Responding to Contact Us

The "Contact Us" form sends an email to contracola gmail, where we have set up a filter to forward all such emails to a COTMD board member, usually someone on the Community Outreach committee. If you are the person assigned to respond to the email from the "Contact Us" form, here's what you do:

1. Make sure your email client doesn't treat these messages as spam. Note that all these messages have a subject that begins with "Kontactr".
   
2. When you receive an email message generated by the contact form, don't reply directly from your own email account, as your reply may wind up being treated as spam.  Instead, log into the contracola gmail account to reply.
3. Each Kontactr message in the inbox will be starred to help you see which messages need a reply. After replying to each starred message, un-star it (by clicking on the star next to the message in the inbox) to indicate the message has been replied to.
4. Your replies will be received as having come from "Columbia Traditional Music & Dance".

Website Setup Overview

Our organization's domain is "contracola.org", and http://www.contracola.org/ links to our website.  In the interest of using free resources as much as possible while allowing the board members to easily contribute, we have reorganized our web setup, basing it mostly on a Google account, as outlined in this brief overview.

Our organization's Google account name is "contracola". The contracola password is not to be shared outside the COTMD Board and is changed periodically.

The Google account is used to access a number of services:

• GMail (email) - mail.google.com or http://www.google.com/
  
• Blogger (replacing former website) - contracola.blogspot.com (schedule, directions, dance info, dance announcements) and cotmdboard.blogspot.com (bylaws, minutes, board-related stuff) - these will eventually be named as subdomains of contracola.org
• Google Calendar (calendar) - accessible after logging into Google
• Google Docs (documents) - accessible after logging into Google
• Picasa Web Albums (photos) - accessible after logging into Google
• Google Groups (mailing list) - accessible after logging into Google

When another third-party service provider is involved, we set up a similarly-named account. And example is the service provider for our "Contact Us" form:

• Kontractr (contact form) - kontactr.com

There are/will be separate articles on how we use these various services.

Google Calendar

Can we get the Google Calendar (below) to display more than two months of events? Or can we connect to other dance groups Google calendars?

Google Groups Test

Subscribe to COTMD Board

Email:

Visit this group