November 30, 2004
Paradise for geeks....
Here's a resource I found last year that will cause many an evening to waste away.
www.freeprogrammingresources.com
... and no guilt as its all free..
Posted by weaver at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)
November 29, 2004
Anti Spam Screensaver
Lycos has created a screensaver that invites users to reply to spam emails in the hope of flooding them and putting them out of business. This is in effect what is known as a distrbuted denial of service or ddos. This is not a good thing. Email spammers are the modern day snake oil salesmen, despicable and to be hated but two wrongs don't make a right and in this case I think Lycos are way off track. Not one their better ideas.
Here's the bbc link to the story
Posted by weaver at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)
November 28, 2004
Meg makes it into the Wikipedia
Courtesy of Nick Fraser, Metheringham now has its own page in Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia....
Posted by weaver at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)
November 27, 2004
The original audience
In designing this site, I had to try and find out who the intended audience was going to be. Looking at many other village sites I came to some conclusions:
- a site without content was a waste of time
- to succeed, support would be needed from the community
- many sites looked good but lacked any significant content
After consulation with the committee, the target audience was split into 3 main groups:
- people who lived in the village and wanted to know what was going on.
- people who used to live in the village and wanted to be reminded of how it used to look.
- people who were considering moving to the area.
There was a fourth group, the insanely curious, but I decided it was easiest all round if I focussed on the first 3 groups.
Now that the audience was defined it was time to build the site.....
Posted by weaver at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)
November 26, 2004
From the ash rose a great bird.......
Firefox is currently my browser of choice...
Typing about:mozilla in the URI gives an interesting result!
Posted by weaver at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)
November 25, 2004
A star is born....... Part 1
One fine day a double sided community news sheet dropped through my letterbox. Coincidentally, I'd just started building a couple of web pages at work (more enthusiasm than skill at that stage!). Haha - light bulb moment - lets put the two together and create something worthwhile.
My initial intention was to put the local community newsletter online. That went well. I used some free web space from my ISP (Hey ...evertone's got to start somewhere!). The editor of the newsletter liked the idea and invited me to the next community meeting suggesting that I offer to broaden the scope.
The meeting:
Chairman: We like what you've done for us. Would you like to expand it? We feel the community could benefit from a web presence.
Me: ermmmm OK
Chairman: The jobs yours if you want it....
Me: ermmmm OK
Chairman: How long will it take to get it up and running....
Me: ermmmm Not long
Chairman: Right off you go and report back progress at the next meeting...
Me: ermmmm Gulp!!!
(Moral - Be careful what you wish for - you might get it!)
There's nothing like an enthusiatic amateur and here I was being channelled into unknown waters.... willingly!
Then followed some panic research to find out what other community sites in England had achieved.
What did I need - A good , affordable webhost, a good memorable domain name, a lot of patience and above all content!. An obvious web host leapt out from the competition straight away. £15 per year, minimum 2 years, for 35MB webhosted spacewas one of the best deals around at the time. It came with lots of stuff that I didn't even know about- php, MYSQL database, cgi scripts but the clincher - a domain name was included in the price - all the others charged extra for one. I signed on the dotted line for 2 years.
Choosing the domain name was a little more difficult. The cheapest (ie no additional cos!)was a .co.uk domain. Fine, .org .uk would have been better but was more expensive. For a name, I first tried the village name - Aha not available, that means that there's already a village website - wrong.. browsing to www.metheringham .co.uk took me to an unpopulated page where some forward thinking entrepeneur had garbbed up every available village name in england.. grrrrr
Ok what to try next. Variations on the village name seemed unwieldy. At the community meeting I went to, they were forming a leisure association but the full name was quite a mouthful. However, it had a snappy acronym, MACLA. Another domain name search - available - I snapped it up, paid the money and www.macla.co.uk was born.
Posted by weaver at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)
st wilfrid's gets its own
The local church now has its own website and very stylish it looks too. well done to rachel!
Posted by weaver at 08:04 PM | Comments (0)
November 24, 2004
Caption competition
A good contender for a caption competition
Posted by weaver at 07:01 PM | Comments (0)
November 23, 2004
A New Beginning
Creating a community based web site is not quite a life changing experience but is damned close. What started as a small idea, that of putting the local community newsletter online, soon spiralled into an all consuming task.
There are all sorts of reasons for embarking on a project like this; to give something to the community, to make a difference, no matter how small, to learn some new skills.
Building and maintaining this website, has for the past 4 years consumed a large part of my life and almost all my spare time.
Its been a fun ride, lots of highs with some lows (esp. the hard drive crash). Would I do it again? Absolutely!
Before I forget everything, what I'm going to try and achieve here, at least initially, is to capture my thoughts, philosophy on the route I've taken, decisions I've made and yet to make and generally comment on life as a webby type person.
Perhaps these ramblings willl inspire someone else, somewhere else to have a go, then again, perhaps not......
Posted by weaver at 07:37 PM | Comments (0)