Keeping up to date
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2004-10-10 19:46:48 - Graham EllisI try to avoid "dentist's waiting room" syndrome on our web site - pages that are correct as they're entered but soon go out of date and look old. Here on "The Horse's Mouth" that's not so important as it's a diary (and some will say I should never come back and change history), but on the main area we require to be crisp and current.
This Open Source computing stuff is constantly changing, right? Well - actually WRONG. Who would want to learn to program in a language which is current this year, but out-of-date and replaced next? We have been writing Perl courses since 1996 and all the earliest examples will still work. But release numbers change, there are additions and changes to how the languages are used. Our course material and presentations are constantly being updated to reflect this - every one of our current courses has had at least a minor update in the last 6 months.
Suprisingly, one of the areas where we find a need to update the website very frequently is in the area of travel. We'll collect trainees from the local station where times of trains change with the season, and from Southampton and Bristol airports, both have which leapt forward in the flights they provide.
We flew out from Bristol Airport yesterday to Venice - that's a flight that was (I think) started by Go and taken over by EasyJet. FlyBE, Ryanair, Air South West, Eastern Airways flights in and out too - many new destinations. So I need to go back to our Web page and add to it: If you fly into Bristol Airport from Bordeaux, Copenhagen, Toulouse, Venice, Split, Bilbao, Barcelona, Nice, Bergerac, Brussels, Paris, Dublin or Amsterdam for a course on Python, Tcl/Tk, Perl, PHP, Tomcat, MySQL or Linux ... we'll collect you from the airport. Our offer's open to UK arrivals too and there the flights have stepped up; Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast are not new. Newquay and Plymouth are, but I do think that people would drive or use the train.