[Coco] New tandy Website

[Brian Blake]

On 1/25/2013 11:53 PM, Jimmy Scott wrote:
> I am not discrediting these web sites or the CoCo Mailing list, but there
> were 100's of tandy products made and I own a mix of them. Many websites
> aren't updated regularly and/or a 10 year old geo-cities style mess. I am
> proposing a full blown beautiful website devoted to Tandy products.
>

Jimmy,

I'm not trying to dissuade you in any way from doing this. However, the 
history of my website may be of use to you.

My site initially began as a project to hone my HTML skills (still have 
a lot to learn), but, grew from four basic pages to what it is today. 
Perfect? Not by a long shot. Complete? Not by a long shot. I created the 
forum, at the encouragement of a few other CoCo enthusiasts when 
coco3.com changed from a forum to a Word Press format. I would say the 
activity level didn't live up to the expectation I had when asked to 
create the forum; I never expected it to supplant coco3.com or the 
mailing list and that was not the intent.

When I initially created the forum over on tandycoco.com, I included a 
separate section for Model I, III & IV, as well as the Tandy PC 
variants. During the first six months, not one single post to those 
sections was ever made. So I changed them around a little bit to their 
current format (Apple, Atari, etc...), and still, not one single post 
has been made to that section. The forum was mentioned several times on 
the CoCo mailing list, coco3.com and the TRS-80 Yahoo group, as well as 
existing in my signature on Atari Age.

In fact, out of the 164 members, only 62 members have posted anything at 
all, and a good number of those fall under the less than five post count 
category - of which only 19 people have exceeded 5 posts. Granted, some 
of the single posters were spam and have been banned...

The same thing happened to Cris Egger's website a few years back. He was 
quite active in the CoCo scene; he had a fairly popular website and had 
a blog site dedicated to CoCo collecting. He created a forum that 
received little to no traffic. Again, I'm not trying to dissuade you 
from creating an ultimate Tandy/TRS-80 website. Just make sure you 
temper your expectations with a realistic goal, as the active 
Tandy/TRS-80 people do seem to prefer a mailing list to an actual forum. 
Maybe it's due to ease of use - it's easier to check your email than to 
remember to go look at a forum; maybe there's just no need for another 
CoCo specific site; I can't say for sure.

Whatever you choose to do, good luck with it!!!


Brian