You’d think
A while ago, there was a knock at my office door. A colleague stepped in and said, “I would like to have a Web site, could you help me with this?” I asked, “Here at the university? You want to upload course- and research-related” materials?”
“Yes.”
I explained that he had two choices: he could either host the new site at his department, assuming that the department runs a Web server, which many departments do; or he could host it at the Data Center. I recommended the latter option because the machines at the Data Center are maintained, full-time, by professionals, whereas the department servers mostly aren’t, which makes the Data Center option more secure and more reliable.
We agreed that he was going to request a user account at the Center and that, meanwhile, I was going to cobble a layout together for his site. He also promised to send me some of the stuff he wants to have online.
I’m still waiting for the stuff, but I have received the Data Center’s account information, and the layout is ready. Once I receive the stuff, I’ll manually plonk it into the layout and upload it. Then, I’ll either offer to maintain the site and add any future updates, or maybe I’ll teach the sensei how to open the pages in a text editor, teach him what a few of the most important tags do, and teach him how to use FTP/SSH to upload any additons.
All of which should be entirely unnecessary.
As it is, faculty and staff at this university create their own Web pages — and it shows. Even a cursory glance at a random sample of those pages will reveal that they’re both coded and designed to fairly low standards of excellence — and no wonder: who’d expect university teachers to be expert webheads?
So, while coding the layout, I was grumbling to myself: why can’t the Data Center set up a university-wide system that would allow anyone to simply log in, drop their stuff into a set of templates, and — hey presto! Instant publication? Add weblogging functionality and — hey presto! Instant improvement of communication across the board?
Security concerns. When I originally set up Tawawa, the Data Center wouldn’t allow me to run the site on their servers because, as a matter of security policy, server-side scripting is out of the question.
Other universities take another line. I’ve just come across UThink, a new project at the University of Minnesota which gives all students, faculty and staff their own weblog.
How cool is that?
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