Website Report 2008

The year 2007-2008 saw a number of new developments for the website.  Perhaps the most notable of them all related to the trying out of new features and learning new skills.  For this, we wish especially to thank our advisor, Clifford L Pelletier, who provided unstinting support, guidance, instructions, and advice.  We are led to believe that he does enjoy teaching as, at the stage our learning, we are certainly very much in the pupil mode.  Cecilia Welna's assistance and suggestions in streamlining the site and editorial help are extremely helpful.   Direct and indirect contributors, in content and support, include Mary Rogers, Morton Tenzer, David De Nuccio, Compton Rees, Eli Dabora, Timothy Killeen, Nicholas Welchman, Vernon Nelson, .Fred Cazel. Jane Knox, Richard Wurst, Celia Chow, and the afore mentioned Clifford L. Pelletier and Cecilia Welna.  We wish to thank here also the support and contributions of Flo Hatcher, Executive Director, CT State Conference, AAUP.  And in that regard, we have set up a special sub-domain, www.CSCAAUPNEWS.eact.info for easy access to view news from the Conference and reports from Morton Tenzer, the EA's liaison officer to the Conference.  Appreciation is to be expressed to Kathleen McGrory and Youssef Kouately, whose photographs, of the Rose Garden in West  Hartford and of the Annual CSC meeting in New   Haven, respectively, livened up the pages so colorfully.  Thank you very much, thank you very much.

In addition to the creation of the sub-domain for the state conference news, we attempted to organize the pages and/or files into groups or categories and to put them in subdirectories, where applicable.  An interesting thing happened.  The counts of the pages having been viewed all turned to zero.  While it had been shown that the Apple computer users were often not counted when they visited the site, (more power to them), this starting from zero in the reorganization was not expected.  Mary Rogers had forwarded to us an article on the frustration of advertisers being unable to get any accurate counts from their websites, but this is ridiculous.  So, outside of being able to report the website appears to have up to fifty or more visits for some of the pages periodically and none at all for others for some stretches of time, not too much can be put in the meaning of the counts.  Often, the clusters of activities surrounded announcements of some event or other and/or are of some utilitarian value, such as the membership and reservation forms.  The minutes of the meetings and the newsletters also seemed to be of interest.

The possibility of uploading different file formats was not known to us.  We knew about uploading graphic files and word processing files using the tools the web host provided, namely, in jpg and html formats.  However, we were limited to the graphics the host provided, as seen in the earlier web pages, really not very good, until very recently, when we learned that other file formats may be used also.  This broadened the choices considerably.  We were able to source more graphics to enliven the pages and this is important, we learned to use pdf (portable document format) for files written and presented in different word processing programs so as to preserve their original appearance.  We have our advisor Pelletier to thank for this and also for the pointers from Flo Hatcher when we tried to upload the fliers she had sent to us without losing the frames.  We were able to scan some documents onto the site, with minor modifications.

The use of the blog as home page for the site continues.  It serves as a simple way to point to the latest news and other developments and is quite handy this way.  However, until a more comprehensive way of indexing the posted entries is available, the old home page remains as something of a site map.  One is at times hard put to decide what to discard and what to keep.  It does not help that the web host is upgrading the service to provide more storage space and other supposedly niftier techniques when one is just struggling along.  Conceivably, one may have to change the hosting service at some point to match the very modest use of the site.

A timely intervention related to the streamlining and developing some semblance of order of the uploaded files was accomplished with Advisor Pelletier's guidance.  What a relief not to see all the files, including incomplete and messing around work files, not to be listed when one went to say, Google or Yahoo search for the site.  By creating a robots.txt file for the site, it did that. What do you know! That was fun.

It is well to mention that, in addition to the technical aspects of maintaining and developing the site, we have learned something about copyright.  With the ease of putting links to different sites on the web, one is prone to overuse the tactic.  We have Nick Welchman to thank for alerting us to look into this issue.  Once again, we turned to Professor Pelletier, who again gave us a number of leads to study.  Goes to show, the more you learn, the more you learn.  Some things one really rather not have to learn, such as the demise of that same computer, the one that had to have systems board and hard drive replaced, although at different times, which led to the establishing of the eact.info site as a holding tank in the first place.  Oh, well, that objective, i.e., of saving the files, stays intact.  So far, all the files that have been uploaded to the site remain intact, except, of course for the files that had been deleted in the streamlining process. Nevertheless it would be good to have at least another member, with another computer, involved in maintaining the files and working on the site.  Hopefully, we will have some takers.  Perhaps also, volunteer columnists who may write more or less regularly for the site may come forward.  So far, we only have Mary Rogers for one and three promising bloggers.

Last but not least, we want to take note of a proposed design for a logo for the site by Irmgaard Rees and extend our warmest wishes for her complete recovery.  Thanks all.

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