New era for The Cattery

Ben Jensen, April 6 2018 Today is the relaunch of The Cattery with the biggest overhaul in its near 16 year life. It will take a couple more weeks to make sure the experience for you is what it should be but it will be sorted out soon. And hopefully the site will be updated more often with Cats news, views and the odd muse.

For the technical minded and I am sure many readers are, I started off in mid 2002 writing rambling thoughts (what’s changed?) on the Cats on a frames-based HTML website with the grand address of ‘www.flarn.com/~keldar’. This soon migrated to ‘geelong.keldar.net’ via our own host that we still use today. Around 2005 we dumped frames in favour of an architecture based on ‘PHP’ that we have maintained until this week, it was a leap forward from frames but terribly clunky now. Just prior to the 2007 Premiership we registered the trading name ‘The Cattery’ and the domain name https://www.thecattery.com.au, which saw traffic jump to a typical 200 a day and up to 1000 on game days.

The look and feel stayed mostly the same other than a slight reboot this time last year to a different menu and new logo. PHP served us well but with around 80% of you reading this on a mobile or tablet it just doesn’t cut it any more. Every word, every edit had to be created in HTML, most of it using an editing program but when I found myself on the road in Europe throughout 2008-10 using whatever text editor I could get a hold of.

So, after 16 years for The Cattery and 22 years overall developing websites we have finally joined the WordPress movement. ‘Welcome to the 90s’ I hear you say and fair enough. I’m writing and publishing this from my phone on a train, something I couldn’t do before which has become a real handicap the more time poor I become.

All previous work from 2002 remains available via www.thecattery.com.au/OldSite/, I’ll work on making it more accessible along with bringing in more content in the coming weeks such as Club history, songs & ringtones. And hopefully get some more voices so it isn’t just me, I’ve a couple mystery insiders just waiting to unleash, like we used to have. If you’d like a platform to publish you work just let me know via thecattery@keldar.net.

Thanks for reading and for your support, let’s hope 2018 is another watershed year for The Cats.