have not been made friendly to handheld devices, the handheld browser may reörganize pages in an attempt to make the pages work better on that device: results will vary.

Note : compatibility with mobile devices is greater for more modern sections of this site.

Gold menu items lead to other websites.

White menu items go to resource pages.

Cyan (bright blue) menu items go to team pages.

Note: team names in the AAA TEAMS submenu are gray for teams which lack team sites.

With old browsers the submenus are solid black, but with more advanced browsers the submenus are a bit lighter and partly transparent, so it is possible to see the text behind the submenus.

Submenus are partly transparent for two reasons: first, it is sometimes helpful to be able to read text behind a submenu which would otherwise be hidden; and second, the transparency adds an interesting design touch.

Your browser lets you configure how large that text should normally appear in web pages. This website normally uses the size you configured. Many sites, however, use a size smaller than you configured: if this smaller size had been too small for you, you may have reconfigured your browser to enlarge the text; but if you did so, text in sites like this one would then appear too large.

This is the size you configured your browser to use.

Text size problems would not exist if all sites sized text alike, but they don’t: many, like this one, use the size you configured; many use a size about one step smaller; and many use an arbitrary size which is unrelated to how you configured your browser. The text size therefore varies from site to site.

The size here was increased in Nov 2008 to what you see now, in this section of the site and in the 2008 and 2009 team sites, in order to conform with modern website design practices.

This site’s designer suggests that you configure your browser to use a font size in which this text is easy to read, and in which this text is also easy to read. (The smaller size is often used in menus, sidebars, footnotes, etc.) If this makes text too small on other sites, you could use your browser’s zoom function, if it has one, to enlarge the other site’s text. One hopes that, in the future, zooming will become less needed as more sites correctly honour your browser’s configuration.

When viewing pages on this site, some people may see fairly large black margins on the left and right of each page. This happens most often for people who have very wide monitors, or who have configured very small fonts.

This happens because this site sizes each page so that the page width does not exceed a certain limit. This is done to make pages easier to read: it has been found that people can most easily read lines of text which are neither too wide nor too narrow; by setting a maximum width, the site can ensure that lines of text will not be so wide that they become hard to read.

The maximum width depends on how you have configured your browser’s default text size: if you have configured a large text size, the width is greater; if you have configured a small size, the width is less. The result is that each line will have about the same number of words whether the font size is large or small. But a side-effect is that the black margins on the left and right of each page grow as the font size shrinks.

Note: if the browser window is very narrow, or if the font size is very great, the large black margins will not appear; pages will take up the full width of the browser window.

Note: the limit to the width of each page is not honoured by old versions of Internet Explorer, since these browsers do not support the feature which allows the width to be limited. For these browsers, pages always take up the full width of the browser window.

This site offers some documents which require programs which some people do not have. Examples of such documents are Adobe Acrobat (.PDF), Microsoft Excel (.XLS), and Microsoft Word (.DOC) documents. If you do not have the program normally required, however, you can get free programs which will let you view and print those documents. This site has a page telling you how to get free Document Viewers which will enable you to read those documents.

Note : documents offered by sites on the Internet are usually in Adobe Acrobat (.PDF) format, which you can read using the Adobe Reader (often called the Acrobat Reader); if you do not have this program, you should get it. Caution : Adobe will probably try to trick you into installing more than just the Adobe Reader, so at each step in the installation procedure, be careful to decline installation of other things.

Events in the team calendars are colour-coded to make it easier to identify events, just by glancing at the calendar.

The colour scheme is:

Note : when several types of events take place on the same day, e.g. both a game and a practice, the primary colours are those of the event which is most significant.

A team’s calendar can be viewed in two different ways, either in Calendar Mode, or in List Mode:

Calendar Mode

A calendar normally appears in Calendar Mode, as a grid with rows of weeks and columns of weekdays. For example:

In this mode, these buttons appear at the top right of each month’s calendar:

The third button switches to List Mode.

