I’ve decided to shut community.weather-watch.com down. It was an interesting experiment (for me), but I think it’s a distraction from the main activities of weather-watch.com. In summary:
- It’s a complicated beast to keep running. It’s got a lot of components that each require a lot of configuration and I haven’t properly mastered all the configuration in the time it’s been running.
- Due to (1) there is a lot of code that has to run and despite many attempts to improve the perfomance it’s still pretty poor. It’s based on Wordpress and I have other WP sites that work well so I’m assuming it’s just too complicated for it’s own good.
- The Community pages rely on content being generated by both me and other users. Unfortunately, I’ve not had the time to dedicate to producing content and that means it’s very static so people don’t visit which means there’s no user content either.
- Most of what was being done in the Community site can be done in the forum, or by adding one or two additional functions to my servers.
Some Community features have already moved, i.e.
- My ‘blog’ (for want of a better term) is now this category (Rabbit Hole)
- The Events Calendar is now within the forum (see ‘Upcoming Events’ in the side bar)
- Knowledge Base (see side bar) provides Wiki functionality that I was going to integrate into Community
- The Photo Gallery content has been moved to a new piece of software (link in the forum header). The photos have been migrated over and I’m working adding the descriptions back.
Once I’ve finished the Gallery I’ll go back and assess what’s left. There was an RSS feed that I think is already partly replicated into the forum but I think that needs a bit more work. Once I’ve got everything across that I’m intending to bring across I’ll point community.weather-watch.com at the forum and decommission the WordPress site.