Welcome to the new Miniature Aero Sportsters web site!
This site was created by me, Sean Kennedy – a fresh new member of MAS, to hopefully provide a way for members and visitors to communicate.
The problem many club web sites have is content creation and maintenance. If regular club members have to go through one or two people to get something done on a web site, the process usually breaks down and the content will eventually stale.
This site is designed specifically for member use, and has the facilities to allow any MAS member to add content to share with the world at any time. This site is a “work in progress”, and the look and feel may change a bit in the coming weeks.
Lastly this site was built completely with open-source code that’s portable. There’s no cost beyond the basic web hosting services, which I already had available. The reason this is important is it wouldn’t take much to move this site elsewhere if needed, and there’s no club money that needs to be taken away from other important things like runway repair and maintenance in order to run this site.
So click around and experience the new site. If you have any question don’t hesitate to contact me at sean@miniatureaerosportsters.org.
So why would this new member go out of his way to register a dead domain, build a web site, and present it to the current MAS web owner anyway? For starters, when I committed to a friend’s son that I would take him flying, I wanted to go to a site I knew was favorable to beginners. So after clicking on a web link to the original MAS web site and realizing it was dead, my first assumption was the club was also dead. Curious, I went to the AMA charter site and found charter 1344 still registered, but it’s only contact information was again to this dead domain. This club must be dead. Knowing that many clubs wisp into history from lack of new members and community support, I assumed the worst. Disappointed, I wanted to find out what happened with the site. A google search pointed me to a web site that was built in the late 90’s and to another web site hosted by Tom Glaess. This site was hosted from a comcast users web page, and didn’t indicate there was any significant recent activity. The web site was good, but also suffered from the same problem most sites have, stale content. Being the site was hosted on comcast, there was a chance this was simply remnants of a club now dead. Tom’s site did have a few items that suggested activity so I decided what the heck, I’ll try driving to the site and maybe with luck it’s still there. So… I packed the planes, and told the kids, “Let’s go to the site and let’s cross our fingers it still exists.” I was delighted to see friendly, helpful people at the site willing to provide new membership forms.
When I got home I kept thinking, “I wonder how many people were turned away from the club because the web site posted by AMA was dead?” Knowing I had free domain registration credits I decided that with a few clicks I could easily register the domain, and quickly build a web site using software I’ve already deployed for business purposes as a enterprise storage consultant for Hewlett-Packard. The cost of the domain for me was free, and I already had hosting space available. Putting all the pieces together took a total of 4 hours, with some graphical help from my wonderful wife, Debi. The site was built at the mock site with a “Coming Soon” page at www so the club could take some time to evaluate the new site and then promote the site to the www location upon board approval.
So I hope you enjoy the web site! Please contact me if you have any questions or comments. -Sean Kennedy.