What's new on this website?

07/02/2011

The Aidan Way and Community Prayer Diary

The Aidan Way and the Community Prayer Diary are now available for download from the members area. You will need to login to see these.

25/01/2011

In Recent Months

A great deal of work has needed to be done to:

Update the home page and contact pages in the light of the three new guardians taking responsibility for managing aspects of the Community
Bring the website inline with major changes to the ways in which Google and other search engines index web pages. This has meant many hours of altering hidden scripts which make each web page more visible to Search engines, and therefore more likely to come up in search results. As a result the number of visitors to our site has doubled in the last month alone.
Rename pages and files, again to ensure they are more likely to come up in search engine results.
Update the site with events for 2011
Add a date stamp to the foot of each page to indicate the last time it was updated
Create new database facilities to hold new from our regional groups. All regional leaders now have access to their own sections which they can edit, should they choose.
Add an art section to the members initiatives pages, which includes a free image browser provided by HighSlide.

Further Changes

There always a lot of ongoing work to be done on the site. In particular, it has become clear that the menu system does not always function properly on all mobile devices.
Unfortunately, solving this problem is far from easy due to the huge variety of screen sizes and resolutions involved. There are also major variations in operating system, browser, support for JavaScript and CSS, etc.
In time, and it will take months if not years, a new site may need to be developed, or at the very least a new menu system, probably without the drop down lists.
Using the content management system 'Joomla' is being considered, but there are serious technical issues about the visibility of Joomla pages to search engines, which the Joomla developers will need to address in new releases before we can progress down that line.

01/10/2009

During the last year

The site is stable across all major browsers including Google's newly released ''Chrome" browser. Chrome, however, should not be used by administrators who need to update webpages. Internet Explorer 8 is now just as good if not better than Firefox for viewing the website.
A new page has been added for our South Coast and Channel Islands region
Members can now pay their subscriptions and make donations online using a new secure PayPal facility. We are moving closer to having an online shop - the logistics of taking and despatching order still needs to be sorted out.
A new interactive tour of Lindisfarne has been created, showing the island's main features and beauty spots. You can find it here. Move your mouse over the page to explore the island.
Updates to the web hosting company's versions of PHP and MySQL (which holds our database) caused a few problems for anyone trying to update or edit the PALM pages. The coding of related pages has now been re-written to overcome these. If anyone has any further problems please contact the webmaster.
Many other small updates and improvements have been made throughout the year.
New links have been added to Social Networking sites
Plans are being made to create a new 'thin places' section to the website. Anyone with stories and/or pictures of thin places they have visited should send them to the webmaster.

05/09/2008

During the previous six months:

Work on the Community's on-line shop has been put on hold until we have enough volunteers on Lindisfarne to run the order handling, packaging and posting requirements
The menu system has been completely overhauled so that it should now be more intuitive
Work is now complete on providing online editing facilties for all regional leaders, including those in Australia. Leaders can now post details of their own meetings and events without having to send them to the Webmaster
The Prayer Diary, that ships with the Aidan way, is now online in the secure PALM section. It updates daily to show the people and organisations to be prayed for on specific days
Further international pages have been added to the site
Selected readings for morning, midday, evening and night from the community's daily prayer rhythm are now available online from the home page
A section for member's special initiatives has been set up under the Members menu. So far, Sally Steen's work in Burma is displayed and their is space for Manfred Jahn's work with the Amazonian Indians. If you are a member and have any special intiative that you want online, contact the webmaster.
Animated graphical hyperlinks back to the home page now appear at the top left and right of every screen.
Significant new material has been added to the Studies section
The "News" menu has been overhauled so that old "news" is no longer present.
Contacts and links have been updated and should be accurate. If not, let the webmaster know.
For those who are technically minded, the site is now supported by updated versions of PHP and MySQL.

19/03/2008

The decision, in principle, to create an online shop has been taken
Work on the Community's on-line shop has begun
The aim is to get the on-line shop fully functional by autumn, but much will depend on logisitics, finding people who can help actually process orders, package goods and despatch them.

01/03/2008

Work to allow the management team on holy Island to directly edit web content of the News Flash page online, has now been completed
Helen Maguire has now been appointed to co-ordinate postings on this page
A similar facility can be made available to Regional Guardians and others exercising leadership roles in the Community. Contact the Web Manager if you would like to make use of such a facility

07/02/2008

This website is now functional and stable on all platforms, although there are some suspected issues with Apple-Mac machines using the Safari browser
Members can now add and delete their own contributions directly through the secure PALM pages
The Guardian can now also add, edit and delete material from his blog which is hosted entirely within the site
Ray Simpson's book 'Celtic Daily Light' is now totally available online from the home page. A different reading appears for each day of the year.
Email references on the site have now been hidden from malicious mailbots, that seek to copy emails for spamming operations.

Date Stamp

Updated 26-01-2011