Your Alumni site … version 2.0
August 22, 2009 in About this site by Stephen Oliver
Many years ago (before the dawn of MySpace and Facebook) when I quite naively created a small series of linked .html pages and called them the CHSS Alumni website, I could not have imagined then how quickly the site would grow. There was an obvious desire out there in people to stay connected to their former high school classmates. More than 1000 people registered on the site and it has kept me quite busy manually doing all the profile update requests that come in each month.
In recent years, with the explosive growth and popularity of social networking sites, I began to wonder if there was a future or even a need for such dedicated sites such as ours. People, it seemed, had found other ways to stay connected. Could we still be relevant?
The answer, of course, is that I honestly do not know. Maybe sites like ours have already been eclipsed by the likes of Facebook. That quite possibly is true. However, I also want to believe that there is still a desire/need for a blatantly non-commercial, smaller scale, more private, less “data-mining” option than what the behemoths currently offer.
And so, rather than just let the old site [www.amdsb.ca/CHSS/ALUMNI] gradually fade, I’ve been investigating a number of options in the past year or so. Obviously, expense was one of my criteria as well as scalability. If this new site grows in popularity (as I hope it will), I want the installed software to do the heavy slogging of managing all the new registrations. As you can see, I finally settled on a combination of WordPressMU and BuddyPress to be the backbone of the new site. Both are open source and both are currently being actively developed and used by a large and dedicated community of enthusiastic end-users and creative developers. Given this new direction, I also thought it appropriate that we launch on our own brand new domain. This has obviously meant that certain new domain registration and hosting expenses have been incurred which we did not have before.
And so, moving forward, it could all fall apart. Maybe only a small percentage of people on the old site will bother to register here. Maybe there will be some software problems that come up that need the attention of more knowledgeable brains than mine. But, perhaps equally possible, things could also work out just fine. The new social networking features of this site might just draw back those who had abandoned the previous site as being too static and non-interactive. I guess only time will tell.
Thank you for reading this. I value any and all constructive feedback. I would sincerely appreciate your support in promoting and building this new version 2.0 community. Please encourage fellow Alumni to come and register.
Mr. Stephen Oliver
Site Administrator
Teacher at CHSS since 1981
Thanks for all your work to keep this up and running. Because I am on holidays (extended even as I am on a leave until Feb 2010) I have the unusual ‘time’ to spend on the computer occassionally (like this morning when I decided to take the time to register). I am not someone who lives on the computer and do not consider myself and expert in any aspect of the details of computer use but I managed to get registered–and with a blog (but I likely won’t be using it much–I can’t find time to check email and facebook as it is!!). However, here I am, one of the newest on your site it seems and so far so good–it’s working!! Thanks again, Steve. You have continued to go above and beyond which is what I remembered of you when you first came to CHSS!!