Introduction - the Web Pages

During our 175th Anniversary Year, 1999-2000, we published these pages with updates every couple of weeks, depending on voluntary effort.

Since then things have slowed down a little, but there's a lot of interesting material here, if you have time to browse through. The list of older pages starts on the next page.

Each issue contains seven sections to give you information on the school and the pupils' activities. Click the mouse on the buttons above, or the bars at the side, to move from section to section.

The pages were published to publicise 2000/175 events, to make contact with former pupils around Scotland and around the world, and to let the pupils experiment with publishing to a wider audience including other schools. An after-school Web Club, led by a parent volunteer, met in the last two terms of the Anniversary Year to collect material and to help decide what to publish.

We made the pages up at home since most of the school's existing computers were old and not very fast. Now that we're at the end of the 175th Anniversary year, there's a chance to meet the past and present editors here.

You can link to our award sites from the front pages, but we've collected some of their reviews of our site, link here. There's a graph of site visits here.

If you'd like to help out with producing these pages, please contact the editor at HolmstonPS@dial.pipex.com

Our URLs - from September 2001 you can find the Holmston Web Pages on four sites -

Our new main address, www.holmston.com with registration and web space donated by Ann Cameron, now Knight, a pupil at Holmston from 1956-63.

Also, www.hz06.dial.pipex.com/holmston.htm - our main site from August 1999 to May 2001, web and e-mail services from a professional paid-for ISP, with the cost donated by a parent for the Anniversary year. The site was trouble-free for almost the entire 16 months.

We tried out three other sites, one seems to have gone out of business (NBC Internet in the USA). We'd be interested to know how you find the two remaining ones. Both are probably slower than the dial.pipex.com site, for readers in Britain, but they're free -

www.ourservers.net/holmstonps - web space donated free at Ohio State University in the USA - thanks, Robert!

This one closes sometimes if we don't use their telephone line often enough - but it should be there almost always - sites.ecosse.net/holmstonps - web space and limited e-mail services free and without advertisements from a Scottish ISP startup in Cromarty.

We'd hoped to sell a small amount of advertising on our pages, to raise money for 2000/175 events, to cover costs and perhaps to buy some computer equipment for the school. A mail-shot to all local businesses in the school catchment area got a nil result, though, even after follow-up by glamorous volunteers.

Local businesses were very generous to other 2000/175 events (see inside for details), but the Internet isn't widely used round here yet. There are no lastminute.coms in Ayrshire! After the Anniversary Year, we did get an enquiry about advertising by the "Ayrshire Post", but don't really have enough issues at the moment to justify it.

Thanks again, though, to Ann and Paul Knight of oshawa.auracom.com in Ontario, Canada, who've donated the cost of registering the "holmston.com" name, and are now storing our pages on their computers.

Why isn't the Internet widely used as a source of information by people in Ayr? We blame the phone company. Like former pupil Paul Scott who wrote to us in February 2001, we're concerned at the cost of making most phone calls in the UK, especially in south Ayrshire where there has been no active cable TV company. British Telecom now offer discounts on voice calls, and "flat rate" Internet services but only with their own limited set of Internet associates.

Omne, a cable TV startup company, has laid cables in parts of Ayr, but has now had financial problems and has gone into administration.

Pipex Dial, our UK provider, are offering advert-free "flat rate" services from October 2001 for just over £20 a month, and flat rate ADSL for the few subscribers close to the Ayr exchange, for about £24 a month. No low-cost voice calls, though. There's still room for improvement in the supply and take-up of Internet in south Ayrshire.

Your business could be here. Click for details.