popey.com

About 10 years ago Mark Lewis setup lug.org.uk to provide free web and email hosting for Linux User Groups in the UK. Initially there were four LUGs hosted and over time this grew as new ones were setup. In addition the services provided by lug.org.uk grew to accommodate the requirements of many LUGs. Some LUGs were able to sort their own hosting and as such lug.org.uk just provides a link to those LUG, with the open offer that if they ever need us, we are here.

Over the years a number of people have given up their own time to help adminster the server(s), websites, mailing lists, irc daemons, anti-spam measures, databases and remote access services. Some have moved on as they got other commitments, but a few are still around. Without this band of volunteers lug.org.uk would never have started, and would not still be running today.

There have of course been ups and downs. From the good days/weeks/months where the admins really didn't have to do much at all but monitor the admin mailing list to the bad days where server compromise and hardware failure meant a degradation of service and repeat visits to the data centre. For the most part the issues that have come up were dealt with in a timely fashion by a team who know the services provided very well.

One thing that has been neglected however is the main lug.org.uk website itself. It's barely been touched (other than updating the list of available LUGs, and changing owner names when LUGMasters move on) since about 2002. The site has been looking quite tired for some time now, and in desparate need of a make-over.

At LUGRadio Live in 2006 some of the admins, LUGMasters and other interested parties had a BoF session where they discussed the state of play and where things should go. Lots of great suggestions were made and some were implemented. I created a drupal-based test site which (theme aside) met with overall approval from the admins. It was decided that a content management system would be used, and some other technical changes would be made (new Xen domain mainly) to allow multiple LUGs to share the CMS (and other software) installs.

A brand new server (warning: link contains images of server-porn) was purchased by three of the admins in early 2007 and has been running reliably since then. The website however still got overlooked as nobody had the time or inclination to go through the grief of setting it up and coping with the "constructive criticism" from the community.

After another BoF at LUGRadio Live in 2007 we decided that the time was right (again) to approach the subject of a site redesign. The "SNM" (static 'n' managed) Xen domain was setup to facilitate multiple LUGs sharing software installs and it was decided that the first 'customer' would be lug.org.uk itself for the new website.

Cut forward to this month and after a concerted effort from all the current admins we got the site installed, configured and setup. We recruited a couple of new admin/editors to help manage the content on the site and showed a preview to the LUGMasters last week. The LUGMasters gave us exactly the feedback we were after, allowing us to fashion a site which is clean, easy to navigate and standards compliant.

To say I'm happy with the result is somewhat of an understatement! We have a new logo, easier to administer content, news aggregated from UK LUGs and blog posts pulled in from UK LUG Planets (blog aggregators) running on a stable, robust platform. Many thanks go out to all the admins and LUGMasters past and present for all their contributions to get us to this stage. Well done!

Most of the admin team will be at FOSDEM this weekend, sporting lug.org.uk T-shirts. If you are involved in LUGs in the UK, please considering buying them a beer! :)