Recently I have realised that I can't do justice to the community here in populating the website with content and getting updates done in a timely manner. I am not going away or anything and am still maintaining the sever etc.. However given that I haven't been able to keep up with in my opinion a minimum level of up datedness. I am going to revisit a topic I have briefly mentioned in the past, which is getting some other members involved in helping run the website. I have no specific number of people that I'm interested in attracting. Rather I would like anyone that has an interest in this to let me know. If it is one person great, if it is 20 people that is great also. The wordpress software the site is developed off of has the capability to manage and coordinate a lot of people that are contributing if needed.
If you are interested PM or email me and let me know and I will change your status to author so that you can create content. I will still be here and developing content for the site myself and will coordinate and help with content from other members doing this as needed. I am very proud of the downeasteryachts.com website and forums but think that it could be a magnitude better if we had more people actively working on it. I notice on the forums here that if someone posts something that we will have a few days of members dropping in and commenting till it dies back down, same for the front page posts. If people aren't visiting and looking at new content then the site tends to slow down a lot and people stop checking in as much to see what is new. All the historical projects and boat data that is so much the core of the site is still here but the community side of it seems to slack off. It comes in fits and spurts. I'm hoping that we will develop a core of people that can keep the site ticking over and fairly active without any one person being buried in it or being critical to keeping everything updated etc.. With that core it won't matter if someone is off shore for a month here or there, or gone for the summer etc... The website will still get updates and people with questions or updates needing to be done can get a response in a few days rather than a few weeks to a month or more as it has been in the last year.
So step up to the bar and order a helping of contributing if you feel up to it. If not that is great also 🙂 I know a lot of people love to come and see what has changed and make a comment or two or post in the forums and as far as I'm concerned that is helping the community grow also. For those of you that don't have the time to directly work on the website maybe you can submit a story or link to something interesting for one of us to put up on the site for you.
Scott
For Chris,Sophi and anyone else interested. ( Chris and Sophi have been moved to Author status)
Just jump right in on working on content for the site. I will be offering the same deal to other members that are interested.:)
The front page populates from the posts feature. You can publish one and it will show up immediately or schedule it out for in the future. You can also save drafts and come back and work on them at your convenience before publishing them. I would search out stuff from members or stuff I wrote myself on projects,voyages or other topical stuff of interest and sometimes create up to 10 posts and schedule them to show up about every 4 to 6 days. If there is already stuff scheduled and you add something,schedule it for about 4 to 6 days after the last scheduled post. If you create a page you can choose where it is placed by picking an existing page to place it under. IE under the info index there are major topics with subtopic pages and then actually pages with content such as the individual boat write-ups. or projects such as windows,holding tank,fuel tank etc.. that various people had done.
If you get content from someone else to put up you need to make sure they are ok with you posting it on our website. I generally don't do anything special other than email them and ask permission. If they give it,I will copy the text and any photographs to my computer. I then copy the text to a new post or page and upload the pictures and insert them. You can link to pictures on other websites but I prefer to download and re-upload them to our site. If the linked image is removed or page names changed it will break the image on our site. Much better to have it all located locally. Lately when uploading images I have taken I try and resize them down to a max of 1280 pixels by 1024 at the largest. This keeps the image file size down but still allows good quality if you blow up the image to look at it. My camera puts out 4000x3000 ish sized images that are 4 to 9 megs in size. It doesn't take many to really fill up the server as well as making it really slow for others to view pages with images that size embedded into them.
I always give credit for who wrote the story and if I copied it from their website or blog I will at the bottom of the story put a link back to their website or blog. If your writing and publishing a story of your own then please feel free to link back to your website or blog as well.
I would suggest that if anyone wanting to help has an issue with how to do certain things,that you email me or give me a call and maybe we can sit down on the phone when both of us have time to log into the website at the same time and I can walk you through any of the features you have questions about using. I think that would be the quickest and easiest way of doing that. I know that sometimes trying to tell someone something in an email or forum post can still leave them confused if were not on the same starting place.
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