My Experiences as Portal Developer

This is the trillion dollar question and I am certainly scouting for some answers...

Here is one interesting opinion - whose bailout?. If what the author says is true, the world could be heading into a major recession.

There!! One more downtime and this time was a big one.

It is apparent that my web host (the agency which has been entrusted the job of hosting and keeping the site up and running) is having some problems with its hosting arrangements. Mera Bilaspur is up and running this time on a new server with a new IP address and new hosting environment.

There were several maintenance issues that have forced him to change the system, which has also resulted in the change of hosting environment. Just when we had started feeling that we were comfortable with Helm, we have been ported to Plesk. Both the environments have their peciliarities and familiarization (fine-tuning) issues. The version of Plesk is obviously newer and appears to have more features and options that can be tweaked for better performance and control. But, more options also mean more chances of us bungling the settings.

Anyway we are not getting a hang of the new environment too. All this shifting and reconfiguring the hosting options has certainly effected our development schedules and targets. We have been put back by atleast a couple of weeks.

There have been several improvement to the sections of the site that are already running. Better paging information and page titles are making it a (we hope) friendly place. We have signed up with Google's News service and Google has started scanning us for News Updates. A couple of our articles did get recognized and that again has recharged our energies. But, it hurts when we were not able to keep up the news uploading effort for the last couple of weeks. We have barely been able to upload news to keep the counter ticking but the level of work is far below our satisfaction.

All our team members have their fingers crossed and he hope things will be a little more stable from here on.

In the course of managing and maintaining the web portal the biggest change in me is that I am now learning the work of several faculties and mastering the art merging them together to produce the end product - our web portal.

So far, my team and I had focused only on the development aspect of any project. The collection, presentation and management of the content was always done by other people - subject specialists. I would always see these work out on our developed software and produce beautiful results (most times). Their work seemed so simple. Sometimes when a project interested me and was within the perview of my skillsets, I would pitch in and help them with their content development.

It appeared so easy. Once the software was ready all they had to was key in their content, prepare the necessary graphics and voila - the product. This was also one of the probable the one of the factors that influenced our decision to start this voluntary project of maintaining the information site for Bilaspur city. Being low budget we were not able to hire the services of professionals in the project, so we decided there was no need to hire help for the simple activities, they would be handled in-house.

In the beginning, it was fun. But now it is a challenge to come up with serious creative input on a consistent basis. It is strange how we have started sharpening our skills in the different faculties as and when we progress. I feel the members of our group are fast maturing specialist developers to masters of multiple faculties and I am enjoying it.

More so, the entire experience has certainly humbled me. Now I respect and honour the skills of people from all facutlties. I think that I appreciate people who can produce presentable work on a consistent basis than the one time bright heads who occasionally come up with outstanding work, though both the kinds are needed to keep the up excitement.

The whole of last week we were occupied with our other committments. It was the week of the starting of a new financial year and had us occupied beyond our working strengths. Naturally, the Bilaspur web-site project was the most neglected during this period.

Today, a couple of members from the team have sometime to spare and will be looking up the site again.

Gajendra

Two major things have happened in the past week that effects our working at Data Spec. One a tragedy and the other a development. Both enought keep our team busy.

1. India is out of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2007.
2. Our portal - मेरा बिलासपुर, The Information Site of Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, India been installed in its own domain - http://www.merabsp.com.

It was really disappointing to see India unable to make it to the Super Eight Series in the World Cup being played in West Indies. I don't think that there was a single Indian who had thought that India would not make it to the Super 8. It was a big shock and this has certainly made maintaining the Cricket section of our portal very heavy and uninteresting. But, our team at Data Spec has reinforced the believe that we will complete what we have started.

Meanwhile, we have booked our domain - www.merabsp.com - and have moved the site to it. With the development of the cricket section done, it has come into the maintenance and editorial mode. We shall now be able to concentrate where we left off. We have resumed the uploading of data about Bilaspur city.

Lets see how it shapes up.