Recently in WOU website Category

OK, I take back everything I said about Adobe's tech support after the first time the Contribute server failed on us. What? You say you didn't hear what I said about them? That's probably a good thing, considering some of it was unprintable.

Anyway, this time I actually got a competent support engineer, and I didn't even have to battle my way up the hierarchy for more than a few hours (let alone three days like last time, grumble grumble.)

What impressed me the most about her was not just that she knew what she was talking about, but that she kept after the problem. We had one possible solution that would have taken a couple of days to implement, and instead of just sitting back and waiting, she kept working on our issue. That floored me; maybe I've just had bad luck with corporate tech support, but I've never yet dealt with someone who would do that.

Anyway, she came up with a simple solution that I hadn't tried because it didn't seem to make any sense... but it worked like a charm. You may have noticed that the login delay is now much shorter, too.

So, tech support saved the day!

The Contribute Publishing Server is down again. This is really frustrating; it was running great for months and then bam, two major failures since the beginning of February. Nobody can log in to the system at all.

Last time I had to reinstall the whole system and recreate all the site settings by hand (a tedious process for thirty sites) because when I tried restoring the backed-up settings the problem came right back. This time, even that doesn't work; the problem occurs even on a totally fresh install with no sites defined.

I was able to demonstrate this to one of Adobe's senior tech support engineers, and she confirmed this was a previously unknown program bug and submitted it to the CPS developers. They are supposed to get back to me within one business day, but it's now been longer than that, so tomorrow morning it's time to start pestering them again.

It's frustrating because I still think this is a good product... at least it makes my job as an administrator much easier when it it working correctly. We'll see how things go, I guess.

Things are rolling along. As you've no doubt noticed, more and more pages are going live with the new design. Things will slow down a bit as our student helpers have fewer hours to work, but you will keep seeing progress.

The next big issue is training the web editors in various departments to use the new system. The main differences from the old system are as follows:

So, again I've been too busy to blog much. The web conversion project is moving along nicely, but is eating up almost all my time. If any of you are waiting on me to do something and I haven't responded in some time, please feel free to bug me again. I know I've made some people wait too long for stuff; I apologize for that. Of course, these days we all know what it's like to be understaffed; people have been understanding, for which I'm grateful.

Anyway, we've made major headway on phase one of the process, which is creating the rough-draft PHP files. I have five UCS students working on this, who all deserve mention for their hard work: Jonathan Guillen, Ronni Luchterhand, Mark Lyons, Michael Orr, and Courtney Wehner. Read on for more about the project...

Wow. Once again, it's been a long time between entries, but this time I have a valid excuse. I've been working my tailbones off now that the website conversion has finally moved out of the preparation stages and into full swing!

The first stage involves creating new versions of pages on the WOU website. These new pages end in .php instead of .html or .htm, because they are written in the PHP language. You may be relieved to know that PHP can have HTML freely mixed in with it, so you won't have to learn a new language to work with these pages.

These pages will eventually become the real pages on the website, but for now, the original HTML pages are still there and are not being changed. Each department will be able to look at the new PHP pages and approve or change them before we make them live, and the HTML pages will still be kept in an archive folder for reference, at least for the first while.

The first parts of the website to be fully converted will be the admissions process pages, in other words those that prospective students need to see during the admissions process. The home page will also be updated; you've seen its new look for months now, and that won't change much, but we have a lot to do "under the hood", so to speak.

Stay tuned for more info!

Well, at long last the much-delayed webserver move is done! Even aside from the benefits of the new storage hardware, the new server is going to make the webmastering part of my job much easier. I hope the rest of you enjoy having web drives that map without you needing to click an icon or remember a different password.

Anyway, now it's time to go into high gear with the new template. The admissions pages will be the first to be converted; stay tuned for more on that. Meanwhile, I've got work to do if I want that done on time, so I'm going to go do it.

Well, as you know if you read your allfacstaff email, the webserver changeover has been postponed. This is essentially due to the administration's need to be free to post updates instantaneously; even an 18-hour delay (at the most) is too much for news about the negotiations and looming strike.

Maybe after this mess blows over we'll be able to get on with our jobs. I'm really having to bite my tongue about this whole strike business, at least in public like this; I feel stuck in the middle because I know people on both sides. It's all really frustrating and demoralizing; as far as I can tell, neither side has malicious intent, yet people on both sides seem to feel that the other has some sort of evil hidden agenda, and is intentionally telling lies.

That's all I'm going to say about that in public.