The-Port is the complete social networking experience, your hub to Newport, its
people, forums, groups, downloads, image galleries and blogs... bored of the pointlessness
of Facebook, then The-Port can offer that little bit more: talk about real issues,
your area, your hobbies and interests... or go one further and create and personalise
your own blog.
Are you a small business, start up company, or even established but can't afford
to advertise? If so we can help, we can provide you with a site and proudly place
you in our companies section where you will enjoy a large volume of site views.
You can use your site as an advert, or a full website, you can upload images, and
build a portfolio of your work to show off to potential customers. You can even
create a link back to your own website from your group.
The various landmarks dotted around Newport are what makes our City unique. New
and old, beautiful or ugly, love them or hate them, they differentiate our City
from the rest. We have many groups dedicated to Newport's Landmarks, feel free to
join an existing group or create your own!!!
Are you an ebay seller operating in or around Newport, well if so why not advertise
your ebay listings on the-port.co.uk,
we have a dedicated listings page
that will allow visitors to view your items from a stylish and user friendy ebay
widget.
Increase your local sales and repeat customer base while at the same time nullifying
the postage and packaging charge, decreasing the time and effort required packaging
your items and reducing the risk of loss or damage to your items. With ebay's new
rating system it is becoming increasingly difficult to charge for a postage and
packaging service, so why not reduce the risk of a low rating and increase customer
satisfaction by selling more locally.
ABOUT THE-PORT:
The-port.co.uk started out as a member website, which was only available to a select
number of close friends, with one moderator, this made updating profiles and galleries
very time consuming and as such the site was not updated very frequently. It was
decided that members should be able to control their own profiles, and so we started
updating the site and built in a forum... this means that the site and its content
can be updated by its members, who are free to join at any time.
We also used the old site to display pictures of our travels around the world, but
writing all the html for hundreds of pictures was not very efficient and was slowly
driving us mad, so we added a gallery to the forum that can be updated by each member,
with many gallery sections open to all members.
As a member your feedback is really appreciated, maybe the site could simply benefit
from some new forum sections and groups please inform us, we are always working
to make this site better for the people of the port !!!
For all enquiries or if you would like to join the team please contact:
admin@the-port.co.uk
jay@the-port.co.uk
Thanks, The Port Team.
UPDATE 14:
!!! --- Back to The-Port --- !!!
Wow, how hectic has it been? Well i say hectic, just busy and i am afraid to say
a little bit too busy for the-port, i must admit i have been neglecting it a little
:( but my new years resolution is to get it back on track.
The first half of 2008 saw a large increase in hits and membership and a lot of
those members contributed a great deal, but i got busy with websites again and hance
had little time to post or promote the site (as in spam loads of people) and consequently
we have fallen behind slightly.
I have started by clearing up all the links to external sites, like digg and other
blogging sites as the links that point back to us are now redirected and return
us little rank for the links we point to them, i still use these sites to promote
the-port and so can you, but we will no longer maintain a pile of links back (this
has already improved the rank of the site).
UPDATE 13:
!!! --- Site Quick Links --- !!!
We spent a little time creating a quick links section that is available on all pages
of the site, we hope that this will enable you to better navigate the site, and
increase visibility of the forums and groups that are available.
The quick links section is located at the bottom of each page it includes links
to all sections of the site: The-Port (this is the community landing site). Forum
(the discussion boards), Groups (various clubs, company's and advertisements) and
Media (files, music, software and images).
Quick links also includes many links to your favorite blogging sites, the most popular
of which being facebook
. Two new sites were added: Blinklist
and Windows Live
.
We will continue to update the blog links to include further sites, when we find
the widget code!.
UPDATE 12:
!!! --- Landing Page Modification --- !!!
We managed to re-arrange the site landing page (this one), so it is a little bit
easier on the eye, reduced some of the empty spaces, and filled any remaining ones
with some nice content.
We also added a google search engine control to the site which will enable you to
search through content on the-port.co.uk, hopefully it will work ;)
The Register and Login links have been moved, they are now under
the search control.
Aligned the site navigation links to the right of the panel and moved the mission
statement down, this enabled us to squash the height of the top section and further
reduce the emptiness...
