Q:A lot of people feel that the Medalist Club web site is as good as any gymnastic web site there is, even those that are run by universities. How many "technical people" are involved with the production of this site?

A:Well, I certainly appreciate those people having something nice to say about the site. As far as who works on it, well I pretty much do all of the technical work on the site. In the early days of the page, it was kind of difficult to get people to contribute information for me to post; that got to be kind of frustrating at times. However, now there are several people who regularly contribute information for us to post.

Q:How did you come to be interested in gymnastics? Were you a college gymnast or something?

A:(Laughing) No, no, I have never been a gymnast. And, I hesitate to say this, but I am not the biggest fan in the world right now. I basically "got interested" when I was a student at UA and the professor for whom I was working gave me the assignment. Of course, as time has passed, I actually have developed an interest in the sport. But as far as being able to tell you what various moves on the equipment are, well that ain't me.

Q:Do you ever go to other gymnastic sites to "check out the competition"? And if so, how do you think the Medalist Club stacks up.

A:Sure, but I mainly look at other booster club sites for ideas. According to feedback I've gotten from some of our visitors our site compares very favorably. In fact, I've had our site compared to some of the official University sites, which are maintained by large web development departments with large budgets. Our web development budget is $0.00 last time I looked. :-)

Q:What kind of "tools" do you use in doing the work for the web site? Microsoft Front Page? Macromedia Dreamscape? Photoshop? Poser?

A:Naw, I never use that junk <grin>. I use perl, a text editor, and my trusty ftp client. For the occasional graphic I use PaintShopPro. For file management I use Windows Commander. All of this is freeware/shareware and much less expensive (and better) than those other packages you mentioned. Windows Commander is a special favorite of mine.

Q:Kind of two questions in one here: (1) what do you think your "viewers" like the most about the web site, and (2) what is the most challenging part of the site technically?

A:According to nightly stats reports, out most popular feature is the "Chat Room" followed by the Photo Albums" and the Gymnasts' "Bio" pages. The most technically challenging part of this site is the perl scripting I do in order to minimizing the time spent in maintaining the site. I should point out that along with the new format of this site, I have rewritten my scripts and added bunch of new ones that should make maintenance much simpler.

Q:Where do you get ideas for some of the things on the site? I mean, you have to decide what kind of info to post, how to run the chat room, etc.

A:I don't...meaning I do not originate any of the information. I am completely dependent on Medalist Club members to supply me with things to post. If the information comes in, I post it, in fact, I take no responsibility for the correctness of the information on this web site...that's your job as fans. This is a booster club (i.e. a fan club) after all.

The upshot of this is that we are in need of dependable volunteers to provide us with regular information (news stories, photos, corrections, updates, featured items, interviews, TV schedules, etc. etc.) We have a few very fine folks helping now, but they could use some help.

Q:If someone wants to get involved with the web site, could they, and how?

A:The person to talk to is Pooh Bear, who is the guy that really runs this site. This site was his baby from the start. (I'm just the tech guy - Pooh makes the hard decisions). Pooh can be reached:

• Email: poohbear@gymtide.com

Q:What is the biggest scare you have had running the site?

A:Well as you know, in the past 2 weeks I have been performing major surgery on our web site. There isn't a page that has not been affected. A major undertaking. Well, it is usually my habit to regularly back up my work (any experienced computer user knows the reason for this -- accidental deletions, viruses and trojans, harddrive crashes, etc.) Anyway for some reason, I failed to think of making these usual backups. Can you see where this is leading? (Yes, you can). Well, last Friday night, right when I had completed 95% of the work on the new site, I ran a piece of software that wiped out the entire web site, bypassing the trash can.

Fortunately, I knew how to handle the situation. I changed nothing, booted to DOS, got out my command line disk tools (Norton Utilities and others) and cautiously (and painstakingly) recovered each of the 2500 or so files. By 6:30AM Saturday, I had finished. I spent an hour or two checking things out and had the beta test site back on line. If any of our beta testers couldn't reach the site that night, now they know why...the site had ceased to exist.

Q:I heard that the "Online With the Pattersons" was pretty cool. How did you get that to run? Can you give us a kind of behind-the-scenes view?

A:Actually, that was fairly simple to implement. For our Chat Room, we use a free perl script from Matt's Script Archive. I simply altered and setup another copy of this script. We then asked the Pattersons and a few of the gymnasts over to our computer lab. Along with Pooh, Pat Huet and Segail (who facilitated matters by doing the actual typing) they answered questions coming in through this extra "chat room", by posting responses.