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RainyWeekend was an odd sort of name for a website devoted to Russell so we’ve changed it to Russellers as that’s becoming the accepted collective noun for his fans.
RainyWeekend Productions is being retained as a sort of ‘umbrella’ name but we should explain our amateur status and how that name came about so that you’ll understand that we are NOT in any way connected officially to Russell or his business. The name came about ‘organically’ – to borrow one of Russell’s own favourite words. We are just two fans with some spare time now that we are retired and were looking at the possibility of making our own ‘Russell Watson’ calendars a few years back; nothing commercial you understand… just something for ourselves and a few ‘Russeller’ friends. The files in progress were being saved on a computer with names like RWJan.doc or RW2008.xls to distinguish them from other projects. At some point we thought we’d better not give the impression that our calendars were ‘authorised’ by Russell and, because they were essentially things we did on wet weekends, we said the RW stood for Rainy Weekend. That, in jest, became Rainy Weekend Productions.
About this time, Russell was signed to the Decca record label and they were managing his Official website and ‘social media’. The website and associated Forum had technical and other problems, and during a prolonged period of absence from the internet we started to wonder just how hard it would be to set up and run a website using the free tools that were available on the web.
We went with Microsoft Office Small Business software which, at the time, was free. It was a steep learning curve but mostly enjoyable. We invested about £10 to register our own ‘Domain Name’ and, again, steered clear of any suggestion that we were in any way authorised by or affiliated with Russell officially. The result was a site called RainyWeekend.co.uk. The .co.uk bit was a slight concern, in that we didn’t want to give the impression we were a business or were trading on Russell’s reputation. In a nutshell, everything we do, we do at our own expense.
The RainyWeekend ’logo’ of a lightning flash across a stormy sky is of a real thunderstorm that we recorded on video and from which we took a ‘still’ frame. This was before the Official pictures of Russell against a stormy background were produced, so we’re ahead of the game in that respect and we certainly haven’t copied them!
When the official website returned, and once Russell changed record labels, the new site looked to be everything one could wish for but the gremlins were at work and even the mighty Sony corporation couldn’t keep their site online without interruption. In an attempt to keep the news flowing to fellow fans in the absence of an official site and chat Forum we created a Facebook page and Twitter account with corresponding names. Note: the Twitter account name has an underscore at the end; this is because the name had already been taken but appears to be a redundant account.
During the summer of 2011 we encountered a number of technical and other problems, including the prospect of having to pay for the Microsoft hosting. To cut a long story short we ended up totally losing all the website that we’d built up with Microsoft and started again with WordPress using a ‘dot com’ domain rather than ‘dot co dot uk’.
In July 2012, we thought we would bring ourselves in line with other fans of Russell who, like us, have adopted the name ’Russellers’ as a collective noun so we’ve changed the title of this site to Russellers.com. We hope that that is sufficient to suggest what we’re about without actually incorporating the name “Russell Watson” into the title. We’re aware of other websites that have done that and, if Russell’s okay with it, good luck to them but we didn’t want to do that.
The associated Facebook and Twitter accounts have also been migrated to the new name and we hope you’ve not been inconvenienced by the transition.
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Time marches on and history repeats itself to some degree. The website, Forum and Facebook page provided for his Social Media have, thoughout 2012 appeared to lack the proper ‘care and attention’ they deserved and Russell has, at last, done the job himself – and done it properly – with his own brand new website. Unfortunately, shortly after the new website went ‘live’ his Forum disappeared but it looks like efforts are being made to resurrect it.
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If you would like to contact us, please ’click here‘.
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