In April this year with the help of Carl Harris and his web team at BCS HQ I tried to use the BCS content management system based on the Wordpress CMS. Wordpress was designed for creating blogs and despite Carl's assistance I could not find a way to make the system produce web pages which looked anything like our current pages. So I have gone back to producing the Group's pages manually using my own PHP-based templates. Carl tells me that he plans to offer member groups another more generalised CMS system in the future but I don't know what the timescale is for that.

Back on more routine matters I updated the site following the 2010 AGM with the documents presented at the meeting as well as continuing to update the Group's web pages to match the BCS brand, logo and colour scheme introduced with the Institute's rebranding in late 2009 but I still have all the files from 2003 to 2007 to change!

More recently I have put up the agenda and other documents for this meeting, see www.fortran.bcs.org/2011/agenda11.php. By my calculation we now have well over 1000 files on the BCS server.

In February this year I was surprised to receive an email entitled "We love fortran.bcs.org!". I first thought it was a scam but it was a genuine message from an organisation, SR Education Group, based near Seattle on the west coast of the USA. Cate Newton, their Content Manager, wanted to thank the Group for the Resources page on our website and said "I really appreciate your collection of resources on the fortran.bcs.org website, http://www.fortran.bcs.org/resources.php". SR Education provide guidance to potential students for a very wide range of careers and courses in the US, IT being just one of the many areas they cover. Cate gave me a link to one of their pages on programming languages basics, which unfortunately no longer works. I will have to ask if it is still available elsewhere on their site.

At last year's AGM there was a discussion of online Fortran resources and Clive Page gave a demonstration of a prototype site, with links to many other pages that are heavily interconnected. After the meeting I asked Carl Harris if BCS could provide storage for such an archive. Carl gave me a positive response but wanted some idea of the likely storage requirements. I passed this request on to Clive and will take this opportunity to remind him about it!

Finally, as ever my thanks goes to all the contributors to the Fortran SG site who have provided me with files which needed only a minimum of work to make them suitable to go onto the Web. Also I must thank Carl Harris and Susannah Rogers at BCS HQ for their assistance when I have any queries and for providing me with a steady stream of monthly statistics which I have yet to put on the web despite several years of talking about it!

Peter Crouch
27^th September 2011

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Last modified: Wed 2 Nov 2011 09:30:36