15th August

The rollout from two weeks ago seems stable (no complaints at least) and an SSL security test today yielded A+ across the board, meaning that your commuications with the site are secure.

Google ranking will be a shambles for a while for various reasons but I let content take care of...15th August

The rollout from two weeks ago seems stable (no complaints at least) and an SSL security test today yielded A+ across the board, meaning that your commuications with the site are secure.

Google ranking will be a shambles for a while for various reasons but I let content take care of SEO and a lot of that has been moved inside the wall recently.

News is back out there tho there is a system level bug in that the public cannot access all articles but that has been picked up by the support team who develop the core system and may get a patch in a week or two - once done then the Google bots will have more to spider. Show more

30th July

Well okay then - for those of you who follow the development side here's what was in tonight's rollout from the dev server

- cleaner menu system that present fewer options and is more mobile phone friendly (mobiles lack the 'hover' ability which can cause problems)

- News is public again - I...30th July

Well okay then - for those of you who follow the development side here's what was in tonight's rollout from the dev server

- cleaner menu system that present fewer options and is more mobile phone friendly (mobiles lack the 'hover' ability which can cause problems)

- News is public again - I am forever walking the tighrope between privacy and SEO but News articles seem harmless enough - just be careful on your comments

- Info section - straight pages full of useful stuff (maps, trip planning etc) all public

The site gets a surprising amount of traffic - a suprise since most of it is private. I am hopeful that a carefuly curated Featured page being public will encourage that further and give a representative view on what life on Sandbanks is like Show more

Apologies for the site downtime since yesterday – it was necessary to roll out and test a list of upgrades that had been building up.

Nothing much has changed visually beyond a tidy up of the menus and the ‘bringing inside’ of several areas like news and blog – anything that allows user comments...Apologies for the site downtime since yesterday – it was necessary to roll out and test a list of upgrades that had been building up.

Nothing much has changed visually beyond a tidy up of the menus and the ‘bringing inside’ of several areas like news and blog – anything that allows user comments essentially

On that note about comments a note – new members won’t be able to see News articles from before their time so some News areas may look a little spartan initially.

The big change was that there are now four types of Member:

- Full Members – that’s you heroes who pay £2 a month to keep the club running. Thank you.
- Remote Members – that’s for people who aren’t likely to visit but want to chat with kindred spirits and may take advantage of MeetYouThere Travel. They can’t see events and need to ask to join groups and can’t take advantage of offers and there are various other restrictions but it’s a tenner a year to chat to us so..
- Specialist – there can be only one (per group). These are the guys who will happily answer questions on their chosen field as they own and run related businesses. Currently that’s Sean the SUP and Dave the Bike.
- Subs Due – that’s where you get put when you need to put a coin in the meter – you can still log in, view your profile and pay but that’s pretty much it. Since the Club works only by PayPal subscription you should never end up there but new members go there automatically on registration – there are no more temporary or trial memberships (that’s partly what Remote is for). Equally for anti-trolling reasons people aren’t able comment until they are identified and a financial transaction is the best way to do that..

..plus of course the not-logged-in ‘Public’ side of the site where I need to walk a tightrope between keeping the site busy for SEO reasons and protecting people’s privacy – generally where I’m at on that is no Member’s comments can find their way outside (that was part of this work).

Next on the list was Dynamic Redirects. These allow the system to hyperspace you to a particular page based on your role when you login. Generally that’s the Club Chat page (tho not for ‘Subs Due’ ofc) but (in the case of Full Members here..) you will see a message reminding you that you are fully paid up and there’s a dedicated Full Members page at the top of the Menu – that’s not used yet but will probably contain information for your eyes only. There a lot to explore with the personalisation available in dynamic linking, but only when it’s raining.

The Chat page now defaults to 'all' rather than just 'your friends' – you miss less that way so its much better.

Photos are no longer shown on every page as doing so slowed down the loading.

And for those that are technically minded we add:
- Full, strict end to end encryption to TLS1.3

Busy time for me in dev & test but the rainy, awful, relentlessly dreary ‘monsoon June’ really helped me bull through it.

There Will Be Bugs. Of course there will it’s a big upgrade – please report them in the Support page or by email to [email protected] and I will try and fix them one at a time.

Unless its sunny, when I go..

To The Beach! Show more

Well that was one hell of day

The site started doing crazy inexplicable stuff so I rolled it back and things just kept getting worse - browsers even reported it insecure and I am not about to allow that!

We don't host it ourselves so that lack of transparency meant that it was a few hours before...Well that was one hell of day

The site started doing crazy inexplicable stuff so I rolled it back and things just kept getting worse - browsers even reported it insecure and I am not about to allow that!

We don't host it ourselves so that lack of transparency meant that it was a few hours before we we were told that the server had run out of space - once cleared by hosting I was able to perform a clean re-installation and here we are.

The process of diagnosis did yield several improvements like automated backups if we want them (they have their benefits but ad-hoc before a roll out is also a good idea, so not an entirely wasted day but thank God it wasn't sunny! Show more

New day new issue - comments on the public blog

That's excellent and I'd love people to be happy to comment but the flip side is that peopel may not realise its public (for SEO reasons else the site is unchanging)

To ensure that comments on the public blog are only visible to those logged in is a code...New day new issue - comments on the public blog

That's excellent and I'd love people to be happy to comment but the flip side is that peopel may not realise its public (for SEO reasons else the site is unchanging)

To ensure that comments on the public blog are only visible to those logged in is a code change and that means straying from the supported path of the CMS - I am trying to find a way around that Show more

01 June 2020

The site's email is down - that is I think a datacentre problem as we have to use their SMTP host and nothign has changed outr side (if it aint broke..)

