Jonathan Smith, Birmingham, Barbershop, Quartet

Jonathan Smith : Your Webmaster

Several Anvil members who regularly use this website have requested that a photograph of me should be placed on the website somewhere. I tried to resist this, saying that I was in the chorus photos, but they insisted that I should have a special page with a photo and some words.

About Me

I work as an independent IT contractor, but I am giving my time free to build the Anvil Chorus website. I wanted to gain some internet programming skills as I had not had any exposure to these in my professional life. I decided that creating a good website for the chorus would not only benefit me in terms of my professional development but also benefit the club in numerous ways. To contact me

About the website

The Anvil Chorus website has already attracted quite an interest, within the club and in the wider barbershop quartet and chorus community, and I intend to maintain it that way. The website, therefore, needs to be kept fresh and up-to-date, with new items being added fairly regularly. I am also developing methods to enable particular club indiviuals to update certain pages in the site independently, ie without the need for me to do it. This will allow the site to remain active even when I am not publishing new pages, and it will increase the sense of ownership of it by the chorus as a whole.

Jonathan Smith

Website History

20th July 2010	New Drupal-based website goes live - this old site closes after 8 years 10 months
11th Sep 2009	Discussion Board reaches 6000 entries (last 1000 in 16 months)
21st May 2008	Discussion Board reaches 5000 entries (last 1000 in 12 months)
2nd May 2007	Discussion Board reaches 4000 entries (last 1000 in 17 months)
10th December 2005	Discussion Board reaches 3000 entries (last 1000 in 15 months)
4th September 2005	New-look front page with photos and date-stamped headlines
15th September 2004	Discussion Board passes 2000 entries (last 1000 in 13.5 months)
30th July 2003	Discussion Board reaches 1000 entries (17 months)
17th June 2003	Online maintainable diary goes live
30th Nov 2002	Guestbook is added
2nd March 2002	Login to Members Area is available. The discussion board is the first feature.
Jan 2002	Website linked from the BABS chorus locator page (eventually)
Sep 2001	The website goes live
8th April 2001	The domain name www.AnvilChorus.org.uk is registered

Technical details

For those who are interested, in addition to the usual HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), the website contains pages written in Perl and JavaScript. I use the pre-processor server scripting language PHP to interface with a MySQL database.

Standards

I write all the program code manually (I dont use packages like DreamWeaver), and I validate the resulting pages for adherence to standards using the World Wide Wed Consortium (W3C) validators.