Donate button

[Dhbangham]

Please could we have a donate button on the site. I don't think I am the only one who would be willing to donate some money for the running of this site.
I think paypal offer a method (at a cost) but simply providing bank details would enable people to donate directly.
Cheers Daniel Bangham

[Keith Clements]

Re: Donate button
Postby p.p. » 09 Jan 2019 06:26 am

good idea !!! or donate to the running of the club.... running resto show.....
peter
owner of the jowett javelin Standard 1950 from new zealand,
there is no jowett club in switzerland. flying under "Rest of the World"
me name: peter pfister

[Dhbangham]

Hi Peter, I am pleased you agree with me. My aim is to specifically support Keith with the website. It is an amazing resource.

[Forumadmin]

Your wish is my command.
To offer a donation to help keep the website going please click the donate button. Every little, helps!
The donations go to my personal account, so to save charges please specify 'friend'.

All donations will remain anonymous unless the donor encourages others by posting in this topic.

[Dhbangham]

Thanks. I have just made a donation. Please keep it going. Thanks. Daniel

[p.p.]

Done...... keep going !!!

[Forumadmin]

We're thrilled to be sharing this very exciting news with you - since officially launching our equity crowdfunding campaign last Wednesday on Crowdcube we've already over hit our target of £1million. The response has been overwhelming and we wanted to take this moment to thank you all for your ongoing support.

Car & Classic is Europe's largest Classic Car Marketplace with over 2 million classic car enthusiasts like yourself visiting our mobile and desktop sites monthly. However, there's still a lot to be done with the site including improving our content, search facilities and building a mobile app.

This funding will go a long way to developing these services in creating a bespoke mobile version of the Car & Classic site to allow its vast store of information to be readily available in your pockets. We’ll also be strengthening our existing dealer partnerships to bring even more classic models to the site, as well as expanding the business into the US market.

Ok so they have £1 million pounds to develop their website....I wonder how the investors are going to get their money back and what they will spend the £1 million on?

I have worked out that my out of pocket expenses running the jowett.net website are £877 per year. Any capital expense such as the very cheap second hand computer I bought to act as back-up were amortized over 5 years. A large part of the cost is for broadband as the site is now over 30 GB and recently, with such a major update that had to be transferred a few times, a higher speed line was required. The cost does not include the few thousand pounds of hardware and software that were acquired over 5 years ago and have been used as the development system. It also does not include the power for running the various systems at home which use a lot of watts and the numerous cups of coffee needed to keep me awake.

I also estimate that for the past 10 or more years I have averaged 500 hours per year maintaining, developing and administering the site, but in the last 6 months that has doubled. The job is still not complete with some old stuff to be included in the new system and some more re-organisation and indexing of what we currently have.

The new platform should be a lot easier to maintain since it has little custom code and is all contained within one framework, apart from Jowett Internet Services. Whilst there may be cheaper ways to do the job, the system in place could be up and running in a few hours on a home laptop, so is not reliant on a hosting or cloud service. I will continue to look at Cloud Services but my fear is that they change so frequently that without massive effort the whole system could be lost at the whim of the provider.

Whilst Facebook and Twitter may suit some people, the intrusion of adverts, the inability to collate and file stuff , the difficulty of having a decent technical or historical discussion, and the temporal nature of contributions all mean I still prefer this system.

Roll on the next 20 years of JowettTalk.

JowettTalk has been in existence since 2001 where it started as a simple message board. I may bring those old conversations into this new system so that we have everything in one place with one search facility.
Also the JowettGallery started as a 'Contributions' section on the website that started in 1999. This too I may bring into this new system so that we have everything in one place with one search facility.
There is also a lot of other useful stuff on the old website that is hidden there unless you use the old search facility.. As well as that some stuff has ended up in jowett.net that was not in JowettTalk or the JowettGallery. This can also be found using the old search facility.

Of course, the merging of the JowettGallery into the Library has also created the need to reorganise and prune some of it.

So the pressing question is how would you like this done?

First we have to look at some of the aims of the website, some of which create conflicting requirements on the structure of the website.
1. Create a community for Jowett enthusiasts all around the world.
2. Provide a repository for all things Jowett for the future generation of Jowett owners.
3. Record a history of Jowett events.
4. Provide technical information to support the maintenance and repair of Jowetts.

If you can think of any desirable aims please contribute.

As well as the aims there are some constraints.
Although there are some videos and other large files of data on the site, storing these may become an issue if a lot more are added. The back-up facility is currently straining to cope as the process that does it times out due to the hosting provider's restrictions. There are workarounds by breaking the back-up into pieces but this requires effort and monitoring. There are also limits on the number of files that can be stored without paying a lot more for the hosting. I have little faith that storing media on third party sites is a good idea as they can suddenly decide to charge for or change the access method or simply stop operating. Also your control on the media is lost.

So at some stage a decision will have to be made on how to handle large media. Currently YouTube is my preferred storage for video and the new software provides an easy facility to include clips. I am not happy about links to other image storage facilities as they frequently create broken links. Please upload images as attachments, but please reduce their size so that they are just of sufficient quality to display. Unless they are detailed line drawings or important images for the archive they should be less than 800KB.

[Dhbangham]

Nearly there Keith, you now need to put the donate button on the header so everyone can see it and find it.
Cheers
Daniel

[Forumadmin]

Finally got around to doing putting a DONATE button in the header. Since this thread started there have been major changes to jowett.net The site moved to the Cloud but only after thousands of hours of work, most of which was learning about the new facilities and getting them to work. The site is now backed up on a separate laptop running Debian, so no more virtual servers.