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A Brief History Of The OMC Website |
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Written by Administrator
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Friday, 24 October 2008 |
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The current website represents the 3rd version of the OMC website, the evolution of which is described below:
Webmaster: Donald MacDonald - Site Hosted By BT Internet (Jan 1999 - August 2000)
The OMC's initial site was hosted by club member/webmaster Donald MacDonald using the webspace and domain name that came with his internet account with BT Internet. This original site actually still exists. You may view it here.
web.archive.org is a service that has been taking and archiving snapshots of websites since 1996. It contains records from the OMC's website(s) from December 1998 to the present day. The earliest known record of the first OMC website may be viewed here.
You may visit web.archive.org to see how the first OMC website evolved.
Webmaster: Colin Baird - Site Hosted By Freeola (August 2000 - 2007)
In early 2000 with the website in the hands of new webmaster: Colin Baird, the domain name ochils.com was registered. In August 2000, this domain was pointed at a new website hosted for free by Freeola with the caveat that updates could only be performed using a Freeola dial-up/broadband internet account.
The earliest record from www.ochils.com, was a snapshot taken on 19/08/2000. Visit web.archive.org to see how the site evolved.
In April 2001, with more and more members getting Internet access either at home or at work, Colin, added a Message Board/Mailing List facility, hosted by beseen.com such that club members could communicate with one another, arrange ad-hoc meet-up's and discuss club business. The messageboard stayed with beseen.com until September 2002 when it moved to Smartgroups before being changed to Yahoo Groups In March 2006. Today, the club uses a forum rather than the message board/mailing list, with the message archive available to all.
Colin changed the format of the website again in April 2003 into a form that many members will still recognise.
Webmaster: Nigel Webber - Site Hosted By Myself @ Home (August 2007 - Present Day)
I took over as webmaster in September 2007. The site (in its current form) began life in October, with the current forum taking over from the Yahoo Groups message board in November.
I wanted to base the site on the Joomla CMS (Content Management System) to make it easier to keep up-to-date, and to provide for an integrated look and feel. Freeola proved to be too restrictive here, so the site is hosted by myself at home on a Linux VM (Virtual Machine), than runs on top of my (always-on) windows media centre box. Internet connectivity is via PlusNet using their business ADSL package that provides twice the upstream bandwidth (832K) when compared to a home ADSL solution, making it better for web hosting.
Hosting at home gives a virtually unlimited amount of hard-disk space, which in turn has allowed the photo galleries (one of the most popular parts of the site) to grow. The site is backed up nightly both locally and via online backup. A UPS keeps things alive (for an hour) during power outages (which always seem to occur when I am on holiday!). The site currently occupies 700MB with the photo albums accounting for 600MB of this. The site serves up about 3GB of data per month.
Future plans include migrating to Joomla 1.5x, improving the sites accessibility, and a text alert system for members amoung others.
If you happen to find this site useful and wish to help to offset the running costs (at no cost to yourself) then you could do worse than choose PlusNet as your broadband provider or migrate to them (they pay a few pence/month per signup given as a reduction in ADSL fees). You may start this process by clicking here. Any comments/suggestions about the website may be sent here.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 26 October 2008 )
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