List Mode

A calendar can also appear in List Mode, as a list of events, with one row per event. For example:

In this mode, these buttons appear at the top right of each month’s calendar:

The third button switches to Calendar Mode.

It is harder to describe the two modes than to use them: go to a team’s calendar page and try them out!

To print the entire calendar, simply use your browser’s function to print the page. For most browsers the command to do this is “File Print”. Note that, if you do this, the top part of the page with the buttons and sidebar will not print because this part of the page is not needed for a printed calendar.

To print part of the calendar — e.g. for a month or a few months — you must do two things:

• Step 1 : select the portion of the calendar you want to print: with Microsoft Windows this is normally done by pointing the mouse to the start of what you want to print, holding the left mouse button down, moving the mouse (while the button is still down) to the end of what you want to print, then releasing the mouse button. Usually when you select part of a page, the browser will show what is selected by highlighting the selection in some way.

  For example, to select one month, point the cursor to the start of the name of the month, hold down the button and move the cursor to a point following the last week of the month, then release the mouse button.

• Step 2 : use your browser’s function to print the page, but when the Print dialog box appears, look for an option labelled “Selection” (or something like that) and set the option before clicking the dialog box’s “Okay” button to start printing. Note that the option will not appear if you haven’t selected the portion of the calendar you want to print.

  Here is a depiction of of a Print dialog box with the “Selection” option set:

  

Note : the dialog box should have an option to print in either portrait or landscape mode. In the dialog box depicted above, the mode can be set using the “Properties” button. If the printed calendar is not wide enough when using portrait mode, try landscape mode.

Note : the site tells browsers to try to print the entire calendar for a month on a single page; unfortunately, browser support of this feature is very poor, so you will probably find some month’s calendars broken, partly on one page, and partly on the next. This has been a problem for a long time, and the browser makers appear not to be very interested in fixing this problem.

If you print web pages on this site, some things will not be printed, by design. The page banner, borders, background, menus, and decorative items are not printed, because they are not needed on printed pages. Also, background colours are not printed unless there is a very good reason, and text is plain black on white, because this reduces your printer costs, especially if you have an ink-jet printer.

Sometimes background colours and images will not be printed, even when they should be. This is because browsers have an option to disable printing of background colours and images: this can reduce your printer costs, but may also result in printed pages that lack important content or which look bad; for example, if the page has white text on a dark background, and the browser does not print the background, the text will not show up. If this happens, you can configure your browser to print background colours and images, which will fix this problem. To do so:

• Chrome: there appears to be no way to configure this.
• Firefox: click File, Page Setup, Format & Options, then check the checkbox labelled “Print Background (colors and images)”.
• Internet Explorer: click Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, then check the checkbox labelled “Print background colors and images”.
• Mozilla: click File, Page Setup, Format & Options, then check the checkbox labelled “Print Background (colors and images)”.
• Netscape 7 or later: click File, Page Setup, Format & Options, then check the checkbox labelled “Print Background (colors and images)”.
• Opera: click File, Print options, then check the checkbox labelled Print page background.
• Safari: there appears to be no way to configure this.
• SeaMonkey: click File, Page Setup, Format & Options, then check the checkbox labelled “Print Background (colors and images)”.

The fundamental reason is that some locations are known by several names, which can cause confusion. This site tries to prevent confusion by using names which are consistent and unambiguous. There is a page telling you more about this.

JavaScript must be enabled to generate schedules, game results, and calendars on the team sites. This is because this information is extracted from a small database using a program written in the JavaScript programming language. If JavaScript is not enabled, a warning message explaining this will appear on the page.

This site has a page telling you how to enable JavaScript.

Each team site has a page named “What’s Up” which has a collection of information related to the team’s schedule. One section of this page, named “Conflicts and Incongruities in Scheduled Events”, offers an automatically generated report which lists questionable scheduling issues: for example, it lists games whose starting times seem to be too early, or games which seem to overlap with other events. This information is provided mainly for the webmaster and the coaches, to enable them to more easily identify scheduling problems.

