I wrote my reply to Jim in a bit of a hurry, so maybe i should point a few things out so this dosnt sound as dodgy as it might look, so with that in mind this is aimed
jim and those who asked or were asked to take part.
First i think i should explain to Jim out of respect for him.
We hve a main company site that is back under reconstruction, this is a aite dedicate to everything alternative energy wise we do, its under reconstruction because 99% of it was open to the public, alot like here i guess the content in the blog posts was short articles on alternative energy news and bio methane developments in the industry. These post were then pushed out onto twitter etc to gain a profile, so in all respects normal small business marketing.
We also have some sites based around soap and bodycare stuff, again aimed at things we can put out regularly to social media to raise the profile. The soap/bodycare side we dont push very much at the moment. The customers we have take care of most of the production capacity we have, so that is being increased slowly. Also the next step is actually the American market, the problem is/was making sure we were compliant with both markets, which to be honest has proved difficult because we make a artisan bespoke product.
Back to the energy side, this takes alot of money and research to do, so the soap helps with that. The main site for it is being redone so we can move all the private and confidential stuff like invoice etc (we do all accounting online) is being moved to the main site and secured. Also with have a very large library of scientific papers and relevant literature, this is held in software online dedicated to that kind of thing (pydio8). It allows us to share documents securely with people and to organize and store the paperwork (mostly we are paperless).
We added a customer Q&A type forum, similar to a help desk type thing.
The new site is actually intended for the latest project we are designing, its always been closed to the main internet. Alot of volunteers with different skill sets offered to help with parts of the project ( this is the one with the control system and reactors i posted about), but the site also had the customer side to it, and the SCADA logins (incase someone dosnt know the acronym, SCADA is Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition).
It allows us to log directly into the control systems of both the experiments and the live systems we have running. Because people from several sites and people i have met at uni and conferences, wanted to help with the new system (most have kindly done so for free, we only have a few paid staff) we decided to use the closed site for working on this, as part of it we have decided to have a forum for brain storming and information sharing, we tried with the simple blog comments type system and it gets massively confusing.
Because its grown as a project and now more people including potential customers have access, we got concerned with the security of some of the other things on the server, hence why both sites are being redone.
One will have a public side but also a secure bit (our main site) and the new site is non public and really just dedicated to the new system we are designing, only the closed site will have a forum. So those on here who offered to help are waiting for access, we cant do that until the person going most of the dev work on the sites has moved things etc. So its not secret squirrel sinister, its simply a site with a single purpose and little to offer the general public.
By all means if you want to help in some way we would welcome those with skills we can use, but there isnt much to see as such, those working on say the microbe cells, only really see and have access to that side, those helping sort a coolant problem see mainly that side of it. Everyone sees the main experiment feeds and data but cant control it. Its a bit like watching a fish tank but with bubbles lol, only it isnt set up and running yet as we havnt finished working out all the modules............
So to those waiting for log ins, sorry its taking a while to move things and making stuff secure Lyndsey is doing that side and making a site you read from a phone upto a wide screen pc is not easy or quick!
So hopefully that explains what its all about, anything of general interest or electronic related i tend to post here anyway.