How to customize the Kayaker's Home Page 

The first thing you should do is make a copy of this with a name like "kayak_home_edit"  Save it as RTF (Rich Text Format), MS Word or something else that will keep all of the formatting. If you lose the formatting it will be far less simple to find the parts that need to be changed. Save this file, and if you decide to make changes in the future make another copy. Always save this original and do your work on a copy. You'll need to have the Kayaker's Home Page open while you work, in order to make some of the changes. 

The code can be found below. Things you may want to change to customize it are in bold. They're also marked by comments that start like this:
     <!...
above and below the parts that need changes.

1. The clock. The clock is a shockwave flash animation. In order to work it requires that your browser has the shockwave plugin. It uses your computer's time and date, so if your computer's clock is wrong the clock will be wrong. If the clock doesn't work you probably need the plugin. You can get it by pasting this into your browser:
     http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/
If you want to just get rid of the clock you can just delete the entire section, inclucing the tags before and after.

2. The weather link. The link includes the weather station I'm interested in. Assuming you want to change it, substitute the appropriate state and city in both places. As far as I know you can choose any city at all, and the website will give you a report from a nearbu weather station. It's possible that the website won't recognize some places, or will return the weather from someplace farther away. If that happens pick another place. a large town or city that's nearby should always work.

3. Google Directions. For starters the directions show how to get from Campmor to the Monksville Reservoir. That may be useful if you want to join us for strokes and rolling practice in warm weather, but most of the time it may be more convenient to have directions that start from your home, work, or some other place. You can drag the start and end arrows (labeled as A and B) to anywhere in the 48 states, Alaska or Canada, as long as it's on a road. As of now Google apparenty doesn't want you going to Mexico. You can move the map itself by dragging, and zooming in or out is done with the scale at the upper left of the map. After you drag the arrows to places you're happy with and zoom in or out to show what you like, look just above the top right corner of the map and click where it says "link to this page". Copy the blue highlighted text that pops up. It's going to be long, so I suggest clicking on the link to TinyURL near the bottom right of the Kayaker's Home Page and making a much shorter link. Paste that link in place of the bold text in the Google directions link below.

4. Google Maps. This is exactly like the directions, except that there are no start and finish arrows on the map. Drag and zoom the map until you're happy, and then paste the new link in place of the old one in the Google Maps link below.

5. Add or remove links. Maybe you'd also like to add or remove some of the other links on the page. The text links are laid out in a table with two columns, with bold tags marking the beginning of each column. All  of the text links have a form that looks like this:
   <br>
   <a href="www.somehere.com/page you want" target="_blank">Description goes here</a>
If you want to get rid of a link, simply delete the line for that link, including the "<br>" immediately above it. If you want to add a link, copy and paste the sample above, and then replace the address and the description. Remember to include the "<br>" or your new link will be on the same line as the one that should be above it.

When you're done with the changes save the file. After your changes are safely saved in your working copy, save it again, but this time use "save as" and give it a suitable name. I'd suggest saving it as "kayak_home_new". You'll also need to save it as plain text. After you've selected plain text change the file extension from txt to html. Now open the file in your browser to see how you've done. The first thing you'll see is these instructions at the top of the page, so we'll fix that in a moment. Look at the links for the things you changed, and open them to make sure you're happy with your results. If not, and you left this file open in your word processor you can come right back to make changes and you should still see some of the text in bold. If you closed the word processor I know you didn't read all of these instructions first. Open the saved copy of your working file and make changes. save it as a text file with the html extension, and check again.

Finally, when you're happy, strip out all of these instructions and the line (right below) that separates the HTML code and save the file one last time as "kayak_home.html", overwriting the original. 

        =========  this is a line to separate the instructions and the HTML code  ========

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

<html>

<body 
    BACKGROUND="parchment_light.gif"  
    BGCOLOR="#ffffcc"
    TEXT="#330000"
    LINK="#3366ff"
    VLINK="#3366ff"
    ALINK="#993300" >

<head>
<title> &#160;&#160; Kayak Home  &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </title>
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="1200">
</head>

     <!... 1. This is the clock..>
<table border="0" align="center" cellspacing="5">
 <tr>
  <td width="250" ><embed src="http://www.clocklink.com/clocks/5001-Blue.swf?TimeZone=EST&DateFormat=mm-DD-YYYY"align="middle" width="220" height="20" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash">
  </td>
 </tr>
</table>
     <!...This is the clock..>

