Tuesday 15 March - Tuesday Forum - 9:30am - 12:30pm

John Lucke will conduct a tour of what is inside the Sydney PC User Group's website at this meeting.

A great deal of work has been done on the site in recent times and it contains many hidden gems that are worth exploring and discussing.

There will also be a question and answer session and general discussion of computer issues at the meeting.

Tuesday 15 March - Family History - T Eakin - 12:30pm - 3:30pm

At this meeting Terry will discuss an Index to the NSW Colonial Secretary's letters sent to the Sheriff 1828-1850.

The Index comes from the State Records NSW Films numbered 1062-1065 (4 reels) and the correspondence it covers contains lists of convicts and officials within NSW establishments and settlements at Port Macquarie, Moreton Bay, Norfolk Island, and Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania).

While many of the letters were generated by the Quarter Sessions and Supreme Courts, there is quite a lot of social information contained in the correspondence between the colonial administrators of the day.

There will be ample opportunity for members to raise general family history questions at the meeting.

Saturday 19 March - Web Design - S South - 1:30pm - 4:30pm

This month the group will examine two things. The way the HTML of a web page nests tags by placing some tags inside other tags and why cascading style sheets (CSS) cascade.

Nesting creates parents, children, siblings, ancestors and descendant tags. The group will consider how this nesting affects the way both the HTML and the CSS code is written.

Style sheets give the browser instructions on how the tags should look.

The cascade happens when the browser looks at these instructions and takes the last one or the most important one and applies that instruction even if there are others instructions that may affect the tag. The group will consider how the browser decides what instruction to apply.

The idea for this meeting came from a book Steve South read over the New Year break, titled “Coding HTML & CSS Basics”, one of the Everyday Guides Made Easy books.

The book cost $19.99 at Dymocks and it provides a cheap but comprehensive overview of what needs to be done to create and publish a web site.
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John Mathews