SITE ABOUT TO BE DISMANTLED! Note: from sometime in September 2006, most of the content of this Caving Directory will be removed. The original purpose of this site (back in 1997) has been eclipsed by the huge success of Google and other search facilities, and the success of the many web sites belonging to other individuals and caving clubs. I havent really got the time to maintain this site to the degree that I would like, so it will be carefully dismantled and the bytes will be recycled and used elswhere.
When I set this site up, in 1997, the idea was to provide a useful 'gateway' to caving web sites. At the time, several of our national organisations had obscure, difficult-to-remember URLs, and I thought that a forwarding service based on a range of caves.org.uk addresses would be useful. I called this a 'virtual-foyer' or 'cyber-foyer', the dictionary definition of a foyer being "an entrance hall or open space ...". This site was intended to be just that - an entry point to caving web-sites. The site itself was supposed to be mainly empty - all the information it points to being elsewhere.
But the Internet evolved rapidly, and domain names became cheap to come by. So this site evolved into a directory. I based the first draft on Google, and the Google Directory, which has a category for Recreation/Outdoors/Speleology/. however, the Google directory was always going to be more comprehensive than I could make mine, which was inevitably going to be a bit of a mess - not a comprehensive directory, nor an Editor's Choice. However, the thought was that it might be useful: e.g. it would contain data not appropriate to the Google Directory, such as mail-order addresses for UK caving shops, lists of newsgroups and mailing lists, and so on.
Now it is 2006, and I think there is no longer a need for this site - especially if it is not maintained properly. Sometime soon I will dismantle it - Im in the process of deciding which parts to keep.
David Gibson, August 2006david(at)caves...etc.