On 19 September three members of WaLT will be taking part in the Great North Run, the world’s biggest half-marathon. Danny Blanchette will be raising money for The Stroke Association, Debbie Nicholson for the National Association for Colitis and Crohn’s Disease, and Keith Brooke is running but not fund-raising this time, after running for The Big Issue Foundation a couple of years ago.
Please sponsor our runners!
In January 2010 the College (formerly known as South East Essex College of Arts and Technology) merged with Thurrock and Basildon College. The newly created college, now known as South Essex College of Further and Higher Education caters for 20,000 students across three sites.
South Essex College’s name has now been changed on the University website, but if you spot a stray occurrence of “South East Essex College” or “SEEC” please let WaLT know by emailing walt (non-Essex users add @essex.ac.uk to create a full email address); and please update any references to the College on your own website too.
As previously announced, WaLT are phasing out our www2 web server. Any sites on this server will be moved over to the www server as an ongoing project over the next few months.
There shouldn’t be any work required by web authors to move the site, however we will need to make sure no one is working on the sites when we copy them over otherwise work could be lost. As part of the moving process WaLT will update any links on the corporate pages, and will inform all web authors to ensure other University sites are also updated.
We will get in touch with the web authors concerned to discuss the timing for their site, and make the necessary arrangements.
Please do not hesitate to contact WaLT should you have any queries or would like to discuss this further.
So far this year we’ve had to deal with two major server outages, one planned and one unanticipated. It certainly makes for interesting times.
This is the kind of thing we have to be prepared for regardless of the cause of the outage: sometimes major work is required, even though it may impact on services; and at other times things can simply go wrong – hardware failure, software glitches and so on. The first outage involved an unexpected loss of data from the server hosting a range of e-learning and other sites; the remedy involved rebuilding the server from scratch. The second outage involved the upgrade of one of the main MIS database servers; as many of our web services interact with these databases, we had to close or limit a wide range of online services while the migration took place, and then bring them back and test them when the move was complete.
As I say, these things go with the territory of managing servers for an institution like the University. Ideally we wouldn’t have two outages so close together, though, and records from an external monitoring service show a near 100% availability for our website over the past year. On the other hand, though, the timing hasn’t been too bad: we’re in the early stages of reviewing our server set-up, and the valuable experience of both of these outages will feed into that process to help ensure even greater resilience across all our web services in future.
WaLT has been tweeting! Some snippets from recent WaLT Twitter posts:
- WaLT working hard to support migration of back-end database servers – valiant efforts from @dannyblanchette, @bensteeples and others
- Janine gets very ranty about Scope Creep…
- @bensteeples spent last week helping @dannyblanchette to fix one of the web servers, following a software failure on Monday.
- Last chance to apply for our web post: http://gs12.globalsuccessor.com/fe/tpl_essex01.asp?newms=jj&id=47736 DL 28 Jan
- @bensteeples is working on a batch printing application for OCS.
- @alexoneill and Janine have just finished updating the promotional boxes on the home page which will soon be made live!
- @bensteeples has just released a beta version of Podcasting of Lectures
- The WaLT office is looking very Christmassy, complete with random animals adorning the tree!
- @bensteeples has just upgraded Moodle to the latest version (not alone, he had help!)
Follow WaLT on Twitter for a snapshot of what we’re working on, what we’re eating, what’s bugging or amusing us, and more.
…or just me?
downforeveryoneorjustme.com does exactly what it says: checks to see if a site is down for everyone or just for you.
I’m afraid this vacancy has closed now. We’ve had a healthy response and will be shortlisting soon, probably interviewing in early March and then, if all goes well, the Web Development Team will be up to full strength for the first time in almost two years!
Yes, we’re advertising for a Web Development Officer: http://gs12.globalsuccessor.com/fe/tpl_essex01.asp?newms=jj&id=47736
This post will bring the Web Development Team up to its full strength of three; deadline is 28 January, and any informal enquiries should come to kbrooke@essex.ac.uk.
As some of you will know, the successor to FrontPage is SharePoint Designer. It is a vastly improved product (albeit the name is rather misleading!) and in terms of usability is very similar to FrontPage. The majority of users should be able to move from one to another painlessly. However we appreciate some of you may feel a little apprehensive about it, so we’ve created a guide to illustrate the differences between the packages and to show you how to do the basics using SharePoint Designer.
Our online guide can be found here: Getting started with SharePoint Designer 2007.
Many of you will notice that Internet Explorer 8 is now out and about. It’s Microsoft’s latest offering in the web browser department and whilst it does include many improvements, it is still a bit buggy. Here in the WaLT office we rather like Firefox and Google Chrome.
Firefox has been around a long time (since November 2004) and is the most popular web browser with, at the time of writing, 47.5% of the market according to w3schools.com. Versions of Internet Explorer ( 6, 7 and 8 ) come a not very close second with just over 37%, and Google Chrome beats Safari and Opera put together, with 8% of the market. Given Google Chrome was only released in September 2008, an 8% share of the market is pretty impressive, putting Safari and Opera to shame, despite being good browsers. One of Google Chrome’s most compelling selling points is its speedy start up time which is why it is my preferred browser.
So, if IE8 is getting you down, please do try these outstanding (and free!) alternatives:
