Who runs this site

The short answer is one person in Melbourne/Sydney, Austalia. This site is created by a graduated 'Masters by Research' student Carolena Helderman as part of a Masters by project taken at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia.

Created is defined in design, concept, managment and maintenance of the HIV/AIDS Positive Stories site. All stories and material are copyright to the authors and they are a big part in creating this site.

The Masters is over now but somehow l can't end this website. l suddenly realised the other day that l may never stop this web site! When people write and express how the stories have given them support, a voice and have been so important....well it becomes hard to just stop their voice.

About the site

It has now been over 10 years since l decided to start my Masters at RMIT and create a project based on HIV and AIDS. Many things have changed in that time from HIV/AIDS itself to how technology and the Web has changed.
Initially this project was to be on CD Rom with a very different idea in mind. I'm very glad that l chose for it to be online as one of the most rewarding things and which gives me a drive to keep it going, is your response via email and the many stories which have been sent.

In 2004 a new part of the site was added. Thanks to an organisation in Australia called AusShowbiz, l received a grant to create a section targeted at youth. So many teens and youth visit this site and l thought it appropriate to add a Quiz section which will hopefully teach you more about HIV and AIDS. When l ran a survey on the site, so many of you said that you wanted to see a Quiz on the site.

The site gets over a half of a million hits per month which averages between 22,000 - 32,000 visitors per month.
Results show that users would like mailing lists, chat and an educational Quiz. I will be working towards granting all these wishes.
Due to the popularity of the site, the current account charges could notbe met. This site used over 5 times it's bandwidth allocation, and fortunatly Webcentral has responded to my requestand Sponsored the hosting side of this site.
So thank-you to Webcentral for making this site an ongoing posibility.

Email the authors

Since December 2003 authors of the stories have the option to add their Email address and you can then contact them personally. During December and January l will set about contacting all past authors to give them the oportunity to also add their Email address to their stories.

My long term goal is allow you to give feedback at the end of the stories so you can see what other readers have to say and the authors can also see what you have to say. This may happen using a content management system and work will start on this from May 2009.

The site in 2009 - ten years on

Maintained far less than when l was studying but it has had a code update in 2009, nothing that you will notice.

Have moved the entire site to u new URL. This is due to a couple of things and had been put off for many years.
Firstly, Webcentral can no longer sponsor the website. Unfortunately l cannot continue hosting with them and will move the site to a new hosting company. This also allows me to have an easier website address but this adds to the work as l now have to get the entire site re-indexed with Google and make sure all companies and websites who have links to the previous site, update this. Borning website talk.......for nerds only.

Plans for latter 2009, re-do the entire site using Joomla or Drupal. This gives me an extra skill but l believe it will allow people to wite commets after the stories and l've wanted that to be the case since this site began.

Thanks for your visit and keep coming back to read real stories about HIV and AIDS.

Carolena Helderman
HIVAIDS Positive Stories Web site
May 2006