Happy Birthday Scott,
I appreciate all your effort in getting this site up and running and keeping it going. It means a lot to me as I am keen to learn as much as possible about DE38's. It seems every time that I identify a new bit of maintenance on Tondy I am able to search the site and find info from someone who has already done it. It is priceless! Keep up the good work mate.
Dave
I'm glad it is helping you. I feel a bit the same as you do. It's amazing how many times I start a project and someone else has just posted about how they just did it and I can go oh wow..so thats how it's supposed to go. A good example is an upcoming article on the front page. It should be showing up about a week from now. Erick of Windsong is working on his engine and started pulling stuff apart and took some great pictures of the prop shaft and stuffing box area. I am currently trying to get geared up to fix my stuffing box that is leaking a bit more than is comfortable and is siezed up. His pictures of the layout back there underneath the exhaust muffler gave me a good idea of what I will need to do to get to it all.
I have been kinda slack about documenting some of my latest projects and need to spend some time compiling the latest. Please feel free to write up and talk about the stuff you have going on project wise here. Even if all you do is post it to the forums in conversational format with a few pictures it helps. If there is enough content on the forum on any given project I will probably compile it down into an article and post it to the main website also.
I know that when we purchased Valkyr from Zsanic's family that I just assumed that their was alot of information on the web about the boat. It was one of the attractions of this boat. When they had originally purchased her 4 or 5 years ago I had done some research for them and had found the two older sites that used to be up and pointed them to the information there. I hadn't even thought about it though in years until we purchased her. Low and behold I went out and there were no websites anymore. I totally lucked out though and was able to get in contact with Gerry and other people that had saved the content of the sites and they sent it all to me to put back up. So we started out with a solid core of content going back a decade probably. Since then though The site content has probably expanded by a third or so with contributions by members of content found or write ups about their projects, not to mention some of the discussions on the forums that give some excellent advise.
So the last year has been pretty successfull for the site and the community.. Does anyone have any sugestions or features going forward into the new year? I know that one area of the site that desperately needs addressing is the boat and owner registrys. What it really needs is a database driven registry that owners can add their boats to themselves. I have tried to find an existing plugin that we could use for that but so far have had no success. I'm not really a programer or database expert that I can build it myself so I just keep an eye out for something that would work. I do know that the current format with tables is hard to maintain with how wordpress parses the code. Adding lines for new boats sometimes gives unexpected results. If anyone has any suggestions or thinks they can help with this let me know. 🙂
scott
Scott:
You’ve done an exceptional job and have earned our gratitude for your painstaking efforts on behalf of all DE owners. Of course this extends to the previous site managers, but you have really developed a first rate web resource for the DE sailing community. Having such a site has many practical benefits, as we all have grown to appreciate, and hopefully will not take for grant. Lets not lose sight of this, and consider a tangible means of showing our gratitude for this valuable resource through a future membership subscription.
Duane Nealon
s/v Gracie Emmett
Great work Scott! I visit the site every day and re-read forum posts and the info-index all of the time. Keep up the great work, and I am looking forward to contributing as much as I can and doing whatever I can to keep the site going. I think a boat registration would be fantastic for the site, I'll try to brainstorm any other ideas.
Gracie Emmett said:
Scott:
You’ve done an exceptional job and have earned our gratitude for your painstaking efforts on behalf of all DE owners. Of course this extends to the previous site managers, but you have really developed a first rate web resource for the DE sailing community. Having such a site has many practical benefits, as we all have grown to appreciate, and hopefully will not take for grant. Lets not lose sight of this, and consider a tangible means of showing our gratitude for this valuable resource through a future membership subscription.
Duane Nealon
s/v Gracie Emmett
Thank you for the kind words 🙂 As to a membership subscription, I promised to maintain free access for everyone to the content and intend to maintain that as long as I can afford to. If at some point in the future I can no longer afford to maintain the website I guess I would have to have an open discussion with the membership and as a community come up with a solution. I am a member of several community sites that take in donations once or twice a year and that seems to work for them so maybe something like that. For now though I am able to afford the site with not a lot of financial difficulty to myself.
When we move to the boat our income will be dropping and at that time I might put up a paypal link for donations to help offset the cost of maintaining the site. Or if someone sellling or buying a boat thinks that the website contributed materially to their being able to buy or sell they could donate a few dollars. I might put up some links to marine related products to get a few advertiseing dollars as well then.. It really isn't an issue right this minute. I do appreciate the sentiment from you and other members that have offered to kick in some money though. It has really highlighted the value members have gotten out of the site and makes me feel all warm and fuzzy 🙂
Erick said:
Great work Scott! I visit the site every day and re-read forum posts and the info-index all of the time. Keep up the great work, and I am looking forward to contributing as much as I can and doing whatever I can to keep the site going. I think a boat registration would be fantastic for the site, I'll try to brainstorm any other ideas.
Erick,
I'm glad your enjoying it. I have to admit I like checking your site out on a regular basis and as you can tell have availed myself of your open offer to copy content here to the downeaster website. Two of your recent write ups will be appearing on the home page over the next week. One of these days hopefully well will get the oportunity to anchor Windsong and Valkyr in the same anchorage and hang out a bit. 🙂 It's funny as right now we seem to be doing a lot of the almost identical projects in our refurbishment of our boats.
scott
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