<table border="0" width="500" align="center" cellpadding="4">
 <tr>
  <td colspan="100%" align="center">
     <!... 2. This is the weather link..>
<a href="http://www.wunderground.com/US/NY/Poughkeepsie.html"target="_blank">
<img src="http://banners.wunderground.com/weathersticker/big2_cond/language/www/US/NY/Poughkeepsie.gif" align="center" height=60 width=468></a>
     <!...This is the weather link..>
  </td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td colspan="100%" align="center">
<a href="http://www.kccny.com" target="_blank"> <img border="2" src="kccny.jpg"width="446" height="64"></a>
  </td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td colspan="100%" align="center">
<a href="http://www.npmb.com/cms2/forum_viewforum.php?4"target="_blank">
<img border="2" src="npmbsm.gif"width="500" height="50"></a>
  </td>
  </tr>

  <tr>
  <td>
<a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank"> <img border="2" src="googlesm.gif"width="125" height="50"></a><br>
  </td>
  <td align="center">

     <!... 3. This is the link for Google directions..>
<b><a href="http://tinyurl.com/2zqn3h" target="_blank">Google Directions</a></b><br>
     <!...This is the link for Google directions..>
  </td>

  <td align="right">
     <!... 4. This is the link for Google Maps..>
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/2etzrj" target="_blank"> <img border="2" src="google_maps.gif"width="125" height="50"></a><br>
     <!...This is the link for Google Maps..>
  </td>
 </tr>
</table>

<table border="0" align="center" cellspacing="5">
 <tr>

  <td valign="top" width="45%">

     <!...Text links for the left column start here..>
<b> USGS real-time guage readings</b>

<br>
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/kthxg" target="_blank">Esopus Creek at Coldbrook</a>

<br>
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/35lw54" target="_blank">Lackawaxen River at Rowland</a>

<br>&#160;&#160;&#160;
<a href="http://www1.pplweb.com/ilwpk/cgi-bin/expected_generation.pl" target="_blank">Lackawaxen power release</a>

<br>
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/228mb" target="_blank">Lehigh River above White Haven</a>

<br>&#160;&#160;
<a href="http://www.nap.usace.army.mil/watercontrol/resreg.htm" target="_blank">Lehigh release schedule</a>

<br>&#160;&#160;
<a href="http://www.nap.usace.army.mil/watercontrol/lee" target="_blank">Walter Dam pool levels</a>

<br>
<a href="http://waterdata.usgs.gov/ma/nwis/uv/?site_no=01168500&PARAmeter_cd=00065,00060" target="_blank">Deerfield River at Charlemont</a>

<br>
<a href="http://waterdata.usgs.gov/ct/nwis/uv/?site_no=01199000&PARAmeter_cd=00065,00060" target="_blank">Housatonic River at Falls Village</a>

<br>
<a href="http://waterdata.usgs.gov/ct/nwis/uv/?site_no=01200500&PARAmeter_cd=00065,00060" target="_blank">Housatonic River at Gaylordsville</a>

<br>

<a href="http://waterdata.usgs.gov/ny/nwis/uv/?site_no=01315500&PARAmeter_cd=00065,00060" target="_blank">Hudson River at North Creek</a>

<br>
<a href="http://waterdata.usgs.gov/ny/nwis/uv/?site_no=01317000&PARAmeter_cd=00065,00060" target="_blank">Schroon River at Riverbank</a>

<br>
<a href="http://waterdata.usgs.gov/ny/nwis/uv/?site_no=01315000&PARAmeter_cd=00065,00060" target="_blank">Indian River below Lake Abanakee</a>

<br>
<a href="ny_streamflow.html" target="_blank">USGS guages for New York</a>

<br>

  </td>

  <td align="right" valign="top" width="45%">

<br>

     <!...Text links for the right column start here..>
<a href="http://newweb.erh.noaa.gov/ahps2/index.php?wfo=aly" target="_blank">
NOAA Flow Prediction</a>

<br>
<a href="http://www.americanwhitewater.org" target="_blank">

American Whitewater Affiliation</a>

<br>
<a href="http://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/River_view_" target="_blank">
American Whitewater River Tools</a>

<br>
<a href="http://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/River/state-summary/state/NY/" target="_blank">
AW River Tools New York</a>

<br>
<a href="http://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/River/state-summary/state/CT/" target="_blank">
AW River Tools Connecticut</a><br>

<a href="http://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/River/state-summary/state/PA/" target="_blank">
AW River Tools Pennsylvania</a>

<br>
<a href="http://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/River/state-summary/state/nj/" target="_blank">
AW River Tools New Jersey</a>

<br>

<br>
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/" target="_blank">Tiny URL</a>

<br>
<a href="http://www.topozone.com/viewmaps.asp" target="_blank">Topozone Maps

  </td>
 </tr>
</table>

</body>
</html>