presentations resurrected

When the webteam deployed the new RASC Toronto Centre site in the summer of 2013, they deep-sixed all the old content.

Well, that's not fair, exactly. The content from the old site was still available. But it went to an archive subdomain. Which they didn't initially tell anyone about. The really bad news was that links into the old site suddenly stopped working. Links around the world, from other centres, from my blog—dead. And for the content they did not migrate (which was a lot), people suddenly couldn't find it, especially without knowing the super-secret archive address.

I was disappointed with this strategy on a number of levels. From an information technology perspective, I would have preferred to see a graceful ramp-down process. Better communication, certainly to members, of where to find old content. Better recognition of evergreen content. More of the relevant content actively migrated over. And some sort of handler for old links, with a possible back-end smart search. "Please adjust your bookmarks." Classic migration hyperlink mistakes. On a personal level, I was irked that some of my content—that I went to pains to assemble for our members—was now, at best, very difficult to find.

So, I've started to rescue some of this material. My presentations on field-of-view rings, powering equipment, portable weather stations, is still relevant. Should have been migrated. Should have gone into a "knowledge" or education section. Regardless. I've copied materials and put them on my own web server. My presentations and handouts and possibly the referring articles are now available from the lumpy companion presentations page. Enjoy. Again.