Milwaukee Time Lords Blog

On August 26th, 1989, the Milwaukee Time Lords founded its private organization from a band of Renegade Time Lords, which was a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student club. (Non-students could be members, but not officers.) One of our founding members, Ed Hochman, obtained use of this residence hall meeting room at the Bradford Arms located in Milwaukee, so that we could begin with the business of establishing our club.

That evening, we agreed to the “Milwaukee Time Lords” as our club name. We named our club newsletter “The Relative Times” and our fanzine (no longer being published) “Qui To Time”. We had our initial by-laws drafted by our official parliamentarian, Christopher Cebula, also our official contact with our public television station, Channels 10/36. We had a board of five officers and a few committees established.

Then something happened that changed our business meeting to a Q&A panel meeting! Earlier that summer, Polariscon I in the Twin Cities, Minnesota featured two Doctor Who celebrities: Sylvester McCoy and John Levene. One of our members worked at the convention as a “gopher”. Connections were made and Mr. John Levene arrived as a guest at our club meeting!

Amazing! Right? How often does that happen? Here’s a photo taken and used in our club’s first newsletter. (Hence in black and white — better color submissions wanted!)

This is our 20th anniversary. We celebrated with a night out on a dinner cruise with Edelweiss from 7:45 pm to about 10:15 pm. The boat tour was very interesting and the food was excellent.

Here is my set of photos.

MTL Members: Tell your club memories here or join our blog and post your own stories. Let us know how you found us. If you attended the cruise, share your stories and photos here.

In the spirit of the lines exchanged in Doctor Who: Time Crash - All my love to long ago — and to the days yet to come. We’ve accomplished a very difficult challenge — keeping a science fiction club alive during the days of no new Doctor Who up through the current series. If anyone else has accomplished a continuous run for 20+ years in science fiction fandom, let us know!

Also thanks to the excellent service of Edelweiss Boat Tours. It was probably our best event in our 20 year history, next to our founding day surprise event.

As of this post, WordPress is installed on our server at Blue Host.  The procedure was very easy and quick.  I just had to download the WordPress files, change one file, create a MySQL database and then upload the WordPress files to the Blue Host server.

Having the blog on our server will enable customization and quicker downloads of pages.

Older posts are at our old web-based blog.  I don’t see a way of importing the old posts.  If there is a way to do this, please let me know.

We could still use the web-based account.  Anyone interested in becoming an MTL blog pool admin, please let me know and I will transfer all rights to you.  The web version can be accessed anywhere and allows more than one writer.

The web version should have a different name.  Perhaps a special blog devoted to a specific topic of your choosing.

Respond with your ideas and suggestions.

I have spent today editing our site.  My main goal is to increase activity and make the site a resource for you the member.

MAIN PAGE

I have retired the Tardis image that was on the upper left menu.  When I clicked it, I found that it opens the file directory of our site (not good).  I have replaced it with the Java clock, which I had before below our main page logo.

I have replaced the gray ads with Amazon cloud keyword field.  It’s half size because it takes some time to load.  It uses page text to find related keywords.  There’s room for more ads.  If you have a favorite product to recommend, I’ll look it up at Amazon and post an ad.

I have edited the left menu with a new indented style.  There are four main categories:  info about the club, communications pages, submissions by members and external links pages.  This blog is accessed with the “Communications” link.  The left menu could be a little wider.  I would like a different, more gradual style.  If I used the script version, I could have full control of the blog page and put other content.  Many sites use the blog as the main page.  (such as Bad Astronomy, as an example)

I changed the main page introduction to relate more to our club and its mission.  The second paragraph covers a broader concern that the industry continues to deliver us programming we enjoy viewing.   We can be a part of that by working to grow our club and attract “online-only” fans while taking advantage of “new media” resources we could only dream about in our early days.

DATALINK

I reconfigured the latest Datalink with an Amazon ad and placed the news text within a table.  The text is now nicely separated from the left menu.  The news column is the place to put context ads with all those keywords to grab onto.

LINKS

I have reconfigured the links page.  External links take lots of extra time to manage because they are other people’s sites, which can disappear, leaving broken links that have to be removed.  It is one of the best resources of a website because it’s a convenient list of sites to visit.  I have refined the categories a bit and reordered them. There are new ads.  Two that caught my eye while looking for Doctor Who products to display are a new Doctor Who guide and a John Barrowman book.

Please try out the site today and see what works for  you.

Milwaukee Time Lords Website