How to keep the memories alive by Martin Koronka

[Rogernoble]

THE MEMORIES
Some of us have recently been discussing how to keep the memories of Hillside goings after we are all gone. Martin Koronka has set out the options:

Dear all
I’ve been having similar thoughts and, in terms of the digital site there are issues we need to address. A web site that generates no income is ultimately unlikely to survive much beyond the lifetime of the person supporting it, in this case: me. We could allow advertisements all over the site and people seem to think that doing so will turn it into a gold-mine but, frankly, another site I run with over 11,000 registered members generates about £60.00 a quarter - not enough to keep the thing going and it is only because of the interest of the ultimate owner that the site is up at all.

The costs are not huge - I host hillside school.org.uk on my own web servers so that’s FOC but after my demise that will have to change so costs there will amount to £10 - £15 per month - there are cheaper deals but it’s not worth looking too far as one is unlikely to save more than a couple of quid and end up with inferior service.

The name has to be renewed every year and that’s about £7.00 to £15.00 each time (depending who it’s with and how much they charge to host the site: the cheaper the registration the more costly or inferior the hosting), again, not much but it all adds up to not being viable as a self-sustaining site in the longer term.

The main ‘cost’ however, is the time it takes for all concerned both in maintaining the site, making alterations to the backroom stuff for instance when the rules governing the internet change (GDPR compliance etc - note to self: cookie warning on the site)

There are alternatives…

Social media
We invite all of our members to join our own facebook or perhaps linkedin page and transfer the material from our website.
Advantages: Free. Likely to be a useful way of preserving the content for a substantial period
Disadvantages: Probably not forever as, once the ‘footfall’ drops below a certain point the material is likely to disappear (below page four or five on google search). Also it will need a ‘mentor’ to nurture and maintain the information.

Website Archives
There are sites that store defunct websites - take a look at the 1990’s apple website - amazing how things have changed.

https://web.archive.org/web/19970715124 ... apple.com/

Advantages: Free. No maintenance, there forever.
Disadvantages: These sites are not indexed in a helpful way - helpful to search engines that is. It took me four or five goes to find that Apple page. Very time consuming to set up as every page has to be saved and copied by hand and our forum format is not designed to be anything other than dynamic, also a future webmaster may decide to blanket insert a 'bots out’ .htaccess file entry to all of the archived low traffic sites in order to make their other sites more ‘valuable’ (in internet terms) thereby removing the pages from search engines altogether.

Wikipedia
Whilst not an archive of the site itself and not as dynamic as social media sites it could well be a permanent repository for the assets we hold: photographs, articles, memories, alumni and so on. For an example of how this might look go to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ%27s_Hospital

Advantages: Free. No maintenance, there forever, excellent access via search engines, can be endlessly expanded,
Disadvantages: Some considerable work in the initial transfer of files. Open to alteration/comment by anyone in the future (unlikely as it is an uncontroversial, small site therefore unlikely to be of interest to the twits of this world), not a real ‘website’ but a series of pages linked together - but perhaps that’s what we want.

When we set out we had no idea that it would grow in this way so made the logical choice of format but there is such a wealth of information there now that is is worth preserving and to do that we are going to have to change at some point.

As to the mass of physical paper, well I think Godalming records office if there is such a thing and, if not the nearest to the school. Naturally, over time they would digitise the material anyway so it would become accessible on line so it seems odd we can’t just send them the digital assets and the physical ones at the same time. I should think there is some format complication behind not being able to do so.

Thoughts?

Well done Roger for being so persistent with our fellow ‘Hillsiders' and being perfectly happy to use the half-nelson (pun intended) to ensure compliance.

Hope all are staying well
M