The American Rhododendron Society Massachusetts Chapter web sites will under go technical changes in 2008 including the following:
Update of the template of the Rosebay Blog due to improvements in capability by Google of Blogger. As of January 5, 2008 the planned update from a template to a layout is complete.
Update of the look and feel of Your Portal to Rhododendrons in New England due to improvements in capability by Microsoft of Office Live.
Update of the look and feel of Your Gateway to Rhododendrons in New England due to improved browser support for XML/XSLT/CSS. IE8, Firefox 3, and Opera 9.5 will all be available in 2008.
The major focus of 2008 will be on content rather than presentation. More content will be moved to Rosebay Blog from the Rosebay Journal and Online Species Booklet. The hope is to eliminate totally the need for our old host. More thought will be given to how to present in a good enough way content that is available in variable levels of incompleteness with emphases on how best to collect the content independent of presentation.
Some thought will also be given on how to better support the user who finds the sites using search engines.
In short very little polishing of the presentation components of the sites will be done in 2008. The big questions for 2008 are can new content be collected in the form of text and images and can old content be maintained and updated? How much content is added in 2008 will depend mostly on how many people decide to be producers of such content. The presentation pipeline has 4 new tours anticipated in the first half of 2008.
Celebrating 10 Years on the Web
John and Sally Perkins
Salem, NH
