Greetings unto their Highnesses Insulae Draconis, their Seneschal and Exchequer, 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 2020.

I apologise for the missing reports for the last two quarters. I’m sure you understand that it’s been a strange and busy time.

• Traffic and Search Engine Coverage
• Work Done This Quarter
• Support For Groups
• Upcoming Work

Traffic trends

I expected to see a drop in traffic starting around March, and that is present, but our traffic since January is still roughly in line with our traffic for the last six months of 2019 (which had a bump from Raglan in the summer.)

Work done this Quarter

I’ve been spending most of my time supporting the Kingdom website, especially with adapting the calendar to support cancellations, live updates, and online events. This builds upon work that started at the beginning of the year, and our timing was very fortunate; trying to hand-maintain a calendar in these circumstances wouldn’t have been feasible for a volunteer, or even a team of volunteers, and I think we would have seen an even greater reliance on Facebook groups as the exclusive source of reliable information.

In this spirit, one thing that did change on the Insulae Draconis site this quarter is that our own calendar is now served as a filtered view of the Kingdom Calendar. This was done in concert with the Kingdom Webminister, the Insulae Draconis Chronicler, and the Kingdom Chronicler; the Chroniclers have their own interface to allow them to accept event announcements in the appropriate format for their newsletters. For my part, it removes a significant source of ongoing maintenance work, and for event stewards it reduces the number of announcements they have to make from four to one. We’re delighted with the take-up this has received.

Support for groups

Harpelstane has a new webminister, Maria Harsick. We’ve spoken at some length about the Shire’s needs and how the Principality may be able to support them, and we’ll be keeping in touch.

Yannick of Normandy, who maintains the Pontalarch website, notes:

 
Online activities have increased exponentially due to Covid. That said, since we have been forced to do things online, it has become evident that some things should always have been available online, especially from a beginner point of view. Hence even after Covid, we will be doing quite a lot more online.

ID should make a Zoom account and a Discord server a part of its online presence.

I’d also like to bring your attention to a weak spot in our online infrastructure: domain and hosting arrangements. There are 13 groups in the Principality, and almost all of these make their own arrangements for registering domains (e.g. duninmara.org) and for website hosting. The web hosting is wasteful in that it is a significant duplicated expense; we could fit several websites into the hosting package for any one of them. The domain names are even more troubling, however, because these are usually paid for by a current or former member (who may or may not claim this expense back from their local group) and if they stop paying or go out of contact, then the group loses access to their website and email. Richard the Rampant currently maintains and pays for insulaedraconis.org and three other domains.

I think that some excellent support at Principality or Kingdom level would be to offer to provide (and cover the cost of) one domain registration and web hosting for each group. The annual cost is likely to come out below about £10 per group. While the Exchequer may have a view on this, I imagine that the most straightforward way to do this is for us to pick a company that can provide web and domain hosting at reasonable cost, then an individual pays this bill and claims it back from the Principality on an annual basis. To be robust in the case where that person becomes uncontactable for any reason, a small team of people should have access to the billing (e.g. username/password) for this web host.

This should be an offer, not a requirement; if a shire or barony is happy with its hosting arrangements, then I don’t feel the need to interfere. But I believe that there are a number of groups that would happily accept this support if it were available.

I’d be very grateful to hear the views of the Seneschal and Exchequer on an arrangement like this.

Upcoming Work

Most of my attention at this time is focused on delivering Virtual Raglan alongside Amphelise and Yannick, as well as providing continued support to the web team.

I had previously hoped to have a complete “templateshire” sample website ready by now, which could be adopted by those shires that prefer not to build their own from scratch. I’ve postponed this for now, but would like to revisit it in the autumn. In particuar, between the Calendar and the Kingdom webminister’s work on an online Regnum, I believe it may soon be possible to create useful shire websites that could in principle run entirely hands free.

In service, always,
Sela