DVAA News

After what must have appeared to much of the membership as an interminable series of delays, the new DVAA website is finally (finally!) live.  It was a long and painful process getting here but I hope you will find the result worth the wait.

As you explore the site you will no-doubt appreciate the huge set of new features such as the events calendar, document library and personal photo albums but for my money the most important feature of the new site is "collaboration."  Our old site (forgetting, of course, the ultimately failed but nonetheless helpful-in-getting-us-here WildApricot-based site that we had had for the last half-year or so) had been written and maintained by a single person: Mark Huss.  Mark did a great job but he was a single individual with more than enough on his plate.  As a consequence, our original site changed very little over the years. 

The great thing about our new site it that it is designed to be enhanced and maintained by the DVAA as a whole.  Indeed, this most recent iteration is the work of many, including Dan Acker, Al Lamperti, Bill Bacon, Jeremy Carlo, Andrew Hitchner, Harold Goldner  and Janet Rush, among others.  Moreover, it builds upon pervious work by even more folks, especially Bill McGeeney and Jeff Oaster.  Regardless of its current state, the genius of this latest iteration is that we can finally come together as a club and make our web presence a living thing of our own.

I'll be sending out an email in the coming days to all of the members who have yet to be given login credentials to the new site.  Do please explore then give me your feedback (president@dvaa.org).  I intend to work with the club to make DVAA.org the best club astronomy site it can be.