The Aldbourne Net

It’s

Website refurbishment news

It’s a year now since the original website for this village (The Aldbourne Community Website) was mothballed, and all the work concentrated on its replacement (this one), aka The Aldbourne Net.

The forum has recently had a few posts asking about the progress of this website, and the same questions have been asked, so we are told, elsewhere in the village too.

We have held off updating everyone on progress for two reasons, firstly because we have been busy with website stuff, and secondly because we had a few things in the pipeline. We’re now able to fill you in on where we are at, plus some exciting new developments.

Firstly, the website itself. The next section to open, probably within the next fortnight, will be the community section. It will eventually contain the following sub-sections:

GENERAL
AMENITIES
PUBLICATIONS
ANNUAL EVENTS
LOCAL GOVERNMENT
HEALTH
EDUCATION
CHILDCARE
CHURCHES
FARMING

At first you will only see a couple of the above, as we add further content the others will open automatically. Once this is done the Activities section will follow shortly after. For a detailed look at the community section please download the site map via the link below.

The idea is that each entry in the aforementioned sections will have contact details associated with it. Because of this, we are structuring these sections in a way that makes it easy to produce (and print off) a universal contacts list for the village. The drawback with any such list is keeping the information up to date. The method we are using, we hope, will make it both easy for us to edit the information, and you to access it. We will make a further announcement here when this facility is up and running.

We have also been working on the forum. As mentioned before, we have always planned to transfer the Aldbourne Community Forum onto the software used for this site. This will make it easier to administer and share content across the websites we manage. It will also make it easier for you, as users registered to the forum will be automatically be logged in to this site and other ones we are planning. There may be a few hoops to jump through before this is completed (please see posts in forum about valid email addresses for all users) but once it’s done the shared membership across all our Aldbourne sites will bring further enhancements to you, the user. Updates on progress plus more detailed information about the log in functionality will be posted on the forum.

Well, what are these other Aldbourne sites? Well, it’s been a long time in planning, but we are now proud to announce our Weather station and Webcams project. This was borne out of the observation that the weather forecasts for this area (typically taken from data at Lyneham, or Boscombe Down) rarely tally with the actual local weather. Though this is a nationwide complaint, it’s pertinent here due to the microclimate caused by the village’s valley location. We had the idea that a proper, high specification weather station would not only be of interest, it would also be extremely useful, especially to those people whose employment is affected by the weather.

So, in partnership with St. Michael’s school, we have now successfully applied for funding to purchase this equipment. Once installed the weather station will output a live weather feed that will be embedded on the school’s website as well as a dedicated Aldbourne weather site. A live summary of that data will also appear on the home page on this site. In short, this will provide the local community with real-time, accurate and detailed local weather information, as well as an archived record for longer term analytical purposes. The budget also allows for some traditional weather station equipment, which will be sited in the school’s nature science garden. Who knows, perhaps the key meteorologists of the future will all come from Aldbourne!

The second part of the project involves webcams. Funding has been sourced that will enable us to install five webcams around the village, two of which would be designed to film within nesting boxes. The exterior webcams would be located in appropriate positions to give a flavour of the human activity in the village (whilst respecting individual privacy of course), whilst the others would be set up to provide a close-up insight into the life cycles of the local bird and bat populations. The camera feeds would be available via a dedicated Aldbourne webcam site. The idea is that only registered users will be able to view the village webcams, so they would not be accessed by all and sundry.

Finally, the wrapped banner. A few, tantalising tears have come off the brown paper, but we are now close to revealing the full contents. Once opened, you will see an array of objects lined up, these will all link to the different and varied parts of the site. A degree of animation will be involved; originally the plan was to do these in Flash, but times move swiftly on, now we are constructing them using HTML5. This is the most up to date technology, so you’ll be able to view them on your iPad or your smart phone.

You’ll see from the snippet here that we’ll need to update these animated icons (no football in Aldbourne presently, sadly). Once revealed, the banner is the way we want to draw people in, to realise the potential of the site as a village resource and the wide breadth of content available on it.

So, to summarise, within a few weeks the community section will open, to be followed by the activities section. After this there will be developments on all the other items mentioned above, and we will keep you fully informed on progress.

It goes without saying that all of this work does not happen overnight, courtesy some well-intentioned web-pixies. In fact we rely on our skilled technical team, consisting of real, flesh and blood, human beings. Volunteers all, they are Dyson Wilkes, Ben Hodson and Sam Hutchings, and they deserve great thanks for all the work they have put in.

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Downloads

1. The Aldbourne Net community section site map 3.1

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