As you may have heard by now we will soon be leaving Milton after living here for almost 20 years.

Now this leaves an interesting situation in that I’ve been largely managing the content on the village web site along with Milton News and milton-chat for a very long time and I now need to either pass this all on or let it die.

So are you interested in taking it on? There are two skills you will need, and these could well come from more than one person working together:

1. being editor of Milton News – a lot of content now comes to me via email, I don’t have to go hunting for it, but I do also read RSS feeds and Twitter accounts plus I have regular diary tasks like going to the Blood Donors web site and getting the next dates.
2. looking after the technical side – the site is (currently) built on our own CMS and relies on our own mailing software to send out Milton News. The former is likely to continue longer than the latter so at some point you would need to be able to replace it and in the long term you might want to replace both. There’s also issues like the screen scraper that works out when the next SCDC bin collects is. So key skills here are currently PHP and bash.

The other issue is the milton-chat mailing list. If you’re a subscriber you’ll know that it works, but only because I occasionally put down my moderatorial foot. It may be that milton-chat is a casualty of this move; now that we’ve got the Milton Community Facebook group I don’t think its loss would be so bad as it once would have been, but it does serve a different set of people and it does have 100% reach, unlike the group (thanks Facebook).

If milton-chat is to continue it needs someone to moderate it and I would also like it to find a new home as I’m intending to turn off our list server eventually.

So that’s the challenge. If no one steps up then the site will cease to operate on 30th April so if you are interested in taking it on then let me know.

Thanks.

Paul Oldham