Scheduling issues are classified as  notes ,  alerts ,  warnings , and  errors .

Notes - visible only to the webmaster:

• An exhibition game has no result because the coach wants the result withheld. (This message appears only if the coach has a policy of not reporting results of exhibition games.)
• A game is scheduled today: be ready to post the result.
• A tournament is coming soon: get the schedule, or check for schedule changes.
• An event has a limited-time comment: the comment should be deleted when it expires.
• An expired event has a link: the link should be deleted if it is no longer needed.
• A news item is more than 30 days old: it should be deleted when appropriate.
• A news item has expired: it should be deleted.
• A news item has an initial uppercase character: it should be corrected if this is a typo.

Alerts - should be noted, but seldom require action:

• A regular practice is scheduled on a tournament day and will be automatically skipped: this is normal, but if the practice should take place anyway, tell the webmaster.
• A regular practice is scheduled on a non-game tournament day: if the practice should not take place, tell the webmaster.
• A tournament day is coming soon with no game scheduled: if the schedule isn’t available, try to get it; if the schedule is available, verify that there is no game scheduled, or no game scheduled yet.

Warnings - often require action:

• A game is cancelled: it should be either rescheduled or removed from the schedule.
• A game has no result: the webmaster should be told the result.
• A game is scheduled with no start time: see if a start time is available.
• A game or practice is scheduled with no location: see if a location is available.
• An event takes place very soon after another event, which can especially be a problem when the events are in different locations: if there is a problem, reschedule one of the event.
• A regular or exhibition game is scheduled on a tournament day: check the schedule to see if this is right.
• A game or practice is scheduled very early in the morning: check the schedule to make sure the time is right.
• A game or practice is scheduled during normal work hours, or shortly thereafter: check the schedule to make sure the time is right.

Errors - almost always require action:

• An event appears to start after it ends: tell the webmaster the correct times.
• Two events overlap: this is usually due to an error in the schedule: tell the webmaster if there is an error.
• A tournament game is scheduled on a non-tournament day: check the game and tournament dates, and fix the error.

Note : in deciding whether an issue should be reported, this site makes decisions which are somewhat arbitrary. For example, a warning normally appears if a game starts before 8:00am, and some might prefer this time to be different. Some factors used in making the decisions can be configured, but regardless there may be instances when the issues reported are not what you might expect: the list of issues is not a cure-all for scheduling problems.

These mark games which conflict with the schedule.

An R or X in a game schedule marks a regular or exhibition game which is scheduled on a tournament day.

A T in a game schedule indicates a tournament game which is not scheduled on a tournament day.

For exhaustive scheduling checks, see “How can I check for possible problems in a team’s schedule?”.

JavaScript must be enabled to generate, and to interact with, photo albums on the team sites. This is because the albums are generated from a small database using a program written in the JavaScript programming language. If JavaScript is not enabled, a warning message explaining this will appear on the page.

This site has a page telling you how to enable JavaScript.

This site has a page telling you how to enable JavaScript.

These are pages created for a team coach or manager to post information on the site themselves, without involving the webmaster. For example, if it is urgent to post a notice that games are cancelled due to inclement weather, a coach or manager can do so: the notice goes onto the site immediately.

For the 2009 Minor Bantam AAA team, for example, the administrative pages are at:

http://www.upsdell.com/gba/2009/MinorBantam/admin/index.htm

The administrative pages are password protected, using a different username and password than used for the team’s Confidential page.

There is no button or link to go to the administrative pages: this is because few people will be authorized to do so, they will be told by the webmaster where to go, and they will bookmark the page on their PC(s).

Right now there are just two administrative functions, one to set a news alert, and one to cancel it. Details appear on the administrative pages themselves.

This happens when you have failed to enter the correct username and / or password when prompted to do so at a password-protected page or file.

Password protected pages on this site include the administrative pages, discussed above, as well as team sites’ Confidential pages.