This is a post about the history of the Club’s presence on the web.  You are warned!
The history of the club’s webpage is long and varied.  It started out (as far as I can determine) in 1998 (at least) and was a static collection of HTML pages and photos.  It wasn’t the best page but it was rather cool that a BYU club had an active web presence back then.  Then I was asked by Ken to make a new page, which I did using Flash.  It looked… interesting, but it could at least be easily updated in the early days before CSS becamse big.

While I was on my mission Ted Maxwell (awesome guy; if you disagree let’s agree to disagree) rewrote the page using Perl.  The webpage was now fully updatable by users on the Internet (kinda like Wikipedia).  There were very few occasions of vandalism andit was good.

When I returned the page was rewritten to use PHP/MySQL and featured forums and user accounts.  The page was hacked once, but it was actually in a nice fashion where the hacker let me know where security was lacking.

When I was elected VP in 2005 I spent Winter Semester rewriting the backend code of the page again from scratch.  I got rid of the forums, which caused some short-term consternation, but the advent of the GoogleGroup quickly put an end to calls for a bulletin board.  In fact, the Google Group has quickly grown to become to largest Internet tool that the club uses.

Over the last year (2007-2008 ) it became very apparent that all of the needs fulfilled by the club web page were being filled by the GoogleGroup.  Since the hosting costs for the web page were phobitive against our small budget at the time, it was decided to move the page from paid hosting to free web alternatives.

And so here we are.  The club has ownership of the address “qands.org” for another 2-3 years (I don’t remember how long, to be honest), so I linked it up to a wordpress site.  I think the site looks rather swell, and it should provide everyone all the functionality that they’d need from a club website.

There have been a few questions about this move that I thought I’d answer, especially since I’m leaving and there isn’t a “web guy” or “web gal” to take my place (as far as I know).  (Let me just say right here that I unequivocally think that the web guy should NOT be the responsibility of a presidency member; instead it should be treated as a guild head – a guild head can be elected to the presidency, but a presidency member never “deserves” a guild because of their position in the club presidency).  It’s come up before, and it isn’t a good idea.)

Q. Why don’t we just get rid of the web page altogether?  It wasn’t being used over the past two years.
A. The past two years have seen a huge rise in the use of Facebook and other social networking sites.  Before those, the QandS site actually functioned in a similar fashion in keeping clubbies connected.  It can be argued that, through these social networking sites and the Google Group that there isn’t much need for clubbies to use the webpage.  I would say that one should be kept if only to have an informational web presence to put on official club advertising.

Q. Why not try to have all that the web page had before: forums, photo gallery, and other things?
A. With all of the free options available to us through Flickr, Yahoo!, Google, and others it would be easy to gather a collection of sites that would accomplish the same functions as the older sites.  However, there are problems with this approach.  Currently, nobody really used the club website for these activities; the GoogleGroup and Facebook in particular have taken of most of the functions for most club members.  Thus, the addition of further webpages adss further user accounts (and passwords), further URLs to remember/bookmark, and (most importantly) more websites to remember to visit often.  It has been often been shown in my occupational field (web design and programming) that if the average person is presented with too many options they tend to simply ingore all options instead of making choices.  In asking users to visit (often) qands.org, Facebook, email clients (for GoogleGroups), calendars, photo albums, and message boards I think we are asking far too much.  This page can link to further pages, but I would argue strongly that we do not need to reproduce the functionality of old sites because it will be wasted effort.

Q. Why can’t we have a message board? I hate blogs!
A. The blog functionality of this page is actually secondary to the reason I chose to settle us here.  The wordpress blogs can be made to look very professional (IMHO a bit better than the blogger blogs).  Our page can look professional even though it is, technically, a blogging page.

However, the blogging functionality of this page is similar to a message board, but an infrequently used message board poses its own problems, mostly that small, almost-secret conversations can be happening deep within the branching threads of a message board which can always lead to problems.  A blog keeps everything in the open, organized by topic and date so that it’s easier to find what people were talking about in the past.

Can the club have a message board?  Of course, there are free sites aplenty out there and no one will stop you.  Just keep in mind that the pendulum of club’s internet activity will be against anyone using it without being forced to, and why would you want to force anyone in the club to do something?  It will, currently, be wasted effort.  In the future that might change.  If you feel strongly against the blog format I challenge you to give it a try for a full month, and afterwards try to honestly answer the question: would anything really change if a message board were implemented?  If the answer is “Yes it would if I talked up the message board enough to club members,” then why not talk up the blog aspect to club members?  Keeping things simple is always better than making things more complicated.

Q. Can we go back to hosting our own site?
A. Sure, if you want to pay for it!  I have the old source code for the page I wrote, but the club would always be welcome to write a new one.  Just remember to find a good host, if not a free host–see if BYU would host you again, and make sure that the limitations BYUSA would place on your page and its contents is something you’d allow.  There’s nothing stopping you (apart from BYUSA saying you can’t, of course)!

I can’t think of any other questions.  So welcome to the site.  Anyone can make comments without logging in, and if you need help logging in just email me and I can help.