THE LAIR OF THE CYBERMEN

No, I'm not talking about Doctor Who re-runs, I'm putting pen to paper (well finger to keyboard - does anybody use pen and paper these days?) to tell you all about the rebirth of the SDMC website.  We have been using BT Internet for the last 2 years to host the club website.  For various reasons we have moved to a new home.  We can now be found at:
www.sevenoaksmotorclub.com
I know that it is a bit long winded, but all of the shorter domain names have been snapped up by other people, most of whom are not even using them!
The website tries to stay true to the original idea behind the web, that is, a good source of information that is kept up to date.  You won't find loads of flash graphics and amazing menus that take hours to download to your browser, but what you will find is:
Results for our events, usually available long before the paper results are posted out.
Regulations for our events and championships.  The appearance of these is timed to coincide with the snail-mail so that nobody gets an unfair advantage at popular events.
Marketing Machine updates and scores soon after every round - unless BARC run the event when it usually takes a few months for the results to appear…
Online registration and claim forms for the Marketing Machine.  Let your fingers do the walking and forget about buying stamps.
Photo Galleries from many of our events.  Colin Shipway has done a sterling job taking loads of high quality pictures and scanning them in for the site.
Competition and Social calendars.
A full list of the committee, complete with mugshots and email addresses so that you can pester them over the wire.
Links to SDMC members' websites.
Fast Talk - a discussion forum for SDMC members.
Notification of any important news that needs to be disseminated before the publication of the next Acorn.
An electronic archive of The Acorn, provided by Ralph Travers.
The Fast Talk discussion board is a new feature.  The idea is that you can chat about all things to do with the club or your chosen motorsport discipline.  The committee frequently pops in so it is a good way of providing feedback to them.  There is also a Sales and Wanted section for members adverts.  At the moment there are very few messages because not many people are registered.  I can imagine that not many people will register until the conversation starts flowing either.  Joseph Heller would love it!
A topic that Steve Medhurst raised recently was electronic distribution of The Acorn.  This could be arranged through the website.  However the size of the magazine is about 1MB per issue.  I think this might be too big for dial-up modem users.  Let me know what you think.  On the other hand the electronic version is very handy to have available - Ralph has prepared a few sample PDF format versions for me and I much prefer it to paper.
All you need to access the site is a web browser and (for regs and some of the results) something that can read Microsoft Office files.  If you don't have MS Office you can download a FREE suite of programs that are compatible with Office from Sun Microsystems - www.sun.com/staroffice
If you have any comments or suggestions about the site then send me an email and I'll file it in my Recycle Bin.

Ian Crocker
ian.crocker@btinternet.com

The Acorn : May Edition