For the uninitiated, we had setup two groups on Yahoo for building this website. The group names and their purpose is described well in detail on the home page of this website. We started this project with great enthusiasm and emails were flowing back and forth with regularity. However, the enthusiasm dropped over a period of time and all activity for building this website came to a grinding halt.

The site activity also correspondingly dropped and this is evident from the gap in the posts / updates. Nothing after June!!!. I sent an email to the group to remind them of this project. At around the same time I also got in touch with Aniruddha Jinturkar who was also dormant for quite some time. He actively started canvassing the website on Orkut to generate some interest with some success. The traffic on the website grew rapidly. Some of the visitors registered themselves, but most of them just came and left without spending a lot of time on the website. And I don't blame them. The website has nothing to capture attention of the visitors and compel them to return. It has just become a placeholder for our institution's website which may or may not come up in future. In fact I had contemplated shutting down this website and getting my money back from Yahoo by deregistering the domain. But that wouldn't help anyone nor would it help us to build a website for our institution.

Coming back to my email, it elicited only ONE response from the core team. And nothing after that. I am so disappointed!!

So now I have decided to take matters in my own hands and here's what I am going to do moving forward. I will be posting here regularly; either on the weblog or elsewhere with content related to our school and college. That's all I can do sitting here in the US. The posts will be my memories of my days I spent in the school and college, some anecdotes about our institution, some facts that I know and can share with you guys. There will also be some remembrances of the teachers who taught me or had some impact on me. I don't have any pictures that I can put here so I will try my best to paint the picture with words only.

I request all of you to let me know if you like the content I am putting up on the website and give me suggestions on the content you would like to see. People who want to contribute can post here on the weblog or other areas by registering on the website. People who have already registered can start contributing right away. If anyone wants a private space (folder) on the website to publish their articles / thoughts, experiences then please let me know by posting a comment on the website or writing an email to the group.

Cheers!!

Aniruddha Jinturkar and I had a long chat on building our website. Based on our discussion we came up with the following plan and wanted to run through you guys. The list is prioritised based on what we felt was important and easily achievable. If we can show some small wins, I am sure we will be able to generate more interest and contribution from other people as well.

1. Collect and publish information about our school. History, progress through times, changes, growth etc. If we can get biographies of key members in the build-up of our school to its current status, like for example chairmen and trustees
2. Collect and publish lists of teachers starting from the current group going back to the first teachers. If we can put a small biography of each one, that would be super.
3. List down prominent students with their biographies. Starting with students who have gone on to become some famous personality and then drilling down to meritorious students of each year and then drilling down to each student as much as we can. This will take a lot of effort and coordination and is therefore at the bottom of list. This would be easily feasible once we get the community involved in this.

To assist in building the student database, we are building a spread sheet with names, contact numbers, email addresses, year they passed out from school / college and their current location. Many of you have registered on the website, but at this moment I don't have a mechanism to store the information on the website securely. My request to all you guys is to send me your and your friends' contact information containing the detail.

PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE THE INFORMATION ON THE WEBSITE. It is not secured and may be harvested. I don't want people to suffer. Instead, send the information in an email to me / group and we will update the spread sheet. We will also publish the numbers and possibly names of the people of who we have the details. So please take some time out and send us the details as much as you can.

CHEERS!!!