WANTED: New Webmaster!

As the notice on the Home page says, it's time to discuss passing management of this site to someone else or , perhaps easier to achive, find someone else to create another site to do the same job.

I have been concerned for a long time that the forum is in danger. It is, in effect, run by someone as a hobby. There are no adverts and no charges for hosting the forum with him. At any point he may decise to close down his one remaining server. And now, with increasing age, and since selling my own SeaHawk, I would hope to find someone able to continue maintaining the site once I am no longer able to.

Now is the time to ask questions about what's involved and to suggest ideas on how a handover can be achieved. Do you have the skills or know someone who has who might be prepared to take control of the site?

Greg.

So I know I’m not super active on the forum, but I’d hate to see it disappear. If that means helping contribute to running it etc, I’d be interested, though wanting to know a bit more about how it’s run, put together etc., as well as the associated costs

As it happens, I work in IT so am familiar with running websites, although not nabble!  

I’m not sure whether it’s something you want to display publicly, or have a private conversation, but knowing more about it would definitely allow me to say whether I am able to help.

As for a “new webmaster” given it’s your site, your baby etc… I’d be more keen to be here to support, until such a time as you actually don’t want to do it… rather than “taking over”

There you go…. Those are my first thoughts.

Hi Perry,

I wouldn't say anyone was "super active" on the forum, but you are a long standing SeaHawk owner and consistent contributor and hearing that you're an IT man means that you pass the bar for people I'd trust to hold the login credentials for the site and admin status on the forum.

If nothing more, you could act as custodian, pending transfer to someone else, should I cease to respond to emails. That would give you the ability to download the main site and obtain a backup of the forum content to protect against the site going off-line unexpectedly.

Yes, currently, it is "my site", but I am over-stretched with the various sites I maintain, not to mention my band, a demented sister-in-law to help care for, a house move to complete, and without the motivation of continuing ownership of a SeaHawk it is one site that I plan to stop maintaining. There are others without an obvious audience, that I am happy to let expire.

Yes, I have reached the stage where I "actually don’t want to" maintain it. However, because it clearly has an audience, my plan is to endeavour to pass the domain, site and forum to someone else. I strongly suspect that anyone taking over the domain would want to rebuild the site from scratch using WordPress or some such package with which they are familiar. I'm not precious about that. It's just as much as possible of the content that I'd like to see preserved.

I'm just a self-taught, hobbyist web designer, with no formal training. The main site is entirely hand coded. Although self-taught I consider myself competent in HTML and CSS, but my use of JavaScript is limited to inserting very small segments of code to obscure email addresses and my understanding of PHP is limited to using a number of "includes" for the headers, footers, and main navigation menu code.

The forum is a separately hosted package with limited options compared with many of the more popular open source forum packages. I've made registration more complicated than it need to be as a way of defeating spammers, not that we seem to plagued by them. (In recent years its been downgraded and has broken some of my customisations hence, for example, the unplanned by me, appearance of the purple badges indicating a user's status. I've never made the time to find out how to remove them.)

The domain registration expires on 29 March 2025, I'd like to consider that a deadline, but it's still set to auto-renew at the moment.

Greg,

I’m happy to be a custodian, and happy if you want me to take of domain registration in 2025. Not sure where you are hosting it and the costs for that, but again, if it’s not too expensive I’m happy to help.

I’d be keen to see who else responds, as it’s always better to have a couple of people at least to be able to run things. I’d also probably need to spend some time understanding how the forum is structured and whether there are any easy ways to migrate to other open source ones.

Either way, let’s see who else can help, but I’m here to make sure this amazing body of work you’ve pulled together isn’t lost, if and when you want to step away.

The other thing I wonder is whether you have contacts, data or content which isn’t on the website but is useful for Seahawk owners. I know a couple of times you’ve talked about things like original plans etc that I’ve not seen (or only seen lower res images of) on the website.

If you have stuff like that I’d be more than happy to store it within a public area on by Dropbox account, so it’s still available to people.

I’m glued to my email so have responded quickly… let’s see who else is up to help and go from there.

And also thank you. Without this website I’d have never bought a Seahawk!