Alex Little

Have been away quite a lot for the past few weeks – hence why I’ve not been keeping this up to date. I attended the latest Unfold CoP meeting in Glasgow a week or so ago which seemed to go well, I’ve put more about this in my LD blog, so have a look there!
I’ve just been back in the office for a day now, so just catching up on things. On 10th Oct we released our new IET website; the actual design hasn’t changed (well, only a little) but we have:

• Created the site content from scratch – there were 100′s (or 1000′s) of old, unmaintained, out of date pages on the old site, so in starting afresh we have removed all of these. They are still available on backup if we do need to restore any sections/pages for any reason, but we hope we’ve got the main content areas covered
• Moved to a clustered servers – so the website should be much more robust. Though we have had some intermittent problems with one or other of the cluster servers becoming unresponsive overnight. I think we’ve got this fixed now – might have been due to one of the server timeout settings not being set, so if a long running page was hit (or caused an infinite loop) the server didn’t automatically terminate the request after a certain amount of time.
• Changed the publishing system for the site – now all IET staff can edit the site via their web browser (a bit like a wiki) and everynoe has access to edit any of the pages. Previously people needed to use Dreamweaver or other web editing software to actually go and edit files – and also have access to the files. This meant that updates to the site often didn’t get done because of the hassle invovled in finding the right person who has access etc etc. We’re not sure yet that this will definitely solve the problem – but it does mean there is no excuse if someone spots a typo or incorrect email address etc for them not to just go and update the page themselves. It also means we can track more easily pages which haven’t been updated in a certain length of time – I think we should be aiming for ensuring pages get updated at least every 6 months – or at least reviewed even if nothing actually needs to be changed.

The next thing I’ve got to work on is getting the LD JISC projects finished off and what should be the priorities to get done, and also some work finishing off bits on the new IET site.