FreeToastHost 2.0 Links

FreeToastHost 2.0 Websites are available for use by any club wishing a free website.

Useful FTH 2.0 Links

Use this link to request a New FTH 2.0 website

Browse a Sample FTH 2.0 Club Website

View a FTH 2.0 Getting Started Video

Use this link for FTH 2.0 Administrator Documentation.

A FTH 2.0 User Guide is also available.

Please join the FTH 2.0 Support Forum for information about setting up your new website.

FTH 2.0 Frequently Asked Questions

Review the FTH 2.0 FAQ

What to do when your FTH 2.0 website is ready to go live?

1. Your default website address for FTH 2.0 is going to be "http://your-club-number.toastmastersclubs.org" where your-club-number is your Toastmasters club number. This address will always work. However, you have the choice of assigning a custom name as well in the admin window. That will make your web address "http://custom-name.toastmastersclubs.org" Clubs with common names may not get their first choice, since you are competing for the name with all other clubs using FTH.
   PLEASE NOTE: There is no "www" in your FTH 2.0 web address. If you use "www" in your club URL the link WILL NOT WORK.


2. Visit Club Central on the TI website and change your club’s website address to your new FTH 2.0 address


3. If your club has purchased a custom domain name (i.e. myclub.org) there are special instructions on the FTH Support Forum to be followed as well. Search for “DNS”. If you can’t follow the techno-babble, call your domain registrar and they can do it for you.

Creating FTH 2.0 Meeting Agendas

Download FTH 2.0 Agenda Planning worksheet

The FTH 2.0 Meeting Agendas is one of the most complex and confusing parts of the system. It’s up to your club how you want to utilize this feature, if at all.

Clubs that ask members to sign up for roles at their meetings may want to continue the practice. If your membership is willing to use the club website for signup then you may find this feature useful. However, clubs that have agendas designed to a specific format may find the FTH 2.0 format unacceptable. You can still use the “Meeting Agenda” for role signup while ignoring the printed output.

Planning Your Meeting Agenda with Excel

You can expedite creating FTH 2.0 agendas by using this Excel Agenda Planning worksheet. Once you have your agenda designed in Excel, you can simply follow the spreadsheet to set start and end times and copy and paste the role titles from Excel into FTH. Correcting mistakes in FTH can be very difficult, depending upon the error. You can save time and anguish by first planning your agenda first in Excel, while setting up all the role durations so your meeting ends on time.

1. Review the two sample worksheets to see how this tool is used.
2. Enter the time your agenda begins in cell A2.
3. Enter the duration of each role in minutes into column B
4. The worksheet will automatically calculate the start time and end time for each role. Do not enter anything into columns C or D.
5. Enter the role title as you want it to appear on the agenda. Keep in mind the instructions below for Numbered Roles and Keyworded Titles.
6. Enter “x” in columns F, G and H to remind you that these boxes must be checked when you create your FTH agenda.

There are two general ways to use the Meeting Agenda:

1. Use the Agenda Strictly for Role Signup

If you have your own agenda format it may pay to use FTH just for role signup. Even if you print the FTH agendas for use at your meetings, you may want to design your online signup for contests using this technique, since a contest agenda is very different from a regular meeting agenda.

To create an online role signup, add your meeting roles to the FTH Meeting Agenda, but leave all the start and end times the same as your meeting start time. This will produce an online role signup sheet with no times shown at all. For the speeches, make sure to check the “This is a speech (select manual / add intro) so speakers can add those details.

Be sure to follow the instructions below for Numbered Roles and Keyworded Titles so your role report is correct.

2. Create a Meeting Agenda Format for Printing

The standard FTH 2.0 Meeting Agenda printout is perfectly suitable for use at a meeting. It may not match your club’s current format, but it still works. If you print to an Adobe Acrobat file, then you can scale the PDF before printing, thereby forcing the agenda to a single page, if that’s what you desire. The banner at the top of the default agenda can be stripped of the graphic and unnecessary text, thereby saving considerable space at the top of the page.
The following was copied from the FTH 2.0 Frequently Asked Questions page, and contains important information about creating agendas.

