Version 3 of myTobago Launched

[Steve Wooler]

Hi Folks

My apologies if you were inconvenienced by the absence of myTobago.info for two hours this afternoon.

Having now transferred 10732 files occupying some 255MB of disk space to the server, I am delighted to announce the launch of version 3 of the site.

Don’t expect huge changes. There are no new articles or major changes. This was a technical rebuild to improve search engine “friendliness”, navigation usability and performance, with minor cosmetic ‘tidying up’. Readers on dial-up connections should find the site very much more responsive – in fact page load time has been improved by almost 40%.

For the technically minded, v3 has been written to XHTMLv1(STRICT) standard and the most boring part of the 500-hour rebuild was physically submitting each of the hundreds of main article pages to the WWW Consortium (W3C) for certification.

The site comprises of over 2000 pages (including all the photo enlargements), so we now have a major job checking that everything works as intended. If anything doesn’t work as you might expect, links don’t work or take you to the wrong page, or if you spot anything wrong/unusual/suspicious – PLEASE LET ME KNOW.

Otherwise, please enjoy.

[Paul Williams]

Well its even better now and I thought that would not be possible.
As you can see Steve has spent an enormous amount of time and effort so that we can enjoy the website so please all remember that continuation relies on our donations.
Regards

[Dr Stefan Rustscheff]

Whoa! Another GREAT achievement! I bow my head to Steve in silent admiration. I really didn´t think this site possibly could be improved...
Best of luck with version three!
Stefan

[Bill B]

Steve,

I don't see any of the photos. All I get is the little red X in the upperleft corner. On some of them if I click I get your message about page not found.

Page Not Found
Sorry, but the page you requested is not available.

If you typed the web address in manually, you may have a typographical error - so please check the entry in the Address bar above.

If the page address ends with .htm, you may have entered the address of a page on our 'old' site. These addresses became redundant in 2004. All good search engines have updated their links, but some small and less efficient directories still continue to list the old links. You will appreciate that we can do no more than notify them.

Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience. You should be able to easily find the page you are looking for through the main menu bar above.





Steve Wooler

Hope you can correct this.

Bill

[Steve Wooler]

Hi Bill - and everyone else

Sorry about the photos. I thought the transfer of the photos would be complete by the time I opened the site up, but there's obviously very heavy load on the lines and my broadband connection is grinding along very, very slowly with over 150mb of photos to upload.

Bear with me - all will be sorted by the morning.

[Paul Tallet]

Message said "You have finished viewing this site" ... only briefly did I 'think it was all over' ... I signed in ... it worked ... didn't notice anything, posted a message ... that was earlier this afternoon.

This evening ... came in again ... it looked different, lush, something had happened ... had a look around ... COR !!!!

Steve, this is an unforeseen and big improvement.

As David says ... long may this be supported and may many more currencies of various denominations continue to support myTobago in it's cause.

The Weather bits look good too

Regards

[David Watkins]

Excellent Steve!A terrific site made even better,who would have thought there could be any more improvement?Thanks.Can I make one suggetion for your alphabet section?Howabout fig,ripe fig and green fig,a fig is a banana!
David

[Steve Wooler]

Good suggestion David - one of those local terms that regularly throws visitors.

As a matter of interest, what's the page download speed like on your dial-up in Castara (is dial-up or carrier pigeon?). I've switched compression back on for the site and initial tests show most pages loading in around 30-35% of the 'old' site. Does this seem to be the case in practise?

[Grant Mchattie]

Very nice Steve. I have been looking at the site for some time, but only recently joined. As someone who is a Tobago habituee, I feel that it represents the island very well, and gives visitors an excellent idea of what to expect and where to go.

More power to your elbow (or keyboard)

Grant

[Steve Wooler]

Hi Grant

Welcome aboard! Your comments are appreciated and I'm delighted that you feel that myTobago presents the island accurately.

[David Watkins]

Hi Steve,yup the pigeon does seem to have a bit more zip!
David

[Gisela Grell]

Dear Steve,

well done and thanks a lot for all the work you put into this wonderful site.
As I try to make a donation there was a bug. I filled in the from and when I push the button "submit" it sayes "page is not found".
Tried it twice.
Hopefully my donation is booked now. If not, please let me know.

Cheers

[Steve Wooler]

Well, at least nobody can accuse me of only thinking about funding of the site!!!!!

I have to admit that I totally forgot to rebuild the donation pages and because they're not a direct link of the main menus and are actually hosted on our secure server, rather than on myTobago.info, I totally forgot about them.

I will fix the problem this morning, as soon as I've cleared my mail and other more pressing matters.

Thanks for pointing it out Gisela.