The ONB website is hosted at hostingplex.com and is physically located in Toronto. Hostingplex was taken over by (merged into?) Host MDS in July 2008. This change in ownership resulted in a change in hosting services which was mostly transparent to me.
The site 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 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.
The discussion list for the COC organizing committee was extremely useful and extremely busy. I have 1280 messages saved in that folder and I did not save all the messages that I received. In retrospect, I wonder if a web-based collaborative tool would have served the committee better. Perhaps, if there was a way to train in its use.
A major effort, way over my mental budget for the task, was the building and maintenance of the COC 2008 part of the site. The COC pages were all static pages except the actual on-line registration and were organized using frames. This technique has a few problems, but it seemed to work well enough.
Lorna Guttormson of the Ottawa Orienteering Club produced and ran the registration system. I suspect that she too went over her budget, but the system worked without any major problems.
I created a forum on the website for discussion on the proposed new constitution. I created the only two entries on behalf of others. I consider the experiment to be a failure. I will remove the forum and the forum software shortly.
I have put up a number of pages on request.
Possible new services would include setting up a list server to send mail to all ONB members. A list server could also be set up for each club. The problem with these servers is the administrative work to keep the lists synchronized with the ONB membership database.
There are services available that provide online registration and payment for events. ONB might consider using one for its events. Wild Apricot is one such. I looked at their online documentation and concluded that:
I am reluctant to be the one to try it out because it would inevitably become "mine". It would be better for a future crew to run with it.
I am still prepared to continue as webmaster for another year.
David Fellows, Webmaster
January 09, 2009