Greeting Austineers...

I just received a phone call from Bill Sheehan who kindly informed me of this site. I am still alive and fit!

I guess it time to clear the air of past events regarding the “The Austin Seven Motoring Pages”.
The site was never “sold” but due to a lack of anyone wanting to take the site over (including the Association), I GAVE the site to the new owner of my Austin Seven cars and spares when I changed hobbies (the old 10 plan bit!). Basically money was needed to “host” the site on a server that could support Microsoft FrontPage extensions (“Microsoft FrontPage” is now sold as “Microsoft Expressions” and was needed for the discussion forum to function). The site was very popular and I was receiving 100’s of emails a week…. So it proved to be fairly time consuming as well.

The new owner of all my Austin Seven bits and pieces was to get “The Austin Seven Motoring Pages” up again and manage it. However, it appears this has never happened.

I do have a full backup of the working site that I am more than happy to provide to a suitable Austineer that is willing to do it justice. My original feeling (after some discussion with Barry Lovelock and many others) was that the Association should be the home but this was many years ago now and I am not informed of all the politics involved. It also meant the Association would need to pay the hosting costs. The only thing I would ask is that the person who purchased my Austin Seven bits (a member of the Austin Seven Club of South Australia) be contacted and informed of the proposal. I would think he would be pleased to see it up and running as well. Please email me at Bruce.White@flinders.edu.au if his contact details are required.

As I invested a lot of time and effort into the “The Austin Seven Motoring Pages” over many years, I would also love to see it used as a resource in the future. Thanks should also go to some special people for helping to make it happen and the University that I work at for allowing me to host it for historical value. The discussion forum alone had enough material to compose another Austin Seven Companion! So thanks to John Heuzenroeder , Ron Buchett and Bill Sheehan in Australia along with Barry Lovelock and Ian Moorcraft in the UK for their never ending support in the discussion forum.

Cheers Bruce

Bruce.White@flinders.edu.au

Good to hear from you Bruce.

Thankfully just about all of your site is still available as an archive thanks to the Wayback Machine.
http://web.archive.org/web/20051228022232/http://www.austinseven.org.au/

Sadly a static archive isn't as useful as one that's still growing so I hope that somehow the investment can continue.

Regards

Charles

Hello Bruce, lovely to hear you are very much alive and well, though still sad that you had to leave the ‘fold’. As you can see here, Mac and Jason have made a tremendous effort to continue where the Motoring Pages left off. You would be the man to really know just how much work they have had to put in to get this site where it is today.
As for the Association…. They did (and still do) have the money to host your old site, what better way to use some of it.
Good luck in the future, have a glance every now and again to see how we are getting on, have a good Christmas and Kind regards Ian M

Dear Bruce white, we are delighted to hear from you. we will mail you direct to advise you of our proposal and the work we have put in to restore you wonderful website to the world!

Hi Bruce! It's good to hear from you again, and to know that you are well & fit.

I contacted the A7CA 3½ years ago about the Q&A Forum and they were very keen to help keep it going. They authorised me to contact the new owner of the Q&A Forum so that the Association could take it over and get it going again. Unfortunately I didn't receive a very encouraging reply and the approach came to nothing. Hayden and Malcolm were kept informed of the negotiations (such as they were).

The Association was willing to pay any costs involved and I am sure that that would still be the case.

All the best,

David Cochrane

Well done Jason and Mac!

When I left the Austin Seven community several years ago I stated my views on how the “Austin Seven Motoring Pages” could be move into the next stage, for the most part these views are technically still very true. It is worth noting the site was aimed at documenting history and technical aspects of the Seven and NOT a “social networking” forum. The many local Austin Clubs do this extremely well. Current “wiki’s” like this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_7 have largely covered the history of the Seven that was originally documented anyway.

So what did/do I think the next stage should be?

Because a lot of valuable data had been collected, the website should be hosted by a professional hosting service. The hosting service should support SQL database structures and PHP scripting (for the discussion forum part of the site). Thus moving away from FrontPage and migrating to industry standards that will be around long term and be easily managed by streetwise computer jocks in the future. There are inherent issues with using “free hosting and web tools”. Namely how portable is your valuable data and what standard is it stored in?? AND how do you get it back when the hosting service goes bad. Many will remember the RegisterFly.com issues last year (I was sadly one that had a site with them as well). You get what you pay for. So for moving forward, my view was that the Association should pay the couple of hundred of dollars a year to host it as a resource and pay someone to convert the ugly FrontPage material into a standard “open source” format. This would be a one off cost but in my view worth having a database person doing correct the first time. Hence the loss of this information will not occur again and can easily be moved around. Don’t all local Seven clubs pay into the Association anyway?

