Officers, Directors and Vice Directors:
The weekly status reporting that I promised on the website project has been every other week in practice, and addressed to specific items rather than an overview. I will try to correct that from this point forward.
In my November 4 report I mentioned that 15 out of 35 volunteer officers, directors and vice directors had public profiles. I'm pleased to say that the number is now up to 26 out of 35, although a couple of those do not display much information. If there is anything I can do to help the rest of you activate your public profile, please let me know. Now that about ¾ of you have public profiles I feel better about approaching Section Managers with the request that they do the same and that they also encourage their section leadership appointees.
On November 17 I shared with you the good news that the so-called "big club list" was available. As promised, the next day we told the SMs. I asked for feedback about any problems they encountered. The only feedback I received was from the Orange Section SM who passed along a request from his ACC that we implement an output format (CSV) that can be imported into Excel. We had planned to do this as a new "Widget" in the content management system so that it could be applied to any search result and not just to clubs. However, Jon Bloom found that it could done for the club list at a reasonable investment of staff time so I asked him to do so and it was activated on November 22.
As many of you know, we are using a tool called "Bugzilla" to keep track of website issues. Bugzilla tickets include desired enhancements as well as bugs in the traditional sense. Maureen Farmer has begun providing weekly summary reports of Bugzilla ticket status. On Monday of this week there were 52 items on the list. That was an increase of 1 from the previous week; because of the short Thanksgiving week there were only 4 tickets closed while 5 new ones were opened. That's an exception to the usual pattern; the previous week there were 15 tickets closed and just 3 opened. With only occasional exceptions, lately the new tickets have involved minor issues that are resolved quickly.
Jon and I agree that while we still would like Fathom to fix what they are responsible for, we also want to wean ourselves away from Fathom as quickly as possible. While we will need them in some consulting role for an indeterminate time, i.e. until ARRL staff has a complete understanding of the website, our goal is to be as self-sufficient as possible. Jon concluded that some bugs that had been assigned to Fathom but were not being attended to, could be done quickly by ARRL staff and would give us some of the experience needed to become self-sufficient. Accordingly, a number of bugs were reassigned to ARRL staff and most of those were cleaned up, thanks in large part to Jon's personal involvement.
In the first few weeks of this new approach, our IT staff has gained a much better understanding of the website and the issues that remained, particularly with regard to administrative and page permissions and syncing of data between our Siebel system and the website. As a result the problems in these areas have been significantly reduced.
In short, many issues have been run to ground and resolved over the past few weeks. If any of you are aware, or become aware, of website issues that are either new or not recently reported on, please let me know.
Next week there will be a meeting to review e-store and membership website issues that may result in some new Bugzilla tickets and closing of some others.
The ARRL Web store experienced heavy traffic on Cyber Monday, November 29, and some members reported having difficulty with timeouts. It's not clear that all of this was the result of the load on the servers that now host our website (we currently lease server space from Rackspace) but most of it probably was. The 2011 Plan that the A&F Committee reviewed on November 20 and is recommending to the Board for ratification includes purchasing our own servers, which Jon Bloom believes will significantly improve performance.
The A&F Committee also reviewed a draft contract with Fathom that had been vetted by Chris Imlay. The contract is for two enhancements: the report generator "Widget" mentioned earlier and an audio RSS feed. While our bias is strongly in the direction of doing things ourselves from this point forward, we believe these two projects are within Fathom's capabilities and that they are better able to deliver them than our own staff will be in a reasonable time frame. I forwarded the proposed contract to Kim Mitola at Fathom just before Thanksgiving; she has acknowledged but needs to confirm their ability to meet the proposed completion schedule in light of the upcoming holidays and other commitments.
Finally, on a happy note, programmer Dennis Budd and his wife Shannon are proud parents of their second child, a baby girl, Ellie, born on November 27.
73,
Dave Sumner, K1ZZ
