Forestdale Heights has had a website now for more than a few decades. Ours was one of the first lodges to acquire one around 2001, and, I believe, is now the only Lodge to retain an active site within B’nai Brith Canada. Unlike many organizations, creating an online presence did not result from meticulous planning. Instead, it resulted from engaging in some online “doodling” a few years after I became The Canadian Jewish News’ first web editor. I figured that if it was good enough for The CJN, it was good enough for Forestdale Heights Lodge.

Our first online venture was simple by today’s standards (https://bit.ly/4eEjqnS).   Not being a trained professional in these matters, this fantastic project was always a trial and error effort. Still, we persevered. Times changed, and we managed to keep up with technological changes to maintain an online presence. I’ve been proud of what the Lodge accomplished and the numerous awards we received over the years from B’nai Brith Canada.

What many often fail to realize is that a single site is composed of multiple files. On our site, some files were reused as new content was added. New, distinct files were also created to accommodate the various programs, events and comments that have taken place. What you now see on www.kolechad.ca are the current files with up-to-date content. Meanwhile, the older content and files have accumulated on our server. This would probably have continued if not for an unplanned event in mid-September.

 Our entire website is connected through a navigation bar at the top of each web page. After more than two decades, this tool simply stopped working. We tried to fix it, but nothing worked. We asked the company hosting our site for help, but they couldn’t assist us because our site isn’t based on their preferred web content management system. In other words, they could not (or would not) help me. As for the company that created the code, well, it no longer exists.

Since the Lodge website exists within my personal site, it was decided to return to what works. This was done by stripping out the old code on every page of our website and replacing it with a viable code from my website. Fortunately, it was a success, and the new index is so similar to the old one that many of you may not even notice the difference.

At the same time, it was decided that this was the perfect opportunity to clean up kolechad.ca by sifting through years of old material.

The result is that our site now contains an Archive of older files, reports and columns. I hope you take the time to check it out. The Archives can be found at http://kolechad.ca/archives.htm. It is a fascinating look at the Lodge’s past. This archive also includes all material from our 50th anniversary celebrations.

- Jeff Rosen

 For those interested, the Lodge’s website has used the following URLs:

http://ca.geocities.com/forestdaleheights/

http://ca.geocities.com/dmfhlodge/

kolechad-ca.jelijo.ca

http://kolechad.ca/

If you would like to look back on where we came from, go to the Wayback Machine at

https://bit.ly/4gIRIIo

or

https://bit.ly/3ZJHce6