Jason and Mac PLEASE do not take this as criticism in any way; I probably more than most, appreciate the time and effort you guys are putting into this for the Seven community. I am also unaware of your computing backgrounds and experiences so much of the above may be addressed currently as I am unaware of the details of your new site. In pasting, the copy of the old site I have is ready to be “published” as is to any web service running Frontpage Extensions.

Good luck guys

G'Day David....

Good to hear from all you lads! I just posted above about this as well. You are quick. Would you like me to contact the person that purchased my Austin stuff and ask for his view? I would think he would be happy to see it used by the larger community. But who knows....

Regards

Bruce

Hi again Bruce. In our telephone conversation we agreed that I contact the new "owner" re handing over the OK to publish elsewhere, but now that you have explained the technical & cost complications I think it would be much better if you did the persuading. It would be most remiss of the Association to not fund it, particularly after reading the Treasurer's bit in 2007D. Don't forget to send austinsevenfriends that recent photo! Cheers, Bill in Oz.

Sorry Bill for any confusing re the phone call (I was excited to hear from you again!)

I am happy to do it anyway you guys want. Maybe I can approach the situation first and explain it from my view and then you can take over to get his approval (in principal) from the Association point of view?

Just let me know....

Regards

Bruce

From a technical point of view I build websites using php and mysql, and my day job involves working on large forums, mainly motoring for Haymarket publishing, Autocar, What Car etc etc.

As many of you know, (and have seen) I also have a site up and running based on Austins so have the knowledge and the interest!

I am more than happy to help where possible and if needed, (as I see it the difficult bit is going to be getting the data formatted properly and into a "usable" state.) Just let me know and I'll help!

Hosting is a simple thing to sort out and shouldn't cost much more than £100 per year for the needs of this site. (As much as we wish, it isn't going to be as busy facebook...)

Nice to hear from Bruce himself!
The first website I started to look at when I bought my "pile of old Austin bits" was Bruces. I found the forum incredibly useful as a novice, but only managed a handfull of postings before things closed down.
Thank you Bruce for running a site that I found invaluable back then!

.........On to the present day....

We now have this wonderfull site with a wealth of interesting info and of course a very lively and informal forum, so thank you Mac and Jason.
I am aware that there is a huge archive of info from Bruces site that should be out there hosted somewere for historical reasons, but most other aspects are already here on this site in one form or another.
The forum is now well and truly established almost as an entity in its own right so I am cautious about another forum or site reappearing which might perhaps dilute what we have here at present?
Please accept my genuine apologies if I offend anyone but I think we (more correctly Jason and Mac)have a great site here and perhaps some archiving of the Motoring pages site for use as a resource would be sufficient, the rest could stay as is?

Steve

Yes I agree completely with your concerns Steve, actually there are in fact a number of Austin Seven Forums out there with some very useful content over the years. I guess the point I am making is that technically they all should be merged into a standard SQL database that will be useable and transferable as people come and go in the Austin Seven community. All the data from all the various forums over the years can be put in one SQL database – nothing needs to be lost. And as Austin Harris correctly states the conversion is not for the novice but the result, in my view, worth all the effort. Some forum information would most likely even need to be “cut and pasted” manually. FYI, Austin I understand some database programmers are writing scripting tools to allow them to extract the FrontPage forum data into useful PHP form? I have never seen it done but maybe worthy checking. I think most of the freebie forums are built using PHP but how you extract the useful data would be interesting. Any Ideas Austin?

Regards

Bruce

I tend to agree that it would be fantastic to "add" the old site to this forum, (keeping the knowledge all in one place can only be a good thing.)

The problem will always be getting the data "clean" and into a useable format, I'm not actually sure what format this forum is in, but it's very simple format and lack of features makes it very simple to use. My only slight worry being what would happen if bravenet were to lose / erase etc etc. (Just notice that this forum is in php and I guess therefore mysql.)

There is always the danger of "over egging the pudding" when it comes to forums, which puts people off from posting. Without wishing to offend the Austin 7 world is not full of people for whom the internet is second nature so having to register and enter lots of details may not be a good thing.

My thoughts would be to go down the "open source" php/mysql route if possible. That way costs are low, it is easy to work on and the technical knowledge is all out on the web. This may also help in the forum being "found" by Google and the other search engines, this could lead to another problem of "spam" posting though, which is solvable but may mean a simple registration process.

Bruce, a few questions for you;
How many posts are there in your forum? (If there aren't huge amounts it may be a case of manual copy and paste!)

I don't know Microsoft Front Page at all, would you be able to email me a few pages to look at? (Sort of hoping that there is a database behind it all somewhere.)

I think this forum is a fantastic place and I very much of the camp if it isn't broke don't fix it, I think the idea of a integrating Bruce's pages is a good one though and making sure that all of this is then backed up and safe and easy to re-use elsewhere if something does go wrong is vital! (Servers can go wrong woth sometimes disastrous results - I know from experience...)

Apologies for length of post, Austin.

