In message 9DB876C170EF4365AC0C6C9968C69C37@d3hkh9x94, Dilwyn Jones
dil...@evans1511.fsnet.co.uk writes
16th 17th April. The Quanta website has not been updated since July of
last year and my understanding is that there is little chance of it
being updated in the near future.
Ah - a weekend *totally* full for me with Bach St John Passion (8-(#
Another AGM missed.
Draw your own conclusions for the reason for this from Dilwyn's
yesterday email about the lack of updating to the news items,
I thought I read here quite recently that someone had worked out the
logon and *was* updating it.
Tony
That was John Sadler saying he'd managed to recover the Scottish QL
users group (SQLUG) website and nothing to do with the Quanta one.
You've seen Geoff's email about the website earlier on tonight. A
little bit more on this...
Quanta website is a source of frustration to me and I think to all of
us. The various faults and incompatibilities have caused too much
wasted time, too much time worrying about the SYSTEM at the expense of
CONTENT. The faults meant it has been impossible to update some things
like the News since the last item you see on the site, for example.
It's a free CMS, and in my experience it's not been very pleasant
trying to edit a site with it. Over my broadband, the editor is slow
and clunky. Various facilities either don't work at all when I try
them, or fail to work in various contexts. I get endless error
messages. Pages show up differently on Internet Explorer and on Firefox
(not tried other browsers). I have no idea if this is due to my own
system here, the CMS itself, or the problems with the servers it runs
on. Just look at the homepage of www.quanta.org.uk on the two browsers
mentioned to see what I mean. This is an example of things I have
moaned about in emails to Keith
and Dan (until I'm sure they are fed up of me), which have proved
difficult, or impossible, or very time consuming to fix.
The webmasters will be at Quanta AGM in April (just spoken to Keith
now). So if you are concerned about Quanta's website, go there to ask
questions and get answers. I hope that they will be able to do a
session on the website at some point over the weekend to explain the
situation.
Of course, the situation gives the impression that as far as members
are concerned the website is just out of date. This is not inactivity
or laziness on the part of the committee but a huge and endless
struggle just to get the basic CMS working at all. Dan and Keith are
people who have worked with IT for a living, so it's not a case of
nobody knowing what they're doing either. However, the website
situation is unacceptable as it stands in my view and rapid progress
must be seen to happen now.
The good news is that while I was abroad recently a committee meeting
was held which took major decisions to move forward to a costlier
managed service selected, which should free everyone up to focus on
CONTENT, provided it works better than the free service used until now.
However, the failure to explain all this publicly and the fact it went
on for a long time without explanation does give the impression of
negligence in updating the website, whereas the truth is that the whole
sorry situation is actually down to the CMS not working as it should on
the free server spaces used, making it impossible to provide a decent
website while that system is in use. Too long was spent trying to get a
free service working, so hopefully the move to a paid for service will
improve the situation.
Another matter is that I have resigned as Quanta Librarian today. I was
trying to do too many things - News, Helpline, Library and occasionally
website pages (when the CMS last worked properly). The rush to get
things in to meet the deadline for the current issue before I went
abroad (sorry, I rather monopolised the issue with my ramblings) and
the subsequent decision to produce another issue with deadline 5th
March convinced me the time was right to find someone with new ideas to
the Quanta Library properly and give it the time and attention it
deserves. The Library is in need of modernising, especially as it is
still intended that in time it will go online for members, which I
haven't the time to do. I'll remain as caretaker Librarian until the
AGM when I can hopefully hand the master disks etc over.
This email has NOT been issued or authorised by the Quanta committee
and is only the personal views of one frustrated committee member, sent
with the best of intentions and without intending any personal
criticism of anyone concerned.
Dilwyn Jones
Hi Dilwyn,
I can accept the feelings of frustrations.
A CMS - Content Management System - can just tie people in to something
that is then hard to maintain ... :-(
In the meantime, it is very easy to simply put text information on to a
web site, without a CMS.
So, the question remains - why has it just been left so long?
PS -
