Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
All Change at HOL?
When I started this site just over nine years ago, I didn't have a clue about what I was doing nor how the site would grow. I found the platform we still use today by accident and back in the heady emerging social media days of 2007 and 2008 they were great. The platform was constantly evolving and if I ever had any problems they were incredibly responsive.
However, the exciting (excitable?) social media buzz of those days has settled down to a background hum. Many tech companies went to the wall. Our platform hosts have survived, but were bought by a company which if it were a parent would long ago have been taken to court for severe neglect. This second-rate parent has just sold the platform on. Some accounts suggest that the new owner may be less parent and more modern-day slaver.
Worldwide, users of this platform are up in arms that our monthly fees are being doubled, but perhaps more than that, people are concerned about the viability of the platform in the medium term. So it seems like it's time to start contemplating some other futures.
If the platform closes down, not only would HoL face oblivion, but almost a decade of local community conversation will be lost for good. (This would be just one small part of what's being talked about as potentially the 'forgotten century' as all sorts of digitally stored archives disappear forever). That would be a shame for us now as well as for those who come after us.
To ensure our survival and the preservation of the rich tapestry in our archive, we may need to find a new home. As a first step I've reached out to the other Haringey sites that patterned themselves on HoL and used the same platform.
But, whether we do it alone or work with other sites, any move would mean specifying a new platform and then finding someone to make it for us. So two questions from me at this point:
1. In terms of the features we have and the ways things look, what would you like to change and what stay the same?
2. Can anyone help out on the technical side? As you can imagine the site is not blessed with huge wealth! (But we have won multiple awards and are well known in communities around the world....and...and....I guess any solution you make for us can be applied to a huge number of other people currently using our platform and also looking for a new home).
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by EyeSpy on
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There will be quite a lot of difference between them as one will be raw content and the other will be rendered through a templating engine.
If that is your view of how modern CMS platforms work then that explains your obsession with WordPress and following the heard rather then developing the right solution to the task in hand.
@Hugh, sorry if you feel that his falls foul of the kicking the ball side of the site. I feel that bad advice based upon little knowledge of the subject matter is far worse however.
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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Hey, no probs, I know your intent is to give the best advice you can.
My point is that there's not much difference between the ning db records and the rendered html - easy to strip.
My view of how CMS's work is based on reading the source. My relational database experience predates Codd. As you can imagine, I've seen a whole range of CMS's come and go on various platforms and sizes of kit, from IBM downwards.
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Hello Hugh, the closing date for applications is around the 12th Oct I think, so we'd need to be quick. I'm happy to help you put a bid together if you need it.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Thanks Abi. I spoke with the this morning. We're apparently out of scope and so outta luck!
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Hhhmmmm that's disappointing. Why did they say no?
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There needs to be real world face to face as a core part of the project activity - it happening as an outcome is insufficient.
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You might consider a version of the site that attracted funding - then adopt it wholesale if it works well enough.
When I was a young hippie in the 1970's, a trope was:
'Never trust anyone over 30'
Now that I'm over 60, I'd like it updated to:
'Never trust anyone under 60'
I propose a 'Senior' HoL for those older people (many more exist than ever, and growing) with a registration system that asks for your date of birth and a symbol attached to your user Id when posting that indicates which age-band you're in. Yes it's a bit ageist as not all old people are wise but the aim is not to discriminate, just to see if there's a correlation between the quality of the contribution and the age band of the poster. If youth is, in fact, wasted on the young.
We already have a 'Youth Council' in our borough - this could inspire an 'Elders Council' to help further recede the tide of ageism that is, thankfully, already on the ebb as for the first time in first world history, the old outnumber the young.
Given HoL's credibility, I think these people will fund it:
https://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/global-content/programmes/uk-wide...
You'll be able to use lessons learned when deciding if/when to migrate the 'main' HoL site.
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