The Steering Committee is constantly soliciting feedback.  One of the suggestions we received was the ability to "view" our site via feed, such as RSS or Atom, which is a great idea.  All we needed to do was figure out how to make Confluence do that, which, as it turns out, is not that hard.  As we discussed changing the web site, my mind kept drifting back to web site hosting.

As with the majority of JUGs, ours is supported by the contributions of our members, as well as the charity and support of our sponsors.  Our site is currently hosted by IEC, who have been a great supporter of our group.  With my recent departure from IEC, though, they are left with no one to manage the site from a system admin perspective, so we felt it appropriate to look for a more suitable arrangement for everyone.  That's when we started seeing the price problem.

If you've ever looked for decent Java hosting, you've probably found that it's not cheap -- cheap as, say, PHP hosting.  While there have been overtures made on the part of some of our sponsors, putting that recurring monthly cost on one sponsor puts an undue burden on the sponsor.  With that in mind, I started looking at PHP hosting, as it is quite cheaper and much more ubiquitous than Java hosting.  PHP also offers a wider range of free content manage systems (CMS) for us to use, further reducing our costs.  Researching appropriate solutions brought us to Joomla, the mature, well-supported CMS that is running the site you're reading.  So, to answer the inevitable question of "Why is a Java group running a PHP system?", it's a combination of costs and product availability.

 Back to one of the original reasons for a site change, RSS feeds are now available for JUG news and job postings.  If you want to see all of the feeds available, a link on the left menu will take you to this page, where any new feeds will be added. We hope the new site better meets your needs.  If you have any questions, concerns, additional suggestions, etc., please feel free to share them on the mailing lists.