Fixed the left banner display problems (they didn't like being inside panels!!!),
removed the right-hand-side banner panels in order to reduce the width of the page.
UPDATE 11:
!!! --- Forum Architecture Updated --- !!!
Today we saw an opportunity to bring the Forum's architecture up to date and to
the newest version, so we took the site offline and upgraded it. There are many
changes, but these will be documented within the forum itself.
The most noticeable changes have been made the theme, giving greater emphasis to
friends and their activities, and there is also a new 'Groups' section, that we
have enabled for all registered users.
As the upgrade is new, you may experience some minor problems while using the forum,
please help us to minimise these instances by notifying us of them.
UPDATE 10:
!!! --- 200 Members Reached --- !!!
Today The-Port Forum saw it's 200th member, its been but a month since we saw our
100th member join, so it looks like the site is finally getting some exposure through
the search engines!
We would like to thank all of the members who contribute to the forum, and those
involved in building, and maintaining it - keep up the good work!!!
UPDATE 9:
All forum members have now been given file upload permissions, as we wish to grow
our database of files, so please upload all of your homebrew, freeware and other
files that may be of use to other memebers. Please also note that we do not wish
to have copyright material, or files that require a license... and we also accept
no resposibility for the integrity of any file uploaded or downloaded to or from
this server, and will not be held liable for damage or loss of data, all files are
used at your own risk!!!!
UPDATE 8:
Server hard disk failed on 12th Feb, little did i know until i went to log on to
the forum, realised that the power failure at the servers home the night before
had killed the box.
To top it all off none of my backups would restore, and hacking at the OS achieved
nothing, so i had to manually recover the files i needed to get the server, websites
and databases back online.
I have been wanting to upgrade the server hardware for a while and this was the
perfect opportunity, so the server is now running an AMD Athlon X2 Processor (one
of the 45W Environmentally Friendly ones), 2GB RAM i purchased 4GB, but 2GB sould
do for now as the old box only had a 1GB, the server also has a new AM2+ motherboard
with Hyper Transport 3.0 ready for a quad core processor (though i doubt it will
ever need one), and we have planted two 250GB SATAII hard disks, dont think the
forum will ever need that much capacity but why not at 12 pence per gig!!!
So the server is now running on new hardware and operating system installation,
please email me if you see any problems - jay@the-port.co.uk
UPDATE 7:
100 Members reached. Thanks to all of the members who have supported the forum and
helped get it off the ground. We thought we should mark the 100 members point as
special... though not as special as 1000 ;)
eBay To Go has now been fixed, not sure why it was broken as there was nothing on
the net about it, all i know is that it was down for longer than a month. Anyway,
now it is back we actually have some items on our
listings page. I like this little applet, gives you all the information
you need about items that a specific seller has listed, it shows their feedback,
lisintg end times, and it links to the sellers ebay page, for more detailed information.
We are currently averaging 150 hits per day, this has been pretty much stable for
2 months, we feel that we have reached the limit that posting links will achieve
so it looks like alternative methods will need to be adopted. If you have a website
and you like what we are doing please link to the-port forum, we appreciate all
links and can link back to your site from our
links page.
UPDATE 6:
Updated the main landing page, as in put some real information on there, besides
this update section, this should to give the site a better identity, and better
inform users as to the point of it all!
Created a PS3 Games forum under the PS3 forum, to separate games from general PS3
hardware discussions, it was felt that PS3 Games and all of the other console forums
should be navigable in the same way and have the same layout, after all the Xbox
has a games section. We did not break this down into further sections as there are
currently no posts to fill them.
We sourced a new server, as the current one is a little dated, and as such consumes
astronomical ammounts of electricity being on 24/7. The new server will have a 45W
AMD Sempron processor and a 'Green' hard disk, we could opt for an all singing all
dancing all power consuming Quad Core processor, but the server does not require
this ammount of power and it would only make matters worse in terms of power usage.
The newer processor also has better idle power management than the temporary Celeron
processor that remains 2 years on ;) One of the other considerations is the noise
of the server, by reducing the power requirements of the processor, it sould run
a little cooler and hence not require massive cooling fans, a passive heatsink may
do the trick even.
eBay To Go is broken for some reason so our listings page is currently not displaying
any of our favourite items... thanks ebay, we dedicate a page to your new thingy
and it don't work!!!
