Something we take for granted as members of the RASC Victoria Centre is the online infrastructure of the society and our centre.
Our Victoria Centre website victoria.rasc.ca serves us well thanks to the work of dedicated volunteers. The father of our centre’s electronic infrastructure was Gary Shearman, who served this centre in many capacities in the 1990s, including as president. He also was a creator of the Victoria Freenet, a web and email hosting service in the early days of the internet. He gave our centre its first e-mail service in 1992, and “email chatting” became popular during those early days of email.
Three years later in 1995, the Victoria Centre’s first website was set up as part of a bulletin board and then as a “hand-crafted website” hosted on the Victoria Freenet. David Lee was our first webmaster.
According to David: “The website was created using simple editors, there were member supplied articles about observing, stellar evolution, astro-tourism and early versions of the imaging sensors we have today. People who have with been with the Centre for a long time will remember Sandy Barta, Peter Schlatter, Jack Newton and Bill Almond being some of the contributors.”
In April 2003, Joe Carr became webmaster, upgrading our website and moving it to the Victoria.rasc.ca domain we still use today. Joe moved the website hosting platform from the Freenet to his own server. Soon images by Centre members who were shifting to digital imaging from photographic film began to appear on our website. Many articles and photographs from these early days are still available on Victoria.rasc.ca in a Website Archive covering 1995 to 2013. Take a look at the interesting material contained on that archive and elsewhere on our website. See banner image above for a glimpse of the June 2003 website.
In January 2014, the website underwent a major upgrade and was moved to a new hosting platform, Amazon Web Services, thanks to the efforts of Matt Watson. Joe Carr has continued as Webmaster to the present day, and in May this year, Joe organized the biggest set of changes to the website in a decade, including shifting our website hosting to Infinus Technology. These upgrades keep our website up with changes in the internet and the rise of new devices such as smart phones and tablets.
Fifteen years ago, our Centre entered social media when Malcolm Scrimger created a Victoria Centre Facebook group, and our lively presence continues there. Joe set up photo galleries for our members in 2008 on Zenfolio at rascvic.zenfolio.com. With the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020, we moved Astronomy Café and council meetings to Zoom. Many of those meetings and other Centre events can be viewed on our YouTube channel. Darren Delorme has created a Discord channel for us this year. Links to these sites can be found here.
In 2014, Matt Watson moved our centre’s email and online paperwork onto Gmail and a Google Drive. The Google Drive helps our executive members work together by providing a place to store documents, and Gmail facilitates teamwork. Today the organization of our online documentation needs some attention, and so a working group of executive members spearheaded by David Lee is now reorganizing the Google Drive.
When the 1990s began we had none of these utilities, and now they form an important part of our Centre’s services to our members and the public. I’d like to thank the many members who built these services over the years, especially Joe Carr, David Lee, Matt Watson and Gary Shearman.
During the decade I was a member of the national RASC Board of Directors, our national website, rasc.ca, was a matter of constant concern. Because we use it for membership renewals and to sell books and other goods, it is much more complicated than centre websites.
I understand that the national website will soon be undergoing its long-awaited upgrade to keep up with the increasing demands being put on it. I’m looking forward to seeing the upgraded website, but I’ve got my fingers crossed too, because it’s not an easy job.
