Welcome to the August 2007 issue of Great Baddow Online Newsletter

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Introduction

For newcomers to the site, this newsletter is circulated monthly to registered site members and friends, to supplement information on the site itself. Please forward to colleagues and other interested individuals in order to publicise the site.

If you are a recent newcomer to the site, welcome - your readership is appreciated.

The overhaul commenced last month has continued and new features this month are:

• Changes to the front (home) page
• Creation of a monthly diary
• Provision of an RSS feed
• Inclusion of a feedback form on the site

Home page

• A Great Baddow landmark building
• One of our local pubs
• A local lane or byway

Your browser must be script enabled to view these, although most modern browsers will be enabled automatically, unless switched off by the user!

Monthly diary

A new list of clubs and society meetings has been developed and published although there is ongoing work to add details of further organisations. Although there is an existing section on local societies and clubs  this new diary provides a monthly week by week, day by day list of regular meetings in the village.

Note that some clubs do not meet throughout the year and may suspend meetings during the holiday periods or during the summer.

Although visitors are usually welcome at most society meetings, some events may be restricted to members only – where this is known it will be noted in the comments column.

We list meetings by week numbers (1-4) and day of week. This presents a problem for categorising organisations which meet on e.g. the last Friday of the month, because for any day of the week, some months will have 4 occurrences and some 5.  To simplify the problem, any organisation which meets in the last week will be listed under week 4 with a comment that where the club meets on the last occurrence in the month, it could be week 5!

The information provided for each organisation is:

• Week, Day, Time of meeting (where applicable)
• Organisation name
• Place of meeting
• Contact name, Contact phone, Web link, Email link (where available and published)

Organisations which meet every week or several times per month will have the relevant information repeated for each corresponding date.

Provision of an RSS feed

The site now contains a news feed conforming to the version 2 specification for Really Simple Syndication (RSS). For those unfamiliar with RSS, the BBC news site has an excellent summary description as well as numerous feeds corresponding to different topic areas within its site. There is also an “About Really Simple Syndication” on this site and a short description of its features. Because the feed is maintained manually, it will only be updated for newsletters and significant new or amended content.

The feed itself is at http://www.greatbaddowonline.co.uk/270707RSS/270707rssfeed.xml

Feedback form

The facility to send me an email remains a straightforward option for communication with the site manager. However, I’ve now added a simple feedback form for users to submit queries or comments directly from the site. I will be interested to receive comments about the use of this form itself, because it works by interacting with the user’s browser and email system. I have used it myself with both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 and there are differences with each in the way the form works. Note that for the form to work fully, your browser needs to be enabled for JavaScript.

Other news

Village DVD

The group developing the DVD about the village is part way through filming and has sufficient information and content relating to the historic buildings in the village to produce an interesting documentary. We currently envisage about 8 chapters covering the main roads and selected buildings.

Genealogy

A contact from the US with ancestors in the Great Baddow area has contacted me and expressed interest in corresponding via this site with local individuals with an interest in genealogy. If anyone reading this would like to correspond with him via email, let me know and I will put you in touch.

Features

I am still seeking new content for the site and would welcome anyone living locally in the Great Baddow area with an interest in providing news, events and feature articles relating to the village, to provide draft articles for consideration to include on the site.

Developments next month

• Updated content for the home page and new styling/presentation
• A feature article about the former Great Baddow brewery
• Removal of old, inactive content
• Removal of old discussion forums and replacement by a “Have your say” section
• Removal of statistics from the newsletter and provision of a more comprehensive set on the site itself.

Home page

The inclusion of photos is the start of a planned change to the site to update the content and presentational style of the home page, unchanged since the site creation over a year ago.

Great Baddow Brewery

Many people will be aware that the building on Church Street adjacent to the Bringey is the former site of the Great Baddow brewery which occupied the premises from the mid 19th century until closure and disposal in 1930.  I have recently researched some of the background history to the brewery for inclusion in the forthcoming village history DVD and a summary feature will be added to the site next month.

Inactive content

I have reviewed out of date content and those pages indicated by the site statistics which are either inactive, i.e receive few visitors. As a result, some pages will be removed.

Discussion forums

The present discussion forums will be removed as they have been little used and replaced by a “Have your say” section which it is hoped will provide encouragement to correspond on local topics and feedback via the site.

Site statistics

Updates on site visitors have been published in some issues of the newsletter including this one (which updates previous information to June and July 2007), but space only permits the inclusion of visitor numbers and pages visited. In future I propose to provide more detailed statistics and analysis from the Google Analytics programme, and publish on a dedicated area of the site.

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Because so many of us receive junk email, if on receiving this or any other issue you do not wish to receive any further editions, please accept my apologies; to stop future issues mailed to you, simply email me with the subject line “stop e-newsletter”, and I will delete you from the mailing list. If you have read the newsletter online and would like to receive it by email, please email me with the subject line entry “start e-newsletter”.

Chris Harvey
Site manager
1 August 2007

Email Chris Harvey