Cyberspace Snow and Avalanche Center Update 1) Official 501c3 (tax-deductable) status is here! 2) We are now on a new server. 3) Welcome our newest Sponsor: Transworld Publications Snowboarding Magazine 4) Recent additions/improvements to the Web Site 1) As of sometime in May we are officially a 501c3 tax-exempt organization. This means that all contributions from people or organizations in the US are tax-deductable. (We're not sure what, if anything, it means outside the US.) This also means that your employer may match your contribution. It also makes us eligible to receive grants. And contributions of equipment from corporations. Our letter of determination is posted on our Organizational Page. 2) At the end of May we moved servers. For the past year we have had internet services free from PEAK, which was a part of the Computer Science Outreach Services at Oregon State University. PEAK is no longer part of OSU, but has become a private company offering internet services. So we are now paying for a virtual server from PEAK Inc. The transition was mostly smooth, and hopefully you didn't notice much difference. Fortunately by the end of May traffic had slowed down substantially anyway. Our page counters were broken for a while, and a few other odds and ends required attention. Everything should be normal again now. (Except for access to the Professional Section. But we will be rebuilding this anyway, quite possibly with less restriction.) 3) We are pleased to announce our third sponsor, Transworld Publications Snowboarding Magazine. We are still waiting for their graphic to put on our home and Bulletins page but they are sponsoring us, along with Lifelink and Marmot. Watch for their web site by the end of summer. These sponsorships along with contributions from individuals make the project possible. Please visit their web sites and/or send them a note of appreciation! 4) We recently reworked all the graphics on our pages, and the graphics html tags. This should speed the loading of our pages substantially. It should also be possible to navigate the page before the graphics finish loading. The effect of these improvements will depend on which features your browser supports, but most should reflect a great improvement. It sounds like Netscape, AOL, and ATT browsing software all load the page faster. Let us know if it's better for you! We have added many things, and continue to expand the content. Only a few will be mentioned here, so check out the site once in a while! The Organizational page has our articles of incorporation and our 501c3 letter from the IRS. We have a page of logo graphics for links. It is not yet linked into the site, but you can find it at http://www.avalanche-center.org/Organization/logos.html (Thanks to Aidos from Kazakstan for our newest logo graphic.) If you link to our site feel free to use one of these graphics. The 95/96 Annual Report of the SW Montana avalanche Center is online. You can get to it from either our "Other Info" page or the Bulletins page. Karl and Ron were among the first to get their Bulletin on the net (two years ago), and now have the distinction of being the first to get their annual report online. We hope to have others available, depending on the wishes of the various centers. We started maintaining a traffic stats page, so you can see how many 'hits' we are getting, where they are from, and what items people are looking at. We try to update the key .gifs monthly. We have been reached from over 50 countries now. We will be continuing to work on developing the site and the organization throughout the summer. We are working on getting more sponsors, setting up some cgi scripts that will make the site interactive, additional content, and incorporating volunteers. We are also setting up our office and working on obtaining computer and office equipment. Hopefully we will have an update soon which focusses on volunteer efforts over the past year and discusses current volunteer possibilities. Thanks for subscribing to this list - we appreciate your interest in our project. Jim *********************************************************** Cyberspace Snow and Avalanche Center (CSAC) 297 Hawthorne Ave, Eugene OR 97404 1-800-289-4403 http://www.csac.org snow@csac.org Jim Frankenfield; Director ***********************************************************