UPDATE 5:
We recently promoted two of the forum members to Administrator positions, these
were Gareth_25.05.05 and Baza, congratulations both.
We also felt that the Le Parkour and Darts sections in the Sport Port forum
were not seeing much interset and as such were deleted, if you were planning to
use these sections please inform us and we will resurrect them.
Gareth_25.05.05 also created his first forum in the Sport Port section
for boxing, fights, fighters and clubs, we will see if this one sees some action
;)
UPDATE 4:
Created four forum sections under the computer forum, these are: Hardware, Software,
Games and Peripherals as before this was a mixed bag of computer related posts,
we feel they now have a clearer identity, and a clearer path as to where different
items should be posted.
UPDATE 3:
The forum sections have been jiggled about a little, so that posts are located under
the correct topics. We also nested a few of the forums, mainly console related ones,
so now they are separated into groups for each console.
We moved all of the forum related forums; Forum Updates and Announcements, Member
Introductions, How Did You Find Us and Frequently Asked Questions And How-To's into
a new section called 'Forum Port'
The gadgets section no longer contains any console related posts, it also has a
separate section for mobile phones, and will soon have one for portable media players.
We added a section for the ladies under general, so you can talk about girlie stuff.
We think that these changes will help members find the things they are looking for
a little easier, while arranging forums and posts appropriately, we will try and
keep on top of it now!!!
UPDATE 2:
Added a Newport History section to the Newport forum. We require
a number of historians to make centralising Newport's history here possible. The
aim here is to make available to the general public all of the history surrounding
Newport.
"Snooker and Pool" section -- Requires experts!!!
"Poker" section -- Requires experts!!!
UPDATE 1:
Added an Adventures section to the gallery, this new section contains
the following galleries currently:
- Tenby August June 2007
- Faliraki June 2007
- America Januray 2007 - Motorshow
- America Februray 2006
- Minehead May 2006
- Minehead November 2006
Also modified the Cars gallery permissions so all members can post
their car images, so get posting some images, we want to see all your car pictures.
Changed the layout of the thumbnails on galleries that fall under The-Port.co.uk
and Adventures sections, this is so more images are displayed on each page,
reducing the number of pages for large galleries.
SITE 100% COMPLETE:
Launched the The-Port.co.uk Forum
inside the new The-port.co.uk Website, which is basically an entry page to the forum.
Backed-up old site, just in case i ever want to bring it back to life, oh, and i
may need the pictures.
Edited old pages in order to keep old links active, and placed a link to the new
site on each.
Deleted content that was no longer required by the new site.
Published new site and uploaded to me web server.
SITE 90% COMPLETE:
Completely trashed the old site, would have taken ages to move it all over to asp.net,
and having to add members, pictures and videos manually was a pain in the proverbial.
The old content maybe added to the forum, if i get the time!!!
Created links to all of the available locations on the forum.
SITE 0.5% COMPLETE:
Decided it was high time that The-Port.co.uk got a long overdue face lift, this
iteration of my first website (i know it's easy to tell, it's shite) will be written
in ASP.NET with a little help from my friends the AJAX extensions for ASP.NET.
The overall colour scheme will remain the same, mainly blues and white, but i have
decided to change the layout of the page somewhat. I will be scrapping the left
hand navigation panel, lets face it most of my sites got that and i'm getting tired
of it.
- Started on layout which is about 95% finalised.
- Created logo section which will house... um, the logo, and login controls, i forgot
my password and registration links.
- Updated the "THE-PORT" logo, and gave it a hover animation, dropped that in the
logo section, oh, and linked it to the home page.
- Added register, and forgot password
links to the logo section and positioned in the top-right corner.
- Added a horizontal navigation bar under the logo section, which currently has the
following links:
- HOME - Link to the home page, duh.
- FORUM - Link to
the forum, which will discuss all thing Newport and not.
- MEMBERS - Link to the
member profiles page, list all member profiles.
- GALLERY - Link to
the gallery, pictures uploaded by members.
- LINKS - Link to the links page which contains links.
- Created basic page with title for each of the above pages, save the forum as this
is already established on the old site.