R22 Discussion Group

Rick,

I cannot tell you all how happy I am that so many of you have shown interest in the website design. Thank you Peter for creating something new to illustrate where we can go. Thank you Luis for your efforts to work with Nabble. I didn't know that it was open source. Thank you all for your interest in the effort to bring our website up to date.

For those who know significantly more than I do about web services, especially that we should secure the website, I am happy to report that we are hosted currently on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an EC2 server. It appears that a free SSL certificate may be easily obtained directly through AWS or LetsEncrypt and added to our instance with little or no additional cost.

The responsibility for the rhodes22.org website and email list manager was transferred to me from John Lock in the spring of 2016 when he lost the ability to provide hosting services. John had assumed the responsibility from Michael Meltzer who had hosted Rhodes22.org for several years. It should be noted that Michael Meltzer still owns and pays for the domain name.

I chose AWS because felt that we needed to avoid using personal server resources or services that might go out of business or change their rules (GeoCities). If Amazon failed, the loss of the list would be the least of our problems. Our AWS charges are about $15/month, a sum that I have been happy to pay considering the activity on da list. For greater details as to the origins of Rhodes22.org, Blew Skies, etc., I defer to Mary Lou as the list historian since I have only been on da list since 2005 or so.

Since I was not a webmaster, I made few changes to the website portion. I was more concerned with survival of the email list and the archives. I asked for volunteers and help in the past and my May 24th call was answered by many of you this year (nearly 30 posts!) 

Rhodes22.org has more content than any sailboat forum I have visited and a very active membership. Now, we need to make it accessible to all who visit and easy to search. I am confident that we have the technology and the people to make it happen.

I want to move slowly so that our efforts are sustainable. There is so much to talk about starting with creating a "wish list" of changes and features followed by defining individual tasks and implementation schedules. I would like to suggest a Zoom call to start an interactive discussion about the possibilities, timeframes and costs (time and $$$). Scheduling is very important as we are in the middle of sailing season in North America.

Mike
s/v Wind Lass ('91)
Nissequogue River, NY
I’d rather be sailing :~)

The Rhodes 22 Discussion Group

Michael D. Weisner

Does our website need SSL?