After 5 years in its current form, we felt that the time was appropriate to take advantage of current technologies to help us in updating and maintaining our web site as well as widening the scope of the facilities it offers to our visitors and event participants.

We have carefully analysed the statistics relating to visitors over the last few years. Although of specialised interest, we believe that ours is one of the most popular websites of its type on the internet. It is also interesting to note the wide range of nationalities of our visitors, the operating systems of the computers they use and the web browsers that visit our site. It is based on these statistics that we have decided to adopt a new larger format suitable for a screen size of 1024x768, which permits us to produce clearer, more detailed and informative web pages.

Which web browser?

In the same way as our users will be using Windows, Macintosh and Linux machines, they will also be using different web browsers : Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari - the list goes on and on. Our new web site is written to be compatible with the latest versions of those web browsers : using anything older means that a) you are exposed to security risks which we think are unacceptable and b) you can't take advantage of some of the technology for image display and automatic updating which modern browsers provide. So please don't expect our site to be compatible with your Windows 98 installation running IE 5 because you happen to prefer the way it looks - that may be your prerogative, but we see no point in risking the vast majority of our responsible users who update their operating sytems and browsers on a regular basis by satisfying anyone's individual requirements. Given that each of the web browsers named is both free and updated by the authors regularly, we would strongly advocate that you use one of the 4 mentioned and that you update it regularly, whichever operating system you use day to day.

Underlying technology

Probably the most significant change is our adoption of the Joomla! Open Source Content Management system. This permits our webmaster to manage and create all of the day to day updates, but also allows our Support Team, time permitting, to provide their own updates and on-site reports by logging in directly and submitting their input via simple screens. One of the major success stories of the Open Source community, Joomla is in use in thousands of web sites and makes use of the PHP programming language and the MySQL database. We anticipate that this tool will allow us to keep managing the web site for the foreseeable future.

Usability improvements

Our web site has long depended on images for its content and we have been looking for means to improve the user experience of the pictures which our participants and management team take all over the world. Our new image presentation system allows the visitor to click on an image to enlarge it - once enlarged, click and drag will move it or a single click will close it. Any number of images can be opened simultaneously and layered to suit the visitor.

Articles are presented individually as they are submitted. The name of the author and date of submission are shown so that it is easy to understand the structure of the reports. Reports which are more than 3 months old are automatically archived and can be reviewed at any time. You can view archived reports by date or search reports for a keyword (such as a yacht name or place)

The Joomla! system lends itself to a 'blog' format : each entry is posted in the relevant section, and depending on how it is programmed, only the first paragraph or so is shown of 4 articles at a time. Use the page number and Next/Previous links at the bottom of the page to see articles occuring before and after the current page. This allows you to quickly scan across the articles and review which ones you have already seen, or which new ones are of particular interest. If the article is more than just the first paragraph, a 'Read More..' link will be provided so that you can view it in its entirety.

Syndication Feeds - stay up to date automatically

The news pages for our World Rally and Biscay Triangle events have links to RSS feeds. Opinion varies, but one meaning of RSS is 'Really Simple Syndication' and we provide it so that you can subscribe and receive all of the updates as we publish them on our web site. Using an RSS feed is dependent on so many variables (Operating System, Browser, Client software) that we can't fully describe it here, but this explanation on the BBC web site is particularly clear.