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 2019.
- Traffic and Search Engine Coverage
- Work Done This Quarter
- Support For Groups
- Upcoming Work
Traffic trends
Traffic is largely in line with the previous quarter, with the obvious exception of Virtual Raglan, which drove a lot of traffic to the site, especially the schedule page.
Work done this quarter
Late July and early August were dominated by Virtual Raglan. I’ve written up a separate report for this event.
Most of my other effort has gone into supporting the Kingdom webminister. The Kingdom website has been successfully moved to a new web host for the first time since 2004, and was done with an outage of about 30 minutes.
We have a dedicated site for Kingdom University and this is particularly notable because I’m using it to try some different technology to most of our websites. I’m trying to make it fairly generic, so we can use it for other events, and it may also get used to make the “hands-free shire website” I’m (finally) working on.
I’ve taken over the hosting of the Glen Rathlin website, without updates for now, and will discuss options for managing it with the group’s seneschal.
Support for groups
With a new Principality Seneschal, I made an effort to get a full slate of reports, and almost succeeded - I encourage you to browse the responses directly.
Of the ten responses (including Dun in Mara, which I reported myself), five have a dedicated Webminister, with others being managed by another officer, or handled informally. There’s a lot of interest in centralised hosting, and remarkable interest in a “hands free” website. This is slow work, but it is moving: the Kingdom Webminister is progressing with a new regnum, which should export officer contact data without manual intervention.
During the quarter, Dun in Mara re-opened its fencing practices for a time. In order to manage COVID restrictions on numbers, they used Fienta to sell tickets for the practices, which ensured that the number of participants each session stayed below the legally required limits, as well as avoiding the need to handle cash.
Upcoming work
I’ve sent the Principality Seneschal and Exchquer an informal proposal for offering to manage domain registration and website hosting for groups. I’ll follow up shortly with a costed proposal and business case. I’m simultaneously working on the technology to provide basic shire websites with minimal maintenance.
As well as supporting Kingdom University, I’m steward for Lough Devnaree’s Yuletide University, and plan to use the same website format to make it as accessible as possible.
In your service,
Sela