NORDELPH COMMUNITY WEBSITE -- AUGUST 2006
If you have found this page from a search engine, and cannot see an index frame to the left and a pictorial header above, click on www.nordelph.org to load the page correctly.
Village Fun Day, 2006
Well, it happened! The weather on the scheduled date, August 12th, was pretty dire and the organisers wheeled out 'Plan B', which was to delay everything by 24 hours. And the weather cooperated!
We have a full report of the festivities -- with lots of pictures -- on other pages of this website. If you go to Raft Race: Before the Start you'll begin the sequence at the start, and can follow links at the foot of each page through the Youth Race, Adult Race and Fun Day.
You may want to download the pictures and print some out. Normally, we make this easy for you by offering a larger higher resolution version if you click on the photo -- the ones on these pages are lower resolution and pretty small, to make downloading faster. However, since we've uploaded some 60+ photos this month, we didn't want to clutter up our web server with an enormous batch of large media files. If you want a printable version of any of these photos, just e-mail us at the usual address info@nordelph.org, and we'll send you a copy! And if you want to navigate to the Fun Day pages in the future, you'll find them indexed under 'Events Past'.
We really ought to thank the organisers for doing so much work on behalf of us all. Strangely, they haven't retired hurt yet, but are actively considering 2007! There will be a meeting on Wednesday 30th August at 7.00 pm in the Village Hall to discuss next year's raft race and to consider whether any other events are needed. Anyone is welcome!
The bit at the top ...
You may wonder what the 'advice' at the head of this page is all about. It's an immediate response to an e-mail we got the other day, which hints at a potentially vast unsatisfied audience out there. Our correspondent was doing some family research, and had used the search engine Google to look for Nordelph-related pages. The one he settled on was the May 2006 Home page. However, Google had referred him to just one of the three frames that make up the page that (hopefully) you're looking at now -- together with index and heading. [If you need to be reminded of how the site works, start with why change? in our 'Web Matters' section.]
By fortunate coincidence, the May home page used its 'advice strip' at the head of the page to remind first-time visitors how the tabs and index worked -- so our e-mailer was aware that he couldn't see what he was meant to. We sorted out the problem at once, by directing him to the 'correct' web address, but we're stuck with the problem. Potentially, a browser could find themselves on any of the pages in this site (over 600 by now) but without the wrap-around navigation provided by the indexes and tabs. The advice above is an immediate reaction, but it will only catch people entering at this month's home page. We could amend every single one of our 'main content pages so that it began with the same advice -- or we could put a less obtrusive 'home' button on every page. The trouble is that this is an enormous amount of non-automatable work. We think we'll just go and lie down.
Wurzelstift!
The anecdote above reflects one of the real bonuses of being your webmaster. You get interesting e-mails from people who are interested in us and our village. You'll recall Tom Boltz from the US who began such an exchange of e-mails and ended up writing a History of the Lyon Family for the site. And our first e-mailer from abroad was Ronald Willson who has provided us with much material over the two years we've been in existence. These enquiries are usually so interesting that we've decided to share them with you. Another correspondent this summer has been Richard Giles, another ex-resident, now living in Germany. Click on his name to read about our exhange (which we've filed in 'Nordelph Past' mostly because there's no more room in the 'Nordelph Present' index! And reading it might make clear what our heading actually means ('root canal post', actually!)
Fen Food
This update celebrates the completion of a year's worth of our 'vegetable of the month' feature, supplied by Ian Massingham (who is also advertised under 'Organic Fruit & Vegetables' in our 'Trade Directory' section). Many locals will know Ian's Friday market stall in Downham. Our own vision of what this might be was a steadily-building catalogue of the staple produce of this area of the Fens. In the technical sense that everything that's been featured -- and photographed -- has been local, this claim is substantiated. But our expectation that we'd be focusing on 'normal' plants has been shaken several times in the year, and not least this month! Our vegetable for August is chilli pepper! If you click on the immediately previous link, you'll discover the scientific unit for heat of chillies and why they're mildly addictive. As well as the vegetable page itself, we've updated the what's in season feature of the vegetable master page -- the link on this page takes you directly to this month's entry; approaching through the 'Fen Food' entry in the index takes you to the top of the page.
And the rest ...
Remember that we had a partial update earlier in the month -- as well as the timetable for the Fun Day (which was then in the future), we loaded the Church services for August into September and the Minutes of the May 2006 Parish Council meeting.
We had some more material planned for this update, by the rescheduling of the Fun Day put our timetable adrift. We'll be back in September with more items.
But a couple of the items held over were more 'Favourite Images'. This is now quite a healthy collection of photographs for you to study and only after clicking on them, find out why they're important to the photographer. There seem to be two main strands -- 'beautiful' photographs, where the photographer has either worked hard for a particular effect, or achieved it almost by accident; and 'personal' photographs that may not be technically accomplished, but which have a special meaning that the photographer is willing to share. Since many of you will have been away on holiday over the summer, now would be a good time to look through your photos and see if there's something that you'd like to contribute -- just e-mail it to info@nordelph.org as an attachment in any format, together with a brief note of why this photo's important to you.