I'm a big fan of fall fairs.
The greasy food. The animal displays. The cute baby contests. The best-of-category vegetable competitions. The tractor pulls. How couldn't you love a good agricultural society fall fair?
And it isn't like I wallow in, imagining myself a know-it-all seen-it-all urbanite, taking a chance to get a chuckle at the rural folk. In actuality I often marvel at how ideal and livable many of these small towns are.
Lucky for me and the family then that Ontario has a rich calendar of fall fairs occurring over the coming weeks.
Which brings me to websites - we entirely choose which fall fairs to attend each season based upon their websites (linked from entries in that directory). It gives us comfort that we're not going to drive an hour to find a shack with a couple of pigs running free, and of course with dozens of fairs occurring (and a high degree of mobility allowing us a wide range of possibilities) we want to pick the most interesting one each weekend. While I doubt that all that many of their visitors are provincial tourists browing the OAAS website, it does seem to be a good idea to spend just a little time on the website.
Which brings me to this fair. Contained on a largely useless website (no offense intended to the author -- I doubt it was their highest priority) is the notice that they couldn't post the prize list because of lack of resources. They follow it up with a petition for volunteers.
Really, how tiny must a community be that there isn't anyone will to scan a print out, or better yet type it in? Doesn't this town have a single eager-to-look like a hacker 11 year olds (or 40 year olds for that matter. Or 70 year olds)? How is it even possible that they can't find resources for this?
In any case, it's clear that the fall fair industry is desperately in need of a good content management system. I'm surprized that the OAAS doesn't offer them a half decent shell to advertise their event ("Please check off each event your fair contains - baby beauty contest [ ] apple bobbing [ ]"...).
