The Secret Techie Blog

A bit before Christmas, I ran a survey on Internet usage among members of the junction. The web-site has languished for some time and I wanted to gather information to help make some decisions on how we can best utilise our site and the Internet moving forwards. Some of the highlights of the survey results are:

• Almost everyone has broadband access.
• Almost everyone spends at least a few hours a week using the Internet and check their email quite regularly.
• Most respondents have reasonably good computer skills.
• Very few use facilities like social networks, instant messaging or forums.
• A lot of people only use our site for the calendar, but many would check the site if the content was updated more often.
• Many members would be interested in seeing articles and discussions on a range of subjects like social justice, church life and parenting, and a fair number of people would be willing to write articles (or even podcast).

So in summary, my plan for the site is to keep the calendar, but scrap the forums and blogs. In place of these, the idea is to put in place a more article oriented site, which could be viewed as a more unified blog of sorts. Articles will be published by members, appearing on the front page and such, and people will be able to comment on the articles, and reply to comments, etc, and thus generate discussions.

All in all, it will make for a more coherent site, instead of this split between blogs and forums, neither of which ended up being used much.

I also plan to have an automated weekly email summarising new content on the site that people can receive if they want. Given that email seems to be the main way we keep connected in the online universe.

Hopefully after that, I will then start nagging those of you who said you were interested in writing things to write things! I will be assisting anyone and everyone who is interested in training on how to use the site, how to publish articles if they wish, or just publishing them on their behalf if they prefer to just type up their stuff but not get involved in that messy web-site stuff.

So when will all this be happening? Good question! I'm currently waiting for version 6 of the Drupal content management system to be released (should be in the next few weeks). I've been doing a fair bit of research on this, and it will become the main backbone of our site, allowing us to do the rest with more ease. I will also copy over to the new site the more popular blog and forum postings from the current site to give us some initial content.

Kim and I have made inroads to sourcing a website designer to give the site a more contemporary look, so you wont have to suffer the programmer art that some hack put together!

So that's the summary of the state of affairs. Please feel free to leave a comment below with any ideas, observations, suggestions, bribes, etc...