29th Mar – 6th April: NCI Calshot web site

Brian Roberts had suggested I might take over the Calshot NCI web pages and this was approved by the Calshot Committee on the Wednesday 23rd March. I was keen to get the main work done before the weather improves for sailing so had a first look at the “Local Information” page on the 25th before Brian came to my house on Saturday 26th.

A skeleton structure is imposed by the Content Management System (CMS), and Brian had set up some public pages for the station. However almost all of the pages consisted simply of links and many of the links were out of date.

I devoted a good part of the next week setting up the public pages – it would have been quicker except for learning how to use the CMS system. It’s really much slower than just editing the actual file!

Admittedly I did spend a couple of days looking at tidal differences between Portsmouth, Calshot, Southampton, and Hurst Point… of which practically nothing ended up in the web pages! Mostly I just confirmed that applying Portsmouth times to Calshot is OK, and differences with Hurst are as given in the Almanac! I did discover that Roger Proctor has a firm “TideTech” in Australia with a model of currents in the Solent… I’ll investigate further when I have time.