MEMRR Club Blog

In early summer of last year, I noticed that our club website no longer displayed memrr content. Instead, it redirected to the Johnson City Railroad Experience website. It seems that during the move from the ETSU building to JCRE in 2023-2024, the website stopped being maintained. Cutting to the chase, a revamped quick and dirty memrr.org website went back into operation on August 24th, 2025. Not unlike the museum layouts, work continues on getting the website layout and content just right. Using the waybackmachine, numerous links from the old site are being tested and put on the current links page if they are still working properly.

The club website was first published in 2007 using mostly html markup language. This coincided with ETSU becoming our club's home. The internet was a different animal back then because most people accessed websites from their desktop or laptop computers. Smartphones were a novelty and less than 1% of web traffic was originating from mobile devices. Since less variation existed in screen sizes, little consideration was given to how web pages looked on smaller devices. As the years passed, more people browsed and shopped with their phones which let to websites becoming more complex. Styling plugins to accommodate the change in behavior were developed for website content management systems and frameworks. Simpler static html sites have been being updated to database driven interactive apps that generate pages on the fly based on added content and choices by visitors.

Given the fact that more personal data and money is exchanged over the internet gives unscrupulous actors motivation to harvest the data for nefarious purposes. The privacy and security aspects of this are often overlooked but should be concerning to even for hobby sites like ours…  To be continued.