A ticket has been raised - chances are either something needs kicking or a licence expired

For now there won't be any notifications...01 June 2020

The site's email is down - that is I think a datacentre problem as we have to use their SMTP host and nothign has changed outr side (if it aint broke..)

A ticket has been raised - chances are either something needs kicking or a licence expired

For now there won't be any notifications so you won't get this message

ah. Show more

We now have Local News (covering BCP & Studland) and World News (covering the rest of the world beaches.. that seems a fair split)

The World News blog is mostly an excuse to show beautiful beaches that we can't currently go to and perhaps help plan future trips

If you'd like to post on either blog...We now have Local News (covering BCP & Studland) and World News (covering the rest of the world beaches.. that seems a fair split)

The World News blog is mostly an excuse to show beautiful beaches that we can't currently go to and perhaps help plan future trips

If you'd like to post on either blog then let me know and I'll hook you up Show more

I have finally got around that niggly bug caused by me wanting the Club Blog to be the landing page - usually that's one click but for reasons of boring it really screwed the menu system up

- Now, if you are logged out, the Blog menu item shows the Blog and the Club menu item shows Login

- Once...I have finally got around that niggly bug caused by me wanting the Club Blog to be the landing page - usually that's one click but for reasons of boring it really screwed the menu system up

- Now, if you are logged out, the Blog menu item shows the Blog and the Club menu item shows Login

- Once logged in then Blog shows Blog and Club shows your recent posts

- When you log out then you are taken back to the Blog (ie the home page)

Just like you'd expect ;o)

That took aaages! Show more

BeachPeople Groups have now been broken down
into individual sports (kite surfing and windsurfing are totally
separate disciplines after all ) Events
will now be created in the relevant groups - the advantage of that is
that it keeps it tight and the event itself is only emailed to the group...BeachPeople Groups have now been broken down
into individual sports (kite surfing and windsurfing are totally
separate disciplines after all ) Events
will now be created in the relevant groups - the advantage of that is
that it keeps it tight and the event itself is only emailed to the group
membersGroup events are still display on the main events thread so its win win and scales nicely. Show more

Sometimes on Android mobiles, trying to paste a link or block of text into your stream doesn't work (the 'Paste' option doesn't pop up) - just type a character, space etc and then it will work fine - when the box is empty it sulks a bit

02Aug2019 A small but important change to Event functionality to increase Club members' privacy

Public can no longer see who is going to events, just numbers attending - you will need to be a registered user and to login in order to find that out

02Jul2019

There is an issue when following external links to events if you aren't already logged in.

The system doesn't handle the login process cleanly in those circumstances and may throw an error page up

A ticket has been raised with the vendor

11Jul2019 "Not authorised to view this resource" message

..this most likely means you are registered but your subs are not up to date - in which case certain areas of the club site are off limits

02Jul19 - 502 server error

Staggeringly - and this is huge - Cloudflare experienced an outage today

They are an absolute titan of defence and content deployment - for them to be affected by a bad software rollout taking down God knows how many sites globally makes me feel a tad better about...02Jul19 - 502 server error

Staggeringly - and this is huge - Cloudflare experienced an outage today

They are an absolute titan of defence and content deployment - for them to be affected by a bad software rollout taking down God knows how many sites globally makes me feel a tad better about continuing live development on this project

More here:... Show more

29June2019

Meetup list email vs Hotmail

Occasionally we send emails to Meetup using their email list feature to let non-members know what's coming upon the Club

The Meetup software that assembles the HTML email doesn't appear to be compatible with Hotmail when viewed on old iPhones so things like...29June2019

Meetup list email vs Hotmail

Occasionally we send emails to Meetup using their email list feature to let non-members know what's coming upon the Club

The Meetup software that assembles the HTML email doesn't appear to be compatible with Hotmail when viewed on old iPhones so things like included images simply don't port properly

Nothing I can do about that. Show more

27Jun2019: RSS module added to show weather warnings from the Met office, tides from tidetimes.co.uk and the BBC's wild guess at what the weather is today. Hover over to see the detail or click

There is an option to add a 3 day forecast but thats a lot of screen space

I can't find a reliable RSS...27Jun2019: RSS module added to show weather warnings from the Met office, tides from tidetimes.co.uk and the BBC's wild guess at what the weather is today. Hover over to see the detail or click

There is an option to add a 3 day forecast but thats a lot of screen space

I can't find a reliable RSS feed for surf as MagicSeaweed have moved away from RSS to favour their app; RSS is old tech afterall. Show more

25Jun2019 Past Events are currently appearing out of sequence with 'Pagp_pago' timezones - ticket raised

25Jun2019 - recent upgrade of the Club site may have caused a minute or so outage but it fixed a lot of bugs, viz:

- inserting links in your thread now automatically created a neat little thumbnail of the site you are linking to

- the little map on the corner of events now works