What exactly is Role / Agenda Item Title? (this content copied from FTH 2.0 FAQ)

This is the title of the item on the agenda, both printed and on screen. In the following example, "Socialize and Network" is our agenda item title.  Notice it is the first line, before the description, and it is in bold.

In this field you want to keep names of members out as well of times, since both can be entered elsewhere.  The title should be clear, but not too descriptive (you can get detailed in the description).

There are three basic categories of titles. These are explained below.

Numbered Roles

Numbered roles are roles that appear more than once on the agenda and have more than one member filling the role.  Some examples are "Speaker", "Evaluator", or "Judge".  These should be entered with the name of the role followed by the number sign "#", then the number of the role, each as it's own entry.  For example,

Speaker #1
Speaker #2
Speaker #3

This is three separate entries (three titles).  The reason you want to enter these in this exact format is so the role reports calculate this as one combined role.  You just want to know how many times member X was "Speaker", not how many times she was "Speaker #1".

In the role reports, the # and anything after will be stripped away.  So if you enter "Speaker No. 1" or "Speaker 1" this will NOT work for you.  You need to enter the "#".  Technically, you could still enter "Speaker #one" -- if you really wanted to.

Keyworded Titles

A Keyworded title is a title that contains a keyword that links to other titles using the same keyword.  These are used for multiple agenda items that require the same member to fill.  This allows the member to signup for a role just once (or the person assigning roles to assign a member just once) rather than multiple times.  It also allows the member's name and/or photo to be shown on the agenda for each time they need to perform a function of their role.

To specify a keyword in a title surround the keyword with asterisks "*".  For example,

*Toastmaster* of the Day
*Toastmaster* Introduces Speeches
*Toastmaster* Closes the Meeting

In this example, there are three agenda items using the keyword "Toastmaster".  Only ONE of these roles using the same keyword should have the option selected indicating that it is a sign up role, usually the first one, but not necesarily.

All of the other roles using the same keyword, should NOT have the member signup option selected.

When a role is setup this way, the member just needs to accept the role and all of the other linked agenda items will display his or her name (may require a screen refresh).  If the member removes him or herself from any one of the instances, it will be removed from all sharing the same keyword (may require a screen refresh).

On the agenda that members see, as well as the printed agenda, the "*" are NOT shown -- these are shown only to the admin and in edit mode.

Do NOT use both keyword titles with numbered roles.  Generally, this is not needed.  But the two do not work together and will produce undesirable results.

Regular Titles

Everything else falls under regular titles.  Just enter these titles as you want them displayed on your agenda.  Examples:

Wordmaster
Grammarian
Timer

Changing Titles

You cannot change/edit titles in the member edit view, only in the administrator console.  If you do change an agenda item title, the change will search all your past and future agendas and make that change globally.  This way, you will not lose any history by correcting a spelling error or making a slight wording change.

Custom Style Sheet to improve Default Type Styles

Sadly, the designers of FTH 2.0 spent little time on typography, so the default type styles are lackluster. To give your pages a more finished appearance without styling every line in the editor, insert these on-page styles into your editable pages.

1. Highlight and COPY all lines below in red.
2. In the FTH 2.0 editor, click on the Source button
3. Click before the first character at the top of the code
4. PASTE into the code window
5. Press RETURN to make a new line
6. SAVE your changes

<style type="text/css">
<!--
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p { padding: 0; margin: 0; line-height: 1.2em; text-align:left; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; }
h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { padding-top: 0.5em; }
h1 { color: #7c2128; padding-bottom:10px; font-size: 18pt; font-weight: normal; }
h2 { color: #004f6d; font-size: 14pt; font-weight: bold; }
h3 { color: #000000; font-size: 13pt; font-weight: bold; }
h4 { color: #004f6d; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 0px; }
p { padding-right: 50px; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0.7em; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 1.3em; }
ol, ul { margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; padding-top:0.5em; padding-bottom:0.5em; }
li { margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; padding-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0.2em; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 1.3em; }
.dark-red { color: #7c2128 !important; }
.no-top { padding-top: 0px !important; }
.no-bottom { padding-bottom: 0px !important; }
-->
</style>