About Our Website – An Update

Since our decision a month ago to disconnect from Facebook you might ask, “How’s that going for you?”   It’s been a lot of work, and it’s worked less well than I’d hoped – so far.  But it’s also a work-in-progress.  I’m not discouraged, over thirty years in IT taught me that the natural progress of solutions is that first they come quickly, and then they come slowly.    One thing that DOES encourage me is that we’re not alone in going down this path of dropping  Facebook – which put me in mind to put something together soon for the Burner community sharing our experience.  Here’s some observations so far:

Did we need to be IT experts?  No – at least not in order to start the process. There’s a huge marketplace out there encouraging people to ‘dive into’ producing their own websites and extracting dollars from them  along the way.  I think, though, it is important to have someone who has experience developing IT systems – not for any specific knowledge they have (which is almost always out of date), but for their ‘resilience’.  That’s the ability and mindset that enables them, when they run into the inevitable dead end or wrong turning, to find (with the help of others on the internet) a way through/around the problem and/or to have the patience to backtrack and start again.  Then you might make some more progress, until you run into the next dead end or wrong turning.  I’d hazard a guess that 80% of people who hadn’t previously experienced this would give up after a few weeks.  Possibly with a ‘sort-of’ working website which eventually faded into disuse.  Because of course, even when it’s built it has to be fed content constantly.  Getting to the point where a website self-sustains through community engagement doesn’t happen without a LOT more work.

Why did we choose WordPress software to build the website?  WordPress matched our requirement for something that was non-commercial – aligning with our Principle of Decomodification.  Other products that will build a website ‘for you’ such as Wix are commercial, which triggered concerns about their commercial nature (in general) and who owns them (in particular).  We considered another non-commercial product, ‘Drupal ‘ which was ‘better’ than WordPress, but the better in that case means more complex and able to handle more complexity.  We had a simple requirement for something that would capture our ‘Posts’ and other peoples’ ‘Comments’.  Very much what we were previously doing with Facebook.

Has working with WordPress been easy?   No, it’s been (unexpectedly) incredibly difficult.  I’d recently spent 12 months looking after the Blazing Swan WordPress website which had it’s quirks, but it was already set up by someone else and fairly easy to run.  I’d hugely underestimated the amount of wrangling and frustration involved in getting a WordPress website set up from scratch.  In many ways it’s not because WordPress can’t do a simple ‘Post and Comment’ website (very unlike Blazing Swan’s), but because it’s a bit like Marvin, the depressed robot out of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, “Brain the size of planet and you want me to do that!?”  Well yes.  Having said that, running it is an absolute breeze.

What was our biggest mistake – so far – in making the switch from Facebook to our own website?  We had relatively low engagement with our Facebook page, so any drop-off didn’t concern me too much.  The first big mistake though was not to have a ‘subscribe’ option ready on the website when we announced the transition.  That day we had over 80 visitors to the website and it would have been good to offer them an option to receive notifications of updates on the website – something that our Facebook used to do automatically.  That was a missed opportunity.   The other BIG mistake involved a plug-in component we added to WordPress (WordPress is a framework which a lot of extra (commercial) products plug into).  I didn’t research the company behind the commercial plug-in product, and discovered too late that this company didn’t quite align with the expections expressed in our Statement of Inclusion.  I could have justified sticking with it, as it was now critically important in how the website was set up, but if we were going to change it this was our last opportunity.  Taking it out and  finding another plug-in involved throwing away two weeks work and starting the website from scratch.  The new plug-in came with a much steeper learning curve because while it was definitely a better product it was even more of a Marvin, “You want me to do WHAT!”  That said, the problem is not in the plug-in product, but my own slow brain.  We’re getting there – slowly.  Once again, once set up (again) it will be a breeze to run.

How much has it cost? The WordPress is free, but we’ve paid for some of the plug-ins that give it extra functions (some are free).  All up around  $250, but that includes around $100 ‘down the drain’ when we dropped one of those plug-ins after we’d already paid for it.  No refunds.  The ongoing cost of that software we’re still using with Worpress (it’s on an annual subscription basis) will be about $150.  The company that hosts the software on their servers and provides the domain name ‘campbibliophilia.com’ along with a security and backup service charges $250 per year.  All up then, we are looking at $400 a year, ongoing.  Compared with Facebook which was didn’t charge us (but still made money FROM us). Just for perspective though, our Theme Camp’s annual operating costs are around $5,000 per year,

Has it worked?  Are you really disconnected from Facebook?   No, not yet.  We had a public-facing Facebook page which HAS been shut down.  But we also had a private Facebook for the Camp crew, which was – and still is – quite busy.   The new website CAN provide a private space for the crew to Post and Comment, but the tools that would notify them when something was Posted, and which would allow them to make their own Posts were lost when we pulled the plug on that plug-in and lost two weeks work.   We’re working our way back towards that functionality.  We also have to solve the problem of offering the public a easy way to get notifications when something changes on the website.  There’s lots of solutions to that problem, the trick will be finding something that’s simple and which works with OUR website.  All up I’d say we’ve got two weeks of hard slog ahead of us to get it fully up and running.

How are we managing our social and sustainability obligations?    We are NOT using any of the Artificial Intelligence options available in the software.  AI uses a huge amount of electricity.  We’ve posted elsewhere why we’ll never use AI, but the energy cost is certainly one of them.  We’ll do a calculation of the electrical cost of running the website on the host’s computers in Sydney.  I expect it to come in under $20 per year which we’ll add to our carbon budget and arrange to offset later this year.  I’ve already made a committment to match all Theme Camp expenditure with donations to Medicins Sans Frontieres.  Our Theme Camp is a social ‘good’, but the donation to MSF reinforces that.