I agree with the suggestion of adding Bruce's content to this Forum. I dislike the proliferation of forums, much as I don't like the myriads of little regional A7 clubs which dilute what we could achieve if we were all in the same group. It's so nice just to have one Austin 7 forum to log on to!

If there is any Association input on this, perhaps Malcolm should be the one to be involved? I will drop him a quick e-mail.

David

Hi everybody. I am putting up this post quickly on Jason's and my behalf to move things along a bit. Jason's mum is very pooly so he is up agianst it at the moment. The position is this we have got together ,we think, all the Data of Bruce's site. with the new information that has come to light we can make sure this is complete. we have enlarged our site in anticipation of relaunching and are techniclly prepared. We planned to do it entirely at our own expense.However an assoc. contribution would not be sniffed at! But will not stop us if we don't get it. To this end we tried some time ago ,over a long priod, to get permission from the holder of the data to do it. we mailed on several occasions and put our case and we got no reply. so we tried another ploy. we said in desperation... " may we assume that if you do not say to the contrary we will put up the site " we got no response. May we do it? can we take up your offer to help to get the necessary permissions. If I can have your phone No. Bruce? I will ring you . anyway. Regards to you all . Mac

Jason / Mac, if you want any help do let me know. My "day job" is spent doing "front-end" development and a bit of design. Can't wait to see all the info together, excellent to see everything in one place.

Austin,

Things may have moved on since your posting re the server, I should just say that the Eastspace server that the Association uses has FrontPage extensions enabled and I actually use FrontPage to do the web site ( www.a7ca.org ) although I will say here and now I don't have the expertise to run Bruce's forum.

Hopefully, this time round, the Association will not meet a blank wall and we will recover Bruce's excellent site.

.

David opined:

".....much as I don't like the myriads of little regional A7 clubs which dilute what we could achieve if we were all in the same group."

Your view David, not that of everyone I suspect.

Personally, I do not agree with you.

Our strength lies, in my opinion, in the immense enthusiasm shown at local level, whilst the Association acts and speaks for the movement as a whole.

Mike

Good morning all....

1 - I have contacted Geoff Stephens (in Adelaide, South Australia) this morning and he appears to have no issues with the “Austin Seven Motoring Pages” being used for historical non commercial use. He would like the person(s) that will be reasonable for the use to contact him by email on this address:

caraudioservices@e-access.com.au

Bill maybe you can come in here as well? His work number is (08)8344 1488 if needed.

2 - I republished “The Austin Seven Motoring Pages” a couple of minutes ago from my backups. This will allow everyone to see the data again. PLEASE not publish ANYTHING on the Discussion Forum!!! I have put the site back ONLY as a tool to make life easier from those involved in its future use. The URL is:

http://daphne.bio.flinders.edu.au/austin7/

It is on one of my University servers so please do not link to it – it is only up temporarily. It only takes a few minutes to re-publish anyway.

FYI The site started in 1997 and was shutdown in 2003. Keep in mind the site was written for those using 286 computers and Dialup (advanced back then!). The discussion forum was archived each year with the intent of keeping the “active” current discussion page fairly small for quicker downloads for dial-up users. All this logic is history now with high speed internet.

I still have concerns with using freebie hosting and associated tools as well as what connection the Association has with anything we are discussing? And as an outside observer, it is clear I do not understand the politics of all our discussions here. Anyway, enough of my thoughts, it has been good to catch-up again and I'm off.... Enjoy the old site for a couple of weeks and good luck with all your future endeavours.

Cheers

Bruce

oops...

Change that "reasonable" to "responsible" in the last post please!

Hi Bruce,

I am delighted to be able to communicate with you via this forum, the web site you designed, the clever use of early web page design before tools made it so much easier, the right spacing, the right graphic size, and fantastic page lay out is something any of us could only ever work toward.

I retrieved most of your web site in a usable format, by programmes such as web vacuum – it does what it says and sniffs for pages links and pictures and sweeps them up.

The problem was that the links worked via the .org site and so all had to be re written.

This is as far as I got, and I release this now on the forum.
I was going to do a link on the front page, but personnel circumstances have completely ruined my planned three free weeks for projects.

http://www.austinsevenfriends.com/Bruce/Bruce%20master%20index.html

I would ask all those that have supported Mac and I one thing, and above all with Bruce’s blessing that this site be the custodian of his fantastic work.

I have put a lot of effort into protecting and making sure that each page recognizes Bruce so as not to “cadge” the very hard work.

PLEASE let me have the treasure and build upon it. I have at least most of it !!!.

Bruce – I will take your signature off the front page and all subsequent pages – sorry.

As for the offer of web help on this string yes I would very much like a hand.

It is to the Guard that I now write and the old hands that have such influence GIVE ME THE TORCH let me take the future of the Austin Seven into my generation.

You know it will be treasured.

Jason

Just seen Bruces site link
And the forum is there and everything !

WWWEEEEEPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP