- The Past, Present &
Future
The Early Days
To explain how ShinyCapstar was created we will have to back to June
2001, yes 2001. Basically, as all web-masters (as they are referred to)
know when have an idea and try and devise a website it is a long winded
process.
- excellent association
sites
-
- Having been posted to
Londonderry for our two year tour I started using the internet more and
more. I realised that there were many that visited many excellent
association sites, in particular the message board side of these sites.
It became much of a daily routine to check the message boards to seek
information to see if there was anyone there that I knew, and seeing old
friends pop up and leave messages. The problem with these message boards
is that you will always find the odd "person" who will leave offensive
messages. This in itself could have the potential to upset many people,
and one offensive message could lead to a domino effect that could cause
grievance to many.
ColdstreamChat
I had an idea
to have a site that was dedicated to, well free speech. It was to feature
a Message Board, a Picture Board (Coldstream Images), and on on-line Chat
Facility that would allow you to chat online to anyone that was using the
site at the time. After spending about a week of research (and I was still
new to all this), I put the site together over a long weekend. The main
problem that I had was available cash, which to be quite honest was none,
I could spend my own money but wanted to do it free, with free
 service
providers. The site itself was created and named ColdstreamChat, it
featured links to the boards
and chat room, but due to it
being provided by a service provider (and being free), it would chuck up
one of those annoying "pop-up adverts" every now and then. This was
bearable because after all, it was free. I left the site up for a month or
so and then came back to see if anyone had been using the facilities
provided, a few people had used the message board, no one was in the chat
room, but looking at the hit counter on the web page (a hit counter being
a counter that clicks up for everyone that visits the page) I found that
it read over 1,000 hits.
The idea was there, it was
being used but perhaps I needed a different approach?
The idea After
talking to a few people (basically for encouragement), I decided to try
and think it through again. I then picked up a copy of Soldier Magazine,
that had a small article that a member of a Regiment had created a for his
Regiment off his own back. That was my new approach, a Coldstream
un-official website.
The only problem that I
could foresee was that I wanted the site to be open and available for
everyone. Some want to read about our Regimental History & Customs, some
want to visit a Message Board, some just want a Coldstream Image for a
project and the younger generation want a choice. A choice meaning that it
had to have other information that was readily available for someone to
view, Non-Coldstreamer related, be it the top 40 charts or on-line
gaming. By doing this it "might" appeal to all and if it meant that
someone would visit this site to check the Lottery Numbers and then start
reading about our Regimental Customs it would achieve its aim.
Help me!
The project was now underway and the date was August`ish 2002, and
bearing in mind that I was only working on this when not on duty! And to
add to that the Battalion left for training in Scotland for a month.
Whenever I had time I would turn back to the site and try and develop the
ideas, thankfully my wife was very, very understanding (must have been the
fact that her Saturday visits to Next were unhindered by me being there
whinging that I wanted to go to PC World). I knew that the site was going
to be a lot of work for the main section, but the Regimental side of
things was going to be even bigger! I needed help, so I turned to my good
friend Ian Tindall, the Pioneer Sergeant of the Battalion. Ian had just
shaved off his beard (the only man in Battalion who can choose to have one
if he wishes), and was looking fresh and looked as though he had a new
lease of life. He agreed to take on the Regimental Section, so I could
import his text into the webpage. A task that if he had realised just how
much work was involved, I'm sure he wouldn't have undertaken so quickly.
After asking Ian to help I thought it was only right and proper to ask Mac
Macspirit (another member of the Chesterfield Trio), if he wanted to add a
little input. His short reply of "Sorry mate..........too busy, cleaning
me fridge this afternoon" was straight to the point (sorry mac). Another
quick point to make is that the work that Ian undertook was huge, some
might disagree with things that have been quoted, some might argue on
history, for those that do, please read the disclaimer on the History &
Customs main page.
The Name Although we
had completed loads of work on the site it suddenly dawned on us, what are
we going to call the site? After all the site would have to go live and we
were going to purchase a domain name. We wanted a name that was going to
stand out it was going to be a .com name due to the fact that we
thought these were more professional and easier to remember. Suddenly Ian
had it, and to this day I cannot understand how he thought of it because
he never cleans his capstar (being Battalion Staff he wears a
Silver Capstar instead of Brass), so credit to Ian for thinking of the
name. The name would be good because there are quite a few domain names
already registered with Coldstream in the name, thus making it easier to
find on a search engine!
Word soon got round that we
were now both involved in the site and the Quartermaster asked to look at
it. He said that it would be a good idea for the P.R.I to go on the site,
I agreed so this feature was to be added at a later date. Obviously now
the idea had got a little bigger and now the Commanding Officer asked to
look at the site, suggesting that it could be the Battalion's un-official
website. The official site being ran through the MOD network (a link to
this can be found on the home page).
Research The
Regimental Section of the site was now coming on fine, Ian was hard at it,
and we put to the Commanding Officer that a visit to the Regimental
Headquarters of the Coldstream Guards would be a bonus, due to the vast
amount of material in this location, Ian often spent many a day here
researching his own projects). A phone call made, and we were now into
November 2002 and in Regimental Headquarters. We had a very warm welcome
and basically given free reign of all the archives. We had in our
possession a scanner and digital camera and spent the next four days
confirming the history and gaining images, these are shown in various
parts of the site.
We were hoping to go live
for a date in December, before we departed on leave. Unfortunately what
looked like five minute jobs, would indeed take longer. The P.R.I shop
still hadn't been added, a lot of images still hadn't been converted for
quicker loading on the site, so we made a decision to go live on our
return from leave after the New Year.
The Future We
are now at this stage.................it is now January 2003, and the
following chart shows just how many people have been showing an interest
in ShinyCapstar, over 1700 hits!
 The
Commanding Officer will be looking at the site in the next week, and it
will hopefully be live shortly after that. We await the outcome and I'll
get back to you with the news of ShinyCapstar.Com going live! If all goes
well, we have a few more ideas to add to the site, such as having
dedicated Company Web-Pages on here, creating games for this site, adding
screen savers.............the list is endless. But as we all say, only
time will tell.......
October 2004
Thought it was about time to update everyone on the popularity
of ShinyCapstar. It is coming up to the end of October and
I am receiving e-mails saying that ShinyCapstar is about to
'exceed it's band width'!! What does this mean, I hear you
say!
Basically, ShinyCapstar has bought 'bandwidth' for the place
that it is hosted on the internet - along with space. The
space is not a problem and we have lot's pf space to upload new
pictures. The problem lies with 'Bandwidth', which is
taken every time someone clicks on a thumbnail to enlarge a
picture - or downloads a picture directly from ShinyCapstar - or
even when a page is called to be displayed. This all takes
bandwidth, and at this moment in time ShinyCapstar has taken 92%
of it's available bandwidth - this is about 7giga bytes (gb) in
size!!! Now that is a lot of space....bearing in mind a
floppy disc holds 1.44 megabytes (mb) of information and there
are about 1,000 mb's in a gb - A LOT OF DOWNLOADS!!
The graph shows the popularity rising:
In Mar 2004 the bandwidth for the whole month was 984.94mb - as
at today the bandwidth is 6.24gb - a steady rise in popularity!
Hits are rising by the month, October being the busiest month
in the history of ShinyCapstar with of a HALF A MILLION hits
(throughout it's internal pages). The graph shows the hits
taken in the last couple of months and the rising popularity.
We'll keep you posted!!
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