Aug
13
Written by:
Southern Trails
13/08/2010 11:33 AM
Thank you for your confidence in letting me finish a job I started about six years ago! When I was president, I desperately wanted to replace the Club’s website with a more dynamic, interactive site where you could, for example, easily make trip bookings, search past trips and locate other members. I selected a web hosting service that supported Microsoft SQL Server database system and six years on we are about to make good use of it.
A lot of behind-the-scenes work was essential – six years ago we did not have a comprehensive trips dataset and the membership system was not much more than a flat file. Jim Raleigh has done a great job building a true database to support all our membership activities and this has provided a springboard to potentially let you conduct transactions on the web – and obviously my special interest is around trips.
As Events and Trips Coordinator, my job is to facilitate teams that deliver what you want. It is great to see so many new members, and to once again have our popular trips overbooked, duplicated and still overbooked. Clearly we need more trips, and that means more trip leaders. I am looking for people to help – so please volunteer to join my Trips team.
This club has organised some great social events in the past – ranging from major anniversary dinners to theatre nights. We have never done a steam train trip, and it is ages since we had a restaurant meal. Clearly we need a Social Events team! You know what to do … drop me an email. We will probably only meet three or four times during the year, round a cosy fire at a local hotel during winter.
In fact, when you think about what this Club does, most activities in some way centre on events and trips, so I have also taken on the role of webmaster for the time being. I also need a lot of help with the new website!
Website developments
Yes, there really is a new website on the way, but we want to make sure it is fully useable and tested before it replaces the current site. If you attended the January or February general meetings, you will have seen parts of the new trips facility, especially if you were sitting near the front. (To help with legibility, we are going to set the tables up nearer the screen next time.)
There are already hundreds of pages ready to roll out with the new site, and over a thousand database-generated pages for trips going back fifteen years. For the first time, the Trips and Events Calendar in this magazine has been generated entirely from data in the new website’s database, with no editing, at least from me.
Mind you, the technology we have selected for the new site dramatically changes what the traditional webmaster had to do. You see, the new site can be changed in situ by anybody with the right privileges. If you can access the site using your browser, then you can potentially change it right from the same pages in your browser.
This means that the content belongs to all of us, and pages can be added or changed from anywhere with web access. Naturally there are controls in place, and a little bit of training is required. No doubt, there will be some training sessions in due course for those who want to join the web team.
Subject to approval by the committee, you will be able to transact on the new website to do things like find out about trips, book trips, and propose new trips. You will be able to request automatic notification when a new trip is approved.
Tracks on the new website
When I first joined the club, I heard about lots of exotic-sounding places, but had no real idea where they were. There was an interesting track called the ‘American Beam’, which sounded like a bourbon. Same deal with meeting places. So one of my goals is to make sure all the tracks we use can be searched, and viewed on a map. We also need to report on our usage of tracks, and their condition, to the NSW and ACT Association. Having trip routes shown on maps would be fantastic, and would feed into trip planning packages. There is a huge amount of material which could be back-captured, too. So please do volunteer to help.
I apologise that this is much shorter than my usual effort, but I am actually leaving in 10 minutes to go on a trip! And it does not use the Merricumbene Track, either!
See you down the track somewhere
Richard
Copyright ©2010 Richard Brand