STC Eastern Ontario Blog

I’m always curious how a site became what it is. Who chose the look or decided to add (or do away with) a particular feature, etc. Not much in the way of archival information is kept on the server, though I suppose I could email Robin or Rick and pick their brains about the site. Well, I may well anyway but right now I don’t really need to.

I have been brainstorming ideas for perking up the site with a colleague of mine. The current site is not very dynamic — other than the occasional job posting or program or seminar update, not much really changes on the site from day to day…or even week to week. Not much point visiting a site that rarely changes. Still, for dynamic content, you need either automatic feeds of some kind (blog feeds, forum feeds, etc.) or someone dedicated to keeping the content fresh…or better yet, a combination of both. So, anyway, I’ve been showing her the interim redesign and describing to her what kinds of additional content I was thinking of (forum, blog, maybe a wiki or something, updated news and whatnot). It was an interesting discussion.

So I decide to go have a look at the archive.org copies of the stceo.org site, to see what used to be there that isn’t. And I’m coming to the conclusion that really all I’m doing here is facilitating the return of content that used to be here. I just spent about 1/2 hour reading through a version of Robin’s 1999/2000 “site news” page which is a journal of his thoughts as he was working on the site. In essence, it was a pseudo-blog. Not sure when he got rid of that feature but I miss that historical look at the life of the site and the webmaster.  I want to add it back in, both his old notes and the new ones here in this blog.

And there used to be a forum. Don’t know why it went the way of the dodo — I hope the Lyris mailing list wasn’t its replacement. Maybe it just wasn’t active enough or maybe no one wanted to administer it. Not that I need something else to have to administer/moderate — I already moderate 3 Yahoo groups and the ODP public forum – but how much work would it really be? Maybe I should just ask the admins of stcforum.org for a separate forum for SCTEO members to putter in instead. Ah, well, I’ll worry about that later. Much later.

I also see the standard STC disclaimer that disappeared at some point from the site. And I can see that the design of the site really hasn’t changed much since about 2000/2001, except that the coloured boxes on the index page seem to ebb and flow. Hmmm, maybe I’ll put a site history page up, with screenshots of the various looks. Man, I should have been an archivist. 

[As an aside, the STC logo back in 2000 was fugly]

I’m still working on the clean up. I have finally nailed down the look I wanted for the secondary navigation table (it’s blue and white now instead of taupe and darker taupe). It looks pretty nice for what it is.  Not my ideal choice of a design for the site but a good interim look while I think long and hard about a full redesign. The cleaning up of the file structure will be especially helpful in the future. The interim cleanup redesign is being done using Dreamweaver templates and CSS so that any future redesign will be easier to implement right across the board.

I should have the updated site uploaded by the end of the weekend, barring anything unforeseen happening in the meantime.