The past year was largely uneventful. There were a few minor problems with the hosting service which were resolved without my intervention. I recommend that we continue with Hostingplex (MDS Hosting) as our hosting service provider for the next year provided the price remains attractive.
In June the Board of Directors approved a change in format for the web site event schedule pages to be effective January 1,2010. The new pages will be a "self-serve"format: meet directors will be responsible for inputting the meet information themselves. A consequence of this will be that the page will be in english only.
The schedule will be maintained in a database and displayed by the WebCalendar program. This program allows registered users to submit information about an event. I am creating a customiization that will prompt for all the orienteering event information that we customarily provide in meet flyers. Initially, I propose to register all officials as users of the system.
Also as part of this change, I propose to provide an email forwarding function so that email sent to addresses of the form David.Fellows-10@orienteering.nb.ca will be forwarded to the person's real email address. This will allow us to use these addresses in contact information with some control over spam. If spam becomes a problem the address can be deleted and a new one assigned.
A downside of this new method is that the schedule will no no longer be monitored by the What's New service. On the other hand, it provides its own RSS feed.
If people want a sneak preview they can visit http://www.orienteering.nb.ca/calendar/ I don't want to publish a link to it until it is fully functional because I do not want the search engines indexing it until it is properly functioning.
I plan to write an instruction page for submitting events. This page will be added to the meet official's handbook part of the website.
As part of the research into the software I looked at a number of open-source content management systems too see if they could be used to manage all ONB's web content. I concluded that it would be more work than I wish to put in to convert the contact and train users. For the record, should anyone else wish to take over the site, I would suggest that the Tikiwiki system is the program to use.
I am sorry I am unable to attend the Annual General Meeting. I trust that this report makes some sense.
I am still prepared to continue as webmaster for another year.
David Fellows
Webmaster
2009-11-19