About This Website
I have been giving Oregon CHL classes for over 24 years,
deciding about 15 years ago to create this website both to advertise the courses
and to provide background information and links to related information.
It also provided me with the excuse to build a centralised database to keep track
of issued certificates, and to automate the production of those certificates so that
when, inevitably, someone would come back several years after taking a course to ask
for a replacement certificate, rather than having to search through a large collection
of individually created certiificates to locate their original, I could now
simply locate their entry in the database and generate a replacement certificate at the
click of a mouse button. Adding in the capability for people to re-print their own certificates
on the Internet was a useful by-product.
Another useful by-product of computer generation of certificates was the ability
to include a reasonably secure method of validating the certificates.
I don't know of anyone that has ever done anything like taking someone else's certificate
and using image editing software to replace the name, and don't know why they would,
since if someone is having money issues I am prepared to discuss discounts up to 100%,
but I know this is a subject that many people struggle with. By embedding a URL with
encrypted information in a QR tag it becomes possible to validate exactly who the certificate
was issued to, and when.
When it became clear that Oregon would recognize web-based training, the website
became the obvious choice to host that.
Since the website became operational, the current count of people completing training is
8,023.