The ONB website is hosted at hostingplex.com and is physically located in Toronto. It is maintained by me, David Fellows. It is backed-up by virtue of the fact that pages are first created or stored on my computer and then uploaded. My computer has a complete copy of the pages on the public site with a couple of exceptions. It is backed up daily. My copy of the site is kept in a form that permits retrieving earlier versions of pages that have been updated.
Each of the three clubs has been given access to a subdirectory in which they maintain their own club pages. I keep an eye open for copyright violations, illegal content and space use. Other than that the clubs are responsible for their own content, format, and backup.
My philosophy is to keep the site and the page layout as simple as possible and as accessible to as many visitors as possible. I use html constructs that will work on all browsers - most pages work OK when viewed with a text-only browser - and download quickly. The emphasis is on content, not form.
It is surprisingly difficult to keep things simple, especially documents prepared by others. Most word processor programs produce awful html. They concentrate on tryings to produce a piece of paper that looks the way you want it to look. This does not translate well into a simple web page.
I also enforce a policy of not serving web pages that are encoded in proprietary formats. In particular Microsoft Word and Wordperfect documents. Word documents are also problematic in that they can contain executable content that could be destructive or invasive. The preferred alternative for "paper" documents is to transform them to Portable Document Format (PDF) if they can not be reasonalbly rendered in simple html.
A few important pages and documents are made available in both french and english. There are not the resources available to translate everything. The remaining pages are in the language of submission. To date there have been no pages submitted in french. I might point out that it is considerably more than twice as much work to keep two language versions of pages than one.
ONB Notes are only put on the site a week or so after they would have been received by postal mail or when I receive the file from the editor whichever is later.
I feel that the website can be a useful repository of the "corporate memory". Consequently, I am reluctant to remove pages. Exceptions are things like meeting agendas which are replaced by minutes and meet announcements which are superceded by the meet results pages.
The club currrently purchases its web services through Fellows and Carr Inc. The expenses are $30.00 for domain name registration and $60 for hosting services per year (plus HST). This is the cheapest package I could find.
There is, of course, a person cost. I devote perhaps 25 hours a year to updating, creating new pages, and fixing up other people's submissions.
I have made the detailed statistics for October 2005 available on the website. They are more-or-less typical.
The bottom-line statistics are this
| What we pay for | What we use | |
|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 4.0GBytes/month | 0.2GBytes/month |
| Disk Space | 200MBytes | 27MBytes |
| Services | Many | None |
| Databases | 1 | 0 |
Among the tidbits I find interesting is the fact that we spend more bandwidth sending our pages to the internet search engines for indexing than we do for sendiing them to people for viewing. I think we can assume that our site is well indexed. Also interesting is the geographical distribution of viewers - most are from the USA. A significant number of vistors are still arriving at our new site by visiting the old one at FAN and being redirected.
It is no surprise that most of our visitors use Windows and Internet Explorer.
There are 665 files on the web server including those of the different clubs of which 301 were served during October. There are 395 html files, 40 pdf files and 164 image files. Not all of the files have active links to them. For example, prior years meet announcements are not deleted, but there are no links refering to them.
A more-or-less random list of things to keep in mind when contemplating changes to or around the website.
As mentioned above there are many software packages available under our hosting plan. I will summarize briefly.
Not all of these would play nicely together. There is quite a lot of overlap of fuctionality. Many of the Content Management Systems provide things like calendars, or can be used for blogging. One of the Wikis offers an awful lot of content mangagement.
A hosting package is available for about twice what we are paying that effectively has no limits. Upgrading would be possible, but going back later would not be.
The motion to be considered mentioned RSS. RSS is a means of supplying a summary of what is new on a website. It usually processed by either an aggregating website or by a plugin for a user's browser.
Decide what we wish to communicate and to whom.
Examine the relationship of ONB Notes to the electronic communications
Decide what the right mix of push and pull is.
Use mailing lists for the push.
Use appropriate packages for web services for pull. Bearing in mind the human resources needed to install, maintain, and operate them.
David Fellows, Webmaster
November 24, 2005