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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 (March 1997 - 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 (August 2007 - March 2013)
Nigel 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.
The site is based on a (now ancient) version of 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 Nigel at home using both ubuntu 6.06LTS and later Ubuntu 8.04LTS. Internet connectivity was provided by Plusnet. (approx 1Mbit upload at the time).
Hosting at home gave 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.
In June 2011, with the prices for virtual linux hosting plumeting, the website was moved to hosted storage, initially with eUKHost (who were terrible), and then with LiNode (who are superb). It runs on a VPS (virtual private server) running Ubuntu 10.02LTS. The VPS offers similar flexibility to hosting at home, and the additional bandwidth available via LiNode has enabled higher resolution photos to be hosted. Differential backup is performed automatically every night with the last 2 weeks worth of backups being kept. Our 'Linode 1024' account gives us a virtual linux machine with 1024MB RAM, 24GB HD and 2TB/Month data transfer.
Between 2007 to 2013 The site has grown from around 500MB to 3.2GB, a five-fold increase, so the new host will be good for a few years yet!
Webmaster: Mhairi McCabe (March 2013 - Present Day)
Mhairi took over the website in March 2013, this was after almost a year as 'Webmistress'. She has big plans and is currently re-vamping one of the sites most popular features, the photo gallery.
Any comments/suggestions about the website may be sent to Mhairi: click here.
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