Web Editor's Report for 2003-2004

In addition to the usual routine maintenance of the Group's web pages, mainly putting up pages related to the AGM, this year I have had been involved in two major activities. One was the restructuring of the pages so that each year's files were kept in a separate directory while the second was moving the pages from a location within the bcs.org domain to our own domain www.fortran.bcs.org.

At last year's AGM I was once again asked if we could have access statistics for our pages. I approached Carl Harris, the BCS Web Master, and he arranged for Susannah Rodgers, the BCS Web Editor, to send me monthly reports based on the server logs, starting with April 2003. I have created bar charts to display some of the data from these reports. The increase in the number of failed hits in October 2003 prompted me to restructure the pages so that I did not need to remove old reports after a couple of years. Now we have all the files on line relating to our AGMs back to 2000 as well as other reports going back as far as the formation of the Group in 1970.

Late in 2003 it was announced that the Society would offer Member Group Web Hosting facilities whereby Groups and Branches could have their own domain names and manage their own files on a server maintained by the HQ Web Services team. Two of the requirements were that the pages should conform to the latest generation of the BCS "look and feel" and to the XHTML 1.0 standard produced by the W3C. I agreed with Carl Harris that I would only convert our top level pages to the new requirements plus any new pages created from January 2004. I made the changes to the files in March and they were moved to our new domain, www.fortran.bcs.org, in April.

We currently have over 150 files on the BCS server and that will increase once again when I put the information from this meeting onto the site.

My thanks goes to all the officers and speakers who have provided me with material in a form which enables me to put it on our web site with the minimum amount of effort.

Peter Crouch
18th May 2004

Comments on this or any other of the Group's pages should be sent by e-mail to the BCS FSG Web Editor, Peter Crouch, at pccrouch@bcs.org.uk