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In March of 2007, Brainbox, the sponsor of the ITVA-DC web page, warned us that they were at risk of having their servers shut down because of AOL spam complaints. This had happened without warning to Women in Film & Video-DC the previous year, and their web site as well as listserv had been shut down. It took them months to fully recover. Their Executive Director, Melissa Houghton, recommended Electric Embers (electricembers.net) in Oakland, CA as a listserve host, and we successfully followed their lead with only a slight lull in service to members. A month or so later, Brainbox told us they were getting out of the web hosting business and could no longer support the ITVA-DC site. They offered to continue hosting for an undefined period but were letting their support staff go. The site was already dated, needing a number of design and textual changes as well as coding improvements. As we searched for potential new providers, we watched as the site gradually fell apart. First, the appropriate notifications were not made when members renewed online. Then, the calendar would not support new events. And members couldn't update their Production Guide profiles. Finally, even the editable text on most of the pages could no longer be modified. Initially, we had hoped a site could be put in place for $1,000-$2,000 with later upgrades. After an extended search, it became obvious that we would need a $4,000-$6,000 budget for the initial design and first year of service. With the transition to MCAI-DC/TIVA-DC and uncertain finances, this became a huge obstacle. Fortunately, one of the proposals was for a Joomla! site. Joomla! is an open source application, so we hoped it might be relatively less expensive and would not lock us into a single provider. We ended up not going with the specific proposal because it, too, was quite expensive. However, the more we learned about Joomla! the more it seemed like a good option. The final decision came about when my neighbor, an IT expert, told me I could and probably should just do it myself. Although fairly fluent in Adobe GoLive and Dreamweaver, I had no idea I could create a site that would support the membership, calendar and other features needed by TIVA-DC. I am hugely grateful to the Joomla! open source community. Although each extension I needed to add features to the site required a little learning and experimentation, most capabilities could be added for free or nearly for free and implemented in a few hours without learning a programming language or doing any coding. Currently, the site uses primarily the following:
New features to come! Suggestions welcome! Just click "Comments " and fill in form.
Jacquie Greff
TIVA-DC Board President & Webmaster
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