About This Website

Work started on the Brass Band Portal in 1996, since then it has evolved into the site that you see today. Most of the input is owned by Nigel Horne, however he is by no means the only contributor (see the vacancies page for a list of the other contributors and how you can join up).

For the technically minded

The site www.bandsman.co.uk is currently hosted by on a computer running the Apache web server on Debian Linux. The site consists of two sets of pages, static HTML pages that are written using FrontPage 2000 on PC running Windows XP Professional; and dynamic pages that are written in the Perl computer language and were developed on a computer running Red Hat Linux.

Computer was donated by David Morris of Chapeltown Band and Diego d'Ambra of the ClamAV® team on behalf of Softcom. These servers and run the search engine, a mirror for the portal, the website hosting service for bands and an NNTP server. It can be accessed at nntp.bandsman.co.uk. This computer is a P166 with 64Mb of RAM and runs the Apache server running under Red Hat Linux version 8.0. Finally, this machine acts as the virus and spam scanner for users with a free bandsman e-mail account.

Unlike many websites, we consider testing to be important. We do not demand that you run "xyz" operating system, "abc" browser, set your monitor in 10000x2000 pixels or view the connection over a T1 Internet link. We test the website so that YOU take control, not us. To this end we test with:

Browsers

Internet Explorer (versions 4, 5 and 6), Mozilla (1.1), Netscape (6 and 7), Konqueror(2 and 3), Netpositive(2.2.1)

Operating Systems

BeOS, Windows (95, 98, XP), Linux (x86 and PPC), MacOS 10.1, FreeBSD (4.7/x86)

Monitors

14", 15", 17", laptop and widescreen laptop

Connections

ADSL, 56k dialup

All dynamic pages are also run through the tidy program to check for HTML compliance and are tested using the Apache web server running on a GNU/Linux program and occasionally on a Microsoft IIS server running on Windows XP Professional.

If you find something that doesn't work please tell us, unlike other sites we don't blame you choosing what we call the "wrong" browser, we take the blame for not testing it properly.

Search Engine

InterWebsearch, the computer software that drives the search engine at search.bandsman.co.uk, searches and indexes many brass band sites. The software that does this is available, please contact us to get a copy. It can easily be tailored for any intranet or set of internet sites.

Tickertape server

A ticker tape server using the RSS and RDF technologies is now being tested to bring brass band news to your desktop. If you're running Windows, download a viewer such as Headline Viewer. Click on settings->providers->new, then fill in:

Name: The Brass Band Portal
Data URL: http://www.bandsman.co.uk/brass-band.rdf
Site URL: http://www.bandsman.co.uk
Image URL: http://www.bandsman.co.uk/favicon.ico
Category: General/Music

Then click OK. Open culture->music in the top left, then click on The Brass Band Portal in the bottom left and you're away. I would like to hear about better tickertape viewers if anyone knows of any.

I have heard reports that Google Reader, Feedreader and Wildgrape Newsdesk work, and that Trillian Professional will also talk to the server with their news plug-in, however this software is not free.

If you're running KDE on Linux or UNIX, start up knewsticker and point it to http://www.bandsman.co.uk/brass-band.rdf, set the icon to http://www.bandsman.co.uk/favicon.ico, and you'll get all the latest Brass Band news fed to your desktop!

If you're running Evolution on Linux or UNIX, you can add the brass band news to your summary page via Tools->Summary Preferences->News Feeds. Click on "Add News Feed" enter "Brass Band News" and http://www.bandsman.co.uk/brass-band.rdf, click on "OK" then "Add".

If you're using Firefox, you may find that the Sage plug-in is better than the built in RSS support.