[adding ilugc to cc because I thought its relevant]
Hemanth Kumer L wrote on Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 11:56:32PM -0700:
hkl> This is Hemanth [ILUGC]. I saw your mail.
hkl> I would like to know more information about
hkl> webmaster for ILUGC. So if you can send me the
Just as how history repeats, before I became the webmaster there was
Deivanayakam B who was the webmaster of ILUGC and he too was overloaded
/ had other priorities and hence he had to quit being the webmaster and
eventually ppl found me good with gimp :D and hence i was "unanimously
chosen" as the webmaster.
Whats webmastering all about?
1. Not much of work to be done. About less than an hour's work per
month. This would generally be:
a. copy the previous month's minutes into a new file and replace the
main contents with the current month's minutes; edit meetings.php and
add a link to the current minutes; edit right.php and add a link in
the site update section to the minutes; ftp all of this to
chennailug.org.
b. Generally you have to be the minutes writer too (thats what I was
told when I took this responsibility up).
2. But this doesn't mean you wont have much of work. Sometimes ILUGC
might get itself into a heavy duty campaign (like the LDD2) and you
would just have to do a lot of work. Unfortunately during my times of
webmastering, we didn't have a database for ILUGC and hence I decided
to use CSV databases. You might have to be "guided" through by me or
someone who understands the whole setup at chennailug.org before you
can start writing stuff that does DBs. Great news is that I was wanting
to setup something like postnuke because:
a. I felt I had other responsibilities and a feeling that I might not
be able to webmaster ILUGC completely. So I thought it would lessen
my burden if there can be a nice system like postnuke or whatever
where ppl can collaboratively moderate.
b. I felt I've been that old lurker who nows is seen mostly as that
useless-old-man (-; so I thought I would give young men a nice chance
to webmaster (-:
3. Its a great learning experience when you are in this
responsibility. I wanted to pick up PHP for the sake of having a better
system up on our site. And I eventually fell in love with PHP (-:
4. and you also get to do a lot of advocacy because the first contact
person for a visitor who comes to the site is the webmaster. There
would be a lot of requests from students/professionals asking you
various things. Students generally ask for help on their project work.
Corporates ask for CDs, support, etc.,
5. There are a variety of sites where Deivanayakam and me had
registered chennailug.org as the Official LUG of Chennai. Give me some
time and I would be glad to change contact information on all these
sites.
We need to figure out more things:
a. a login for the new webmaster
b. suraj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx and the fate of all emails to come
c. Should the existing site be replaced with something else that
$WEBMASTER is comfortable with? I dunno, I managed to put semi-cryptic
code on the site :-D (thanks to the use of CSV databases). However one
point to note: "It aint broke". You can as well decide to not fix it.
<personal>
I received a few questions from various luggies asking me if this
'stepping down' is due to the recent war that was fought over the list
(-;. The answer is simple. I'm planning to become a full-time
volunteering teacher (Thanks Thaths! You were my inspiration!). I'm
planning to quit my job in a year's time now and set out to teach free
softwares to children. I decided I have to do more ground work during
weekends/spare-time to figure out schools, their syllabi, etc.,.
One school in my neighbourhood has already agreed to let me teach
fundamentals of computers, etc., and I would only be too glad to find
many others joining my hands. (and of course, people who can donate some
funds would be "appreciated even more" (-; (like prabhu said..
money/economy is a weird animal)).
I would continue to lurk around on this list and try and start more
flame wars and fill the gap that ravi's departure has created (-;
</personal>
-Suraj
--
+----------------------------------------------<suraj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>--+
| Success in righteousness is like riding a palanquin; |
| failure is like languishing under its burden |
| (emphasis on virtue - 7), Thirukkural |
+--<http://www.symonds.net/~suraj/>------------------------------------+
