The Archive

It took a bit longer than planned, but the Skipr.net archive is now live.

We have the full collection of boat pages and position reports online. The main difference with the former site is that the maps are missing. Unfortunately, one of the ongoing issues with Skipr was the software maintenance required by the mapping displays. Evolving standards, platforms and licensing changes made life hard, and were some of the triggers which led to its "mothballing".

However, what we have here now are the full logs as entered by all boats since skipr.net started in 2005. Technology willing, I hope to keep this archive up for some years.

The State of Skipr.net

As foreshadowed early in 2019, we’ve closed skipr.net for further position reporting and existing accounts have been frozen.

Due to some unforeseen moves at Skipr’s hosting company, the forecast December change to skipr.net has been somewhat abrupt. However, we’re working on providing an archive of all users’ position reports, to be published online next month, January 2020.

[update 29 Feb 2020: we’re making progress, but it’s quite a lot of work and the archive won’t be up until some time in March ’20 – sorry!]

Of course you can obtain a position report listing any time and, along the way, provide some funding for the ongoing archiving of the site as described below.

Obtaining a full listing of position reports

Some people have asked me to provide a full download of position reports from their account.

Of course, all position reports are accessible online.

But if anyone would like a full download of all their position reports in the system, I’d be happy to supply that in return for a small contribution toward keeping the system online.

So if you’d like a “dump” of all your position reports, send me an email with your details and deposit $15 into our account to help with hosting costs for the site into the future. Bank account details are as follows:

Westpac Branch: 732-837
Account: 603181
Name: Joy Watson & Marius Coomans

So, the more people pay for position report “dumps”, the longer I can afford to keep the system online for everyone…

What happened?

I started building this site in late 2005 in anticipation of crewing on a friend’s boat to Hobart. My software development skills were (and are) limited, so I got much appreciated help from Steve Couch and my brother Herman to build the first and subsequent versions of skipr.net. While initially it was built for my own benefit, I opened it up to other sailors and, over time, thousand of boats joined the system.

While the site gets some ad revenue to help defray running costs, all of its development and maintenance was done pro-bono, just for the love of it.

Since its launch, technology has moved on. Boat crew have easy access to online services. Facebook and Twitter dominate the Social Media ‘space’. In 2011, Joy and I sold our boat and skipr.net has only received minimal maintenance. Its usage is dwindling without new features. Software has evolved over the past 10 years or so and consequently some aspects of the site no longer work as desired and the only remedy would involve a full re-write of the system. So. I’ve made the difficult decision to start planning its “demise”.

Because a number of loyal users still rely on the system, I want to give sufficient notice of its closure, so here is a time table:

1 September 2019 – No further new user registrations
1 December 2019 – No further user interaction ( no more position reports or edits )
1 January 2020 – New front page with access to archived information.

To be clear, Skipr.net may be used “as is” throughout the 2019 winter cruising season. At this stage, the exact format of the archive after 1 January remains to be determined, as well how long it will be available for.

Marius Coomans
mcoomans@activeweb.com.au