Past Websites

Despite much lobbying and encouragement by Kim Rendell in the late Nineties, and some early attempts at creating online presences for both his then Club of Logan and attempts at unofficial sites for BHA, the first 'real' BHA Website that could be considered fully functional and official was posted in 2001, a year after he became the BHA General Secretary. The URL back then was 'hockey.bytesite.com.au' and the site was known as "The Hockey Web", complete with its own logo!

Back then, the Website content had to be hand coded by Kim Rendell in his own time, using nothing more than plain text editors and the then excellent (though buggy) WYSIWYG Website Editor from Apple, 'Claris Homepage' using the MS Windows platform. At the time, many within the Hockey fraternity couldn't see the significance of this very important first step by BHA. Kim experienced some difficulty in convincing the then Board of Management that this was to be the way of the future. In today's environment this almost seems unbelievable!

The hand coding continued for some years, and with the demise of Claris Homepage (v3), Kim purchased and began using Name Webeditor v5, a WYSIWYG 'Dreamweaver' clone from Korea. In 2007, Kim took the plunge into the realm of the Content Management System (CMS) and began using the 'open source' Website Baker CMS from Germany. It is this CMS that still powers the BHA Website.

For history's sake, Kim has decided to make available links to some of the previous sites. Use the following links, but be mindful that many of the internal links may be out of date, broken or just non-existent! And don't forget that the information contained in these old sites is exactly that - "Old!"

• 2001 - Hand coded using 'Claris Homepage v2' and then residing under 'hockey.bytesite.com.au'.
• 2007 - Originally published online using the 'Website Baker' CMS, this season's content has subsequently been ported to the 'CMSimple' CMS, with a completely different theme, though the content remains true. 2007 saw the beginning of the use of 'EditGrid' to display Fixtures and Points Tables. The inclusion of Lee Oliver's Match Reports (BHL1) was a notable highlight of 2007.
• 2008 - This season was published using Website Baker CMS and featured the exclusive use 'EditGrid' the online spreadsheet for listing Fixtures and Points Tables

Limitations

It is important to note that when preserving the past, much of the material has only been preserved as 'hard copy' and this has necessitated the added task of scanning the documents. In addition, often these documents are very fragile and need to be handled with care. One of the peculiarities of this work is the fact that up until the early Eighties, much of the material was produced on 'foolcap' paper. This has meant that a conversion step (photocopy reduction) has had to be carried out prior to scanning, thus making the process lengthier and even more time consuming.

In the case of past Websites, some of the material and resourses that were linked to back then when the site was live are no longer available. This however, is mostly considered a minor irritation while browsing through these valuable archives. For example in 2001, the only links to Clubs that still yield an informative outcome are those to Norths, Pine Hills and the University of Queensland.

Don't forget to let us know what you think of our efforts to bring back some of BHA's past history!