The Story of our Webpages
Our History
In The Begining.....
This website was sparked off by a chance correspondence on one of the local USENET news groups. Two of the webspinners (Fr Tony Milner and Brian Sharrock) started to correspond with each other and rapidly resolved to start harnessing the "web" for the good of the church and AMDG. Once we had been joined by Fr John Nuttall the editorial board had been formed.
We noticed that although many sites seemed to be superb exponents of the power of the web and to demonstrate the flair and skill of their authors: - there did not seem to be any purpose to them. We determined that an electronic copy of the existing Diocesan Annual Directory would be an ideal model for our website. As the directory is mainly a listing of lots of addresses, names, appointments, times, dates etc.. we felt that this could be rapidly marked up into HTML and provide a useful skeleton for our undeveloped authoring skills.
That's when we discovered that an electronic medium version of the directory did not exist. So we have had to produce one, from scratch. The raw data for the first release of our website originates in an OCR'd copy of the 1995 printed directory. This went online for the first time on October 31 1995. In the proofreading of the OCR output things were occasionally missed - and to this day we still get occasional emails point out minor errors from this period on some rather less visited pages!
After that things began to tick along nicely. we managed to integrate the information from Interlink - the periodical diocesan information pack - with the directory information, and gradually new features were added. Then in September 1996 one of the webspinner (Fr. Tony) was appointed to the seminary to teach theology. The consequence of this was that for the next six months or so the pages were allowed to stagnate a little (though still providing a valuable resource).
In March 1997 the 'committee' met to consider direction. The outcome of this meeting was a major overhaul of the web pages, which took some 3 months.
The service has been maintained with quiet but steady growth, until in January 2000 the decision was made to move from our hosts at Roehampton Institute to a commercial providor with our own domain name (dabnet.org). We are grateful to Roehampton for their generosity over the last five years. Although initial changes will not be great, this new move will allow us to provide further services in future.
By October 2003 changes in diocesan structures and other developments suggested a modest reorganisation of the site was in order. The pages were given a 'facelift' in the process with new graphics and a new colour scheme. No extra bells and whistles however - the aim is a site which is fast loading, clear, and easy to use.
As the website grew, and people began to request more facilities (and the webmaster got busier with other things) it became clear that the current provision was not entirely adequate. So in 2006 we decided on an entiely new solution on a 'content management' model. As of June 2006 The sitehas been hosted and run by Cubik. The diocese still has to look after the content but it is no longer down to one person!
In migrating the site we still used a lot of the old data, so there may be some oddities and anomalies to iron out over the next few weeks and months. Do let us know of any problems or inaccuracies using the 'comment on this page' option on the bottom left of each page.
