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Old 07-11-2013, 01:37 PM posted to uk.rec.gardening
David Rance[_3_] David Rance[_3_] is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: Jun 2011
Posts: 307
Default At the risk of being unpopular

On Thu, 7 Nov 2013 Jake wrote:

On Thu, 7 Nov 2013 09:47:14 +0000, David Rance
wrote:

I've been reading URG for around eighteen years, I think. Even when I
started at least one of the stalwarts, Chunky, who helped create URG had
already left - I never saw any messages by him. And Cormaic last only
another five years or so before he found that his business left him too
little time to contribute. But Cormaic was a great encourager. It was he
that persuaded me to post a regular welcome message and he still hosts
the URG web site.

Ok, so we have a URG web site. Why don't we use it? Not much has changed
for years apart from keeping some of the FAQs up-to-date. In fact, it
probably suffers from a lot of the formatting and colour problems that
others have mentioned. It needs a good overhaul. We could keep a blog
going on that. There could be several blogs. Has anyone the vision to
make use of http://www.u-r-g.co.uk ? URG doesn't *have* to stay as a
Usenet group.


A well-thought contribution David. I have visited the web site quite a
few times and have referred to the FAQs when responding to questions
from "visitors" though I think I'm the only one to have done so
recently.

OTOH, the web site is rather out of date. I don't mean design, though
that does scream out for updating: the underlying appearance is 90s
and the presentation of content can be difficult to follow.


Thanks for your comments, Jake, with which I whole-heartedly agree. Just
to answer one or two of them

More fundamentally, many (I think the majority) of the external links
no longer work. In one FAQ there is reference to using Armillatox to
kill vine weevil. Yep, lots probably use it for such purposes but
doing so is illegal and advocating doing so could have repercussions!
There are also references to other products which have been withdrawn
following EU dictat. So someone does need to go through it and remove
the inconsistencies and repair or replace the links.


About three or four years ago a couple of us (RG and me) were given
write access to the site with a view to repairing links which didn't
work and adding any new FAQs. To rescue some of them I had to go to
sites that cache pages but I think we got them all back. But that was
three or four years ago and so obviously it needs looking at again.

There was something also called the "web-ring" where contributors' web
sites were linked in by a sort of "ring". However we couldn't get the
software for that going again.

It also needs a new domain name. "u-r-g.co.uk" conveys nothing to the
uninitiated.


That's true, though there's little we can do about that as it belongs to
Cormaic.

It would need some sort of discussion facility to be any "substitute"
for the newsgroup. The present site seems to have been (at some time)
operated on the basis that you emailed Cormaic and he put your
question/contribution on the site.


Yes, that was how it worked but latterly RG and I to did that. However
none of the older urglers who knew about the web-site have contributed
anything recently. The last was Nick.

I agree that an interactive page or pages are needed. I actually set up
Wordpress on my choir's website a year or two back when I was DoM at All
Saints', Wokingham, but it's not necessary to host the Wordpress
software on one's own web site.

Put this together and I guess we have a non-starter. I doubt there
would ever be agreement on design; the task of initial updating will
not be a small one and I wonder how many here will know how to do it
and/or be willing to learn, let alone devote the time.


Though perhaps we ought to have some sort of whip-round for Cormaic -
just maintaining the domain name is costing him money.


I think Cormaic now acts also as a small ISP so the cost to him is
minimal. He said that he's willing to host it free of charge to us as
long as we need it.

David

--
David Rance writing from Caversham, Reading, UK