Are you from Newport are you wondering why you don't ever hear about Newport apart from reading the ARGUS !!! Are You sick and tired of reading the VOICE MAGAZINE with constant pages of ads whilst flicking through ? If the Answer is YES you should join The-Port, your community discussion board. We can bring the latest Newport news right to your home just one click away :)
These are few of the KEY Things The-Port can offer to you our valued members and fellow town's folk:
In to skate boarding, blading, or BMX then visit the Skate Extreme Group and discuss and upload picture's and video. Our sport section is pretty thin at the moment so if you have a club or team... boxing, karate, judo, football, etc and want to let people know where you are, when you meet, or just show off your competition pictures then we would like to take it under our wing.
We can provide a dedicated site for your club under the-port umbrella, you will benefit from the large number of both members and new visitors that frequent the-port on a daily basis all from the Newport area. In addition we will work closely with you to tailor your page, so it looks exactly as you wish, all this for the small price of your time.
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. We will even create a link back to your website from your group, again all that is required is your time.
This site is created for the community of Newport and wales. As a member your feedback is really appreciated, if you think the site is not up to scratch or it 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 !!!
We are currently a Small Community of about 200 members but hope to grow and expand the site to bigger and better things, we can do it with your contribution. For any enquiries please contact one of our team:
admin@the-port.co.uk
gavin@the-port.co.uk
jay@the-port.co.uk
Yours sincerely:
The Port Team.
We can upgrade your account to a blogger account, which gives you your own blogging space, maybe to keep a diary or for tech talk, whatever your blogging requirements, you can do it here.
All upgraded accounts give you a new badge on your profile which identifies to other users the types of things you can do on the site... and ultimately your status!
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.
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.