NASWeb is a service of NASWA, the North American Shortwave Association. We’re here to extend the service we provide our membership into the information age.
The NASWeb web pages were designed to follow the XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 standards in such a way that they degrade gracefully on browsers not capable of displaying the latest extensions. Designing toward standards like XHTML 1.0 ensures that these pages will be usable by the widest variety of clients into the future.
NASWeb was designed and implemented by Ralph Brandi, a member of the Executive Council of NASWA who creates and maintains web sites for a living.
The site uses a content management system called WordPress to make management of the site as easy as possible. Some sections of the site, such as the loggings database and the WWW Shortwave Listening Guide, were custom coded in PHP and use MySQL as the database backend. These two sections make use of Javascript (in particular, the form of Javascript known colloquially as AJAX) to attempt to provide a seamless user experience. However, for users without Javascript turned on, these sections of the site will also function perfectly well. We attempt to make sites that degrade gracefully.
BBEdit, a Macintosh text editor, was used to create the site. Perl rocks our world and made creation and maintenance of certain sections of the site much easier. The same can be said of PHP and MySQL. Some parts of the site live briefly in FileMaker Pro before being moved to MySQL.
Internet Explorer added significantly to the pain involved with and development time of the site. IE 6 is the Netscape Navigator 4.x of a new generation. Boo hiss to Microsoft.
Photographs of receivers used in the headers on this site were taken by Ralph Brandi, and are copyright © 2005 by Ralph Brandi, with the following exceptions:
Photographs used in the headers for the following columns and site sections were taken by Alan Johnson, and are copyright © 2006 by Alan Johnson:
We are committed to designing the site in such a way that it is accessible to our blind and visually impaired users. We have coded the site following the guidelines of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines, making extensive use of attributes like title, label, accesskey, and tabindex to provide blind users with the best experience possible. In cases where certain features of the site are less accessible due to features that use Javascript to change the content of pages (particularly in the loggings database and WWW Shortwave Listening Guide sections), we have provided the ability to easily turn these enhancements off, which should make these sections fully accessible.
If you come across any inaccessible areas of the site, please contact Ralph Brandi, the webmaster.
We provide the ability for visitors to leave comments on much of our site. We reserve the right to remove any comment at any time for any reason. We hope not to exercise this right often. Commercial postings are not welcome, however, and will be removed with extreme prejudice. We will take every effort possible to prevent spammers from posting to our comment system while still remaining accessible to our blind and visually impaired users.
We don’t know who you are, and that’s fine with us, unless you want to tell us who you are, in which case we’re pleased to meet you. We log accesses to the web server, including browser versions and site referrals, and analyze the logs to figure out how people use the site, what works, what doesn’t, and to give us an idea how to make the site easier to use. In a few areas, we use cookies to provide certain functionality; we do not use cookies to track visitors. We don’t track your individual browser or anything like that. Once in a great while, our analysis will tell us that someone is abusing a particular service. We will, on very rare occasions, attempt to identify the computer or block of IP addresses that is abusing or attacking our server and institute a block on the particular resource they’re abusing, ensuring that the site remains available to all our users.
We don’t have the money to join a high-falutin’ organization like eTrust, but we think online privacy is important, and we want you to know that.