The blog is coming back!

A couple of years ago, we decided to abandon active update of this blog since only one person was posting, and there are other ways to get announcements out.

So now, in February 2013, we're looking at new ways to communicate to AIAA SF members and the surrounding community. But we/I also want to encourage members of the section council to post their own announcements.  So... the blog is coming back.  Hopefully, this time, there will be posts from more people than just yours-truly.

--Rick (unofficial minister of propaganda)

Addendum (2/22):  I should probably provide a bit of additional info on why the blog is coming back.

Currently, the main AIAA SF website is a high maintenance activity depending on volunteer effort, and typically a shoestring budget. We have been working on migration to a content management system (CMS) on our own server for about a year. But on volunteer time schedules, this is likely still going to take a couple of months... or more. Meanwhile, announcements are backing up and human resources are thin.

For those who are curious, we are planning to utilize Joomla as the CMS. We previously could not do this because we were on a shared server with no root access, but did have a reasonably cooperative ISP. Last year, we arranged with our ISP to take over a VM (virtual machine) at slightly higher cost, installed an Ubuntu server, and moved the existing website into it. This also gave us the foundation to install other software components as we evaluate our needs and see their fitness to the task.

The guys who currently manage the server are hybrid aerospace and computer science nutcases.  While that exact combination is not a requirement, we are extremely lucky.  It is absolutely required that you have more than one server "hacker" if you want to manage your own server image. We got our first additional "hacker" ("hackette"?  footnote 1) a couple of years ago (well, perhaps a little longer), and began to explore the possibilities of a CMS back then.  We got a second additional "hacker" last year, and began to put the migration into action. However, we all have full time jobs; some of us are even taking additional academic courses, but somehow still enjoy the challenge of managing a server.

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1. "hacker" is used here in the positive sense. A female hacker is... this question only came up once, and the two terms suggested were "hackerette" or "hackette". But I thought it was good to point out that at least one of us had more culture than your typical hacker.