Author: Brian Neale

The latest copy of The Journal (October 2024) is now available online. You can see a list of all available online copies of The Journal here.

Online back issues of The Journal now go back to 1967.

I am sorry that the web site has not been available over the Christmas holiday period. I did a small amount of maintenance work just before Christmas and although I tested it and left it in working order, shortly afterwards something happened that took us over the permitted disk usage quota and the site was automatically taken offline. This also meant that I was unable to get to the management dashboard to correct the problem and have had to wait until our service provider restarted normal office hours today (2nd January). I believe that normal service has now been resumed, and I am sorry for the interruption.

Our service provider is investigating why I lost access to the site management facilities and once this is resolved, I hope that the situation will not happen again.

Webmaster, 2^nd January 2024

You may have noticed that the Events Calendar has been blank for the second half-year. This is because of problems with the software we have been using to store and display it. We have now changed the software we use and the second half-year has been populated. There are one or two small bugs still to be ironed out but these should not affect the basic functions; please bear with us while these are resolved. However, we felt it better to have a slightly imperfect but functional calendar than none at all – our apologies for the delay in making this available.

Please send any observations or reports of problems to webmaster@sm-ee.co.uk – it is notoriously difficult to spot all the errors in your own work and comments and suggestions are welcome.

You can find information on publications available directly from SMEE on the new SMEE Publications page.

The SMEE competition rules have recently been updated and the latest version can be found here.

Thanks to the sterling work of Mike Tilby and Chris Hammerton, we have now completed the process of making stored copies of The Journal searchable. This means that if you download them as PDF files, you can use your PDF viewer (Adobe Acrobat Reader for most people although other readers are available!) to search for specific words or phrases.

Chris is also looking at possible ways to add an index to the set of online Journals to make them even more useful. 

Subject to any new coronavirus restrictions in 2022, Society General Meetings, Rummage Sales and other meetings will be at Marshall House. Where possible we will also live stream the meeting online via Zoom, allowing members the choice to attend in person or to participate online. For security reasons, Zoom links are not online but will be sent via e-mail.

The Society’s Training Programme for newcomers to the hobby will resume this year, with the Basic Training course starting in February. Details are on the training pages.

The workshops are now open, subject to Covid restrictions. Online meetings of the Digital Group and Engine Builders’ Groups are also continuing as normal.

Following a period of restrictions. the Society of Model and Experimental Engineers (SMEE) is planning to run its popular training courses for newcomers to model engineering, in 2022, starting in February. See our training page for more details.

This web site has now been moved to a new server platform, which we hope will fix a number of  the long-running problems that we have been experiencing. In particular, you should now be able to get notifications for new forum postings, and the password change mechanism should be working again. I am optimistic that the other changes will be invisible to you – it should just work! However, this will give us the opportunity to introduce some new features.

It is possible that a few things have been broken during the transition, so if you see anything odd, or you find something that does not seem to be working, please contact me so that I can investigate.

Many thanks,

Brian

webmaster@sm-ee.co.uk

Thanks to the good offices of Mike Tilby, the online collection of back issues of The Journal now goes back to 1976, and right up to the latest version hot off the press (April 2021). Many thanks to Mike for his work in scanning back copies which are now easily available to all of us via the web site.

The index to the list of available issues of The Journal is available HERE.