Getting More Involved

It's now well over 2 years since I joined the Society for Popular Astronomy and started to get involved, as a user, with their BB.

A little later on in 2005 there was a problem with the SPA website and, more by accident than design, I lent Jeff Stevens a hand with figuring out what had gone wrong. As part of that process I ended up being made an moderator on the BB and then, a short while later, got bumped up to administrator status.

After that I got to helping out with little bits of HTML hacking for the main site and even knocked together a couple of "fun" pages outside of the main content (first was the BB user map and, some time later, the astronomical event timeline).

Recently Jeff has had other demands on his free time and, sadly, found that he needed to step down as the SPA webmaster. It was suggested that I might like to step into the role. Well, I accepted and, as of last Saturday's SPA council meeting, it seems I'm officially an officer of the SPA.

It's quite exciting and daunting all at the same time. It also feels a little odd too. As a child I was a member of the Junior Astronomical Society (as the SPA was called then) and, to a young lad living in York, those grown-ups all the way down in London seemed very remote — now I'm one of them!

Jeff will be a hard act to follow (same goes for Paul Sutherland who was the webmaster before Jeff) and I hope I can manage to serve the society as well as he did.