FOCUS on this website
Focus is our newsletter, free to members as a paper document if they want it. (The editor of Focus is Bill Chadband, of course, and he also writes many of the articles). From now on, it is also being published on this website as a PDF version, for online viewing or downloading and perhaps printing.
Each edition of Focus comprises a set of articles written by various people over a period of a month or two. These articles include competition results, notices and news, meeting reports, committee reports, etc. Each of them should already have been published on this website (in the blog and the news archive) soon after it was written. But some people prefer to read and/or save a collection of articles, and so want complete Focus editions. Making these available via this website is an optional (and cheaper) alternative to the paper version.
This Notice announces the first of these PDF editions - the August 2009 edition. In future, there will be a blog item to announce each Focus edition and provide a link to it. It will be uploaded about the same time that the paper edition becomes available. Earlier PDF versions will remain available in the news and blog archives page.
Some history
Focus used to be published on this website as complete editions (one per web-page), up to November 2004.
From April 2003, individual articles were published soon after they were written, initially as well as the full Focus edition, then after November 2004 as the only way articles were published on the website.
News publication was modified by creation of the "Members area" in August 2006, when a major improvement was to split the articles into categories: "Committee reports", "Notices and news", "Meeting and events reports", "Member's competition results", etc.
In January 2009, the blog replaced the Members area page as the method of announcing news articles. It continues to use approximately the same categories. So anyone wanting to see Focus articles soon after they are written should read the blog frequently, at least once per week and even up to 2 or 3 times per week. Later, those articles will be published again as part of PDF Focus editions.
(The blog also includes items that are not published in Focus because they have a short useful life, or primarily identify changes to the website itself such as new galleries).