Building the New hscaggie.org

For years the club's website lived on a hosted membership platform. It held our roster and took dues payments, but the club never really owned it: page layouts were fixed, photos were locked into the vendor's galleries, and every year more of what the club wanted to publish had to be squeezed into someone else's template.

This year a club volunteer set out to change that. The goal was simple to say and slow to do: bring every part of the club's public life onto a site the club controls, without losing a single photo, event, or member record along the way.

The migration was the long part. Nearly a decade of gallery photos, dating back to the 2017 boating day, were pulled from the old platform and rehosted. Events, member rosters, payment history, and the scholarship archive followed. Every old page that search engines still know about forwards to its new home, so a link shared in 2023 still lands where it should.

The new site also does things the old one could not. Members get a portal showing their own club record. The board publishes news and photos through its own editor instead of a vendor's. And the whole thing runs on infrastructure the club can inspect, back up, and move, which is the quiet lesson of the project: owning your own corner of the internet is work, but it means nobody can take it out from under you.

There will be rough edges as the site settles in. When you find one, use the contact form. A volunteer reads every message.