Below is my note on crestlinesoaring.org, website of the Crestline Soaring Society hang gliding & paragliding club in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California, about passing the domain and website on to others after all these years.

Wanted to share this major milestone in my life with e2 friends because Web 2.0

First three lines are a site-wide page header that links to the post below.

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Blank Graphs!

Sign of Impending Website Metamorphosis?

<BLINK>Fulfillment of prophecy?</BLINK>

A Beautiful Ride

 Submitted on Sat, 02/08/2020 - 04:01

I put the CSS on the internet when the world wide web was starting to catch on, having held the office of Newsletter Editor, among others, on the CSS Board for some years. Fancy multi-column layouts monthly using Corel Draw and Desk-Top Publishing. Circulation 150 copies give or take. Just before the turn of the century, when I was married and my pilot-wife and I lived near Top Town, we gave each other a weather station for Christmas and I put the anemometer & windvane at the top of a tall tree in our yard in unobstructed airflow similar to that at launch. They had a canned Windows exe but I used my hobbyist linux skillz and an old 386 to get the weather data to the website in a nifty color-coded graph format I came up with.

The web matured. WYSIWYG editors! Scripting! Rendering standards! Frameworks!
I didn't.

The CSS website went through a couple of major metamorphoses. First it was a treasure trove of meticulously maintained static information. Then there was the open-source php forum package I found that more or less ran alongside the regular website and weather stuff. Clunky image handling. Hands of many webnoobs held as Web 2.0 manifested itself.

I chose this Drupal content management system years ago because I imagined farming out chunks of website stuff to interested pilots and Board members with a little web savvy but I eventually came to realize that you had to want to understand Drupal to use it. Pilots want to fly! :)

Always ran the website as my gift to the club. Gave me some license to be lazy at times. Number of years ago decided I didn't want to be on the Board anymore but I was glad to keep running the website and we changed some definitions to accomodate that. Thanks.

A few years ago making the web do stuff lost it's charm for me. Or maybe it was too many cycles of learning the new way to make it do the thing it used to. I've been kinda keeping an eye out for someone who'll be around for a while. Last year I made it known  (to the Board's reflief, I have inklings) that I was ready to hand it all over but keep doing/helping with the weather if y'all want.

They got this new guy David Webb, actual web pro, newish (IIRC) PG pilot, brown & white angled stripes, flies from the 750 and stuff. We're in good hands.

I loved running the website (and aw shucks alla youse) but it's time to pass it on.

(Title is a wisecrack because the movie it's from was on when I started typing, don't be alarmed)

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