At the 2006 AMSAT-uk Colloquium I was invited to join the AMSAT-uk Committee as a 'Corresponding' member. What this means is that I don't need to make the long trek down south to attend committee meetings and can keep in touch via email etc. My job on the committee is to look after the AMSAT-uk website, which isn't that new as I have been looking after the system (there have been three so far..) on which it runs ever since the first AMSAT-uk web presence way back in April 1999..

The new AMSAT-uk website is based on a Joomla CMS. 'Whats a CMS?' you may ask. CMS is an abbreviation for 'Content Management System', in which the articles are stored in a MySQL database and only appear as a web page when the page is requested.

If the website style looks familiar, its because the CSS template was based on the one I use sometimes on this site. As time goes on, the template may change but with a CMS that doesn't mean that the whole site needs changing - just the template. A template defines several areas on a website (top; bottom; left; right; header; footer; etc...) and as long as a new template has the same areas defined but not neccesarily in the same positions on the page, then a change of template will only take a few seconds.

Several new features exist in the new website, like a search engine that indexes new articles as they are produced. A members-only area is already there, but access to that area needs to be sorted out. I don't fancy going through the whole membership list to add each member manually via the Joomla admin interface, but will do if thats the only way.

The previous site still exists and runs on port 8080 of the AMSAT-uk server