Preserve Huntingdonshire

The site as you see it is just the tiniest part of a bigger plan.

The first part of this plan is to try and provide a space in which to capture and present events going on within Huntingdonshire and a mechanism to provide feedback on these. Whilst invisible to the world at large we’re at work building the architecture to allow this to happen. It will also capture external event feeds where we can find them (providing there is a mechanism to automatically keep these up to date).

Apart from brain power (all too precious ) this has involved a fair amount of tedium, like the compilation of a list of all the hamlets, villages and towns that comprise the county in order to eliminate errors when entering event data and to ease searching and re-use of the same on other future parts of the site.

To precis this, work is underway, so don’t lose faith!

Happy New Year

Thought I’d see if I can get the letter published on the Hunts Post - after all they’re getting enough links from this site!

Used their feedback form to place a request to the Site Team.

We’ll see if the feedback system works .....

A couple of weeks ago I electronically submitted an article about this site to the Hunts Post. It was a short promo with a plea for volunteers to help. Thinking that it would appear last week the pressure was on to get the site ready to go live. Last weekend was therefore more than a bit hectic. As it happens nothing appeared in the paper. This coupled with the request in the Hunts Post for folks to submit ‘blogs’ to them seemed to suggest that there might be a motive - competition, for not publishing the letter.

It is reassuring therefore to see that I was wrong. This week (Wednesday October 11th edition) the letter appears on page 3 under the title ’Blogging to Save the Old County‘ - in bold type and very much “in your face” at the top. Can’t miss it It’ll be interesting to see whether this publicity helps and/or whether there’s anyone sufficiently interested to join and help.

The only slight downer in all this is that for some reason the letter doesn’t appear electronically within the letters part of the Hunts Post online site. This means that I’m unable to provide a link to it. It does, however, appear within the e-Edition - an electronic page - by - page version - but this cannot be linked to nor the text selected. Not knowing whether all letters normally appear on the site I can’t tell whether it’s policy or a drop-off.

It is disappointing

Still, any publicity is good publicity.

I’m after a picture of the Huntingdonshire county sign - the one that marks the border. Even if it is one with ‘District’ in small letters!

The thought is that I can then use this for the site - possibly doctored....

I’ve been working on trying to unify the style of this part of the site and that of the discussion forums. The theory is that they at least have some appearance elements in common. This has been a very empirical exercise and it’s not fully complete.  Providing that no corkers have been dropped (and I’m looking for feedback) then the next phase will be to develop the structure for the wiki and to then fit this into the visual theme.

By its very nature this is an intermittent activity - I’ve spent most of the morning, as every Saturday, at (Huntingdonshire Music School in California Road - so it’ll happen gradually.

If this is to be sustainable over the long term I need to find local volunteers to help with the running and maintenance of this site. It needs to be more than a one-man band.

I’m happy to work on the infrastucture and the architecture of the site but I’ll need others to help contribute content in certain areas and to moderate or keep an eye on parts of the site as it develops. This might include the wiki - which will capture information about the locality and its inhabitants, the forums or being a news-hound blogger.

You don’t need to be computer expert. Enthusiasm, committment and a sense of humour is much more important!

Any sensible offer considered.

Welcome!

This is the first in what I hope will be a lively area for news and debate concerned with the county of Huntingdonshire - technically obsolete and subsumed by Cambridgeshire - in the east of England (UK).

The purpose of the site is to provide a focus, a meeting point, a nucleus around which information concerned with Huntingdonshire can coalesce to form something useful for everybody.

In the years in which I’ve lived in the county I’ve watched the gradual erosion of the visible signs of the county and its infrastructure in the name of ‘advancement’ or whatever the bean-counters try to sugar-coat it as.  It’s been a very slow decline, each change being almost imperceptible, but the cumulative damage has been significant. With the recent announcements about the downgrading of Hinchingbrooke hospital (to what?) this has got out of hand. What never surfaces is the cost to the residents who bear the brunt of the changes.

Before everything disappears completely I wanted to provide a means for like-minded folk to communicate and also to capture information on the county - a resource to be used.

Please contribute and make use of it.