Greetings unto their Highnesses Insulae Draconis, their Seneschal, the Kingdom Webminister and various others who may be interested, from Sela de la Rosa, Insulae Draconis Webminister. Here is my report for the second quarter of 2019.

I took over the office formally at Coronet, but have been a member of the web artificers team since the site was relaunched in late 2017, so I have a view across the full quarter.

• Traffic
• State of the Shires
• Upcoming Work
• Communications in the SCA

Traffic

Our traffic this quarter is a little higher than last quarter - the blue line shows that our background level of traffic is mostly above the previous quarter (orange line). There are some spikes of traffic for Raglan-related announcements in April and also (in orange) the original announcement at the end of March.

State of the Shires

I’ve had eight responses so far to my request for reports - six webministers, one seneschal (for a shire without webminister) and one domain owner. I’m given to understand that this is so many responses as to be unprecedented; giving people a link to a Google spreadsheet and asking them to fill in one line seems to work really well.

The items that came up were:

• SSL/TLS: I’ll speak to the webminister about using Cloudflare as we do on Dun in Mara and Insulae Draconis.
• Kingdom iCal feed: we have this prototyped, so I’ll see about announcing it.
• Help with finding a new platform: I’ll speak to the webminister about their needs, and whether we can meet them with GitLab.
• Giving domains to the groups.

Upcoming Work

On that last item: a single person holds and pays for the domain names for Insulae Draconis and some shires/other groups. (This is a separate expense from the web hosting.) I also suspect that there are other shires have members who pay for domain and web hosting out of pocket. This is unsatisfying for the member, but perhaps more importantly, risky for the groups: in the unfortunate event that the member became unavailable without a clear handover, our web presence and emails are at risk. I would be grateful if the Seneschal and Exchequer might take a view on how to handle this, perhaps including centralising the registration of domains and payments.

I’m also planning to work on “Templateshire” - now that both the Dun in Mara and Drachenwald websites are using much the same base (including the theme, with appropriate colours), I think it’s a good foundation for other shires that might also want to use the same tech and theme. There are also portions of a “standard” shire website that could be pre-generated, such as local officers and events (which could be built automatically from the same source as the Kingdom or Principality uses.) This is likely to be my next priority as Insulae Draconis webminister. In doing it, I may take the opportunity to move the Insulae Draconis site to the same template.

I always intend that any web support from the Principality to shires should be an offer, not a requirement. If a group has volunteers that prefer to do things differently, I’m delighted by that enthusiasm and would not stand in their way.

Communications in the SCA

At the beginning of June, I ran a survey to find out how people in the SCA find out what’s going on. I’ll send you my report when it’s finished (I’m waiting until it this month’s Dragon’s Tale comes out before I finalise it) but there’s one finding I’d like to share now - not of the content of the responses, but how the submitters were reached.

I wondered if I could quantify how many people are reached by mailing list posts, compared to posts on Facebook. So, I sent the survey to the Drachenwald and Insulae Draconis mailing lists at 21:00 on June 6th, and held off on posting it to Facebook until noon on June 7th.

Here’s when the responses came in.

Some salt is needed on these numbers: most of the gap between the mailing list posts and the FB posts was overnight, and we don’t know how many of the post-noon responses came from the mailing list. But while FB does have a strong majority of responses, it doesn’t dominate.

I’ll be preparing the full report in the coming weeks, and will send it to you when it’s ready.

In your service,
Sela