One Thousand Activities!

ALTopedia has been running for about two and a half years now, and I'm happy to say that there are now over one thousand activities on the site! That's a thousand ideas for teachers to help their English classes succeed!

I still remember those early days where the majority of the site consisted of my own material, and most grammar points only had a lonely activity or two, if any. It was a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem of how to get people to use the site and contribute their own ideas when there wasn't a lot to draw them here in the first place. The shadow of Englipedia loomed quite large, and I remember people saying that they supported the idea of ALTopedia, but couldn't really justify using it over Englipedia.

Like a lot of things, it was a commitment to slow and steady work over the long term that eventually led to ALTopedia's growth. As I write this today, there are dozens of contributors from around the world who have offered their own ideas, worksheets, games, and lesson plans for just about all of the grammar points and lesson themes on the site. From what I can tell, Englipedia had about 1200 activities when it finally stopped operating, and it might not be too long before ALTopedia has even more than that. It's in no small part to incorporating hundreds of well-worn activities directly from Englipedia, of course, but I think most people would agree that there are lots of ideas that you'll only find here.

Visitors to the Englipedia archive may have noticed recently that it's not up and running at this point. The timing is a bit of an unfortunate coincidence. My understanding is that the person who was hosting the archive purchased it on a multi-year hosting plan, and my guess is that it may have finally run out its term. I'm going to see about talking to that person to see if I can host it on my own web hosting. My understanding is that other folks may have archived the site as well, but I want to make sure that I have permission to host it before doing so. I estimate that it might add another $10 or so per month to my hosting costs, so I'd like to point out once more that you can help the site recoup its server costs through a Patreon membership or Ko-fi for one-time donations. There's no other source of funding, so I do appreciate anyone who can chip in!

There are a mountain of development tasks I have for the site coming up, but at the moment, I'm still working out some tricky server issues. I've been trying off and on for almost a year to upgrade to Ruby on Rails 6, which has necessitated doing a pretty big change in the way that the site's server works. I think I'm most of the way there, but I need to get that sorted out before I work on anything substantial.

Starting out, my goal was to get as many activities on the site as possible. I'm still thrilled to see anyone bring their own ideas in, but I think my development and administration priority should shift to making sure that people can more easily find what they're looking for on the site, given its size now. I need to improve the site's interface substantially and do a good sweep through the tag system to add more relevant information to each tag and make sure that activities are tagged sensibly.

This milestone would have been impossible if not for everyone who's contributed to the site, so my sincere thanks to all of you! I'm humbled that you've all signed up and taken time out of your days to help others. Let's do our best to make another thousand!