Web Committee Report

By: Brian Baddour, Chapter Web Committee Manager

Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

If a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, then a significant sect of our chapter is interested in helping out with its web site. Kudos to people such as Rick Elliot and Bob Clark for their willingness to help out wherever needed, and for their recognition that such involvement counts as experience and self-improvement.

You two in the bush -- may I recommend offering some of our vibrant committees with their contributions to the Web site? Our chapter practices a casual kind of collaborative online publishing. Committee managers like Myron Shawala (employment) and Nora Ebie (newsletter) correctly see the Web site not as an initiative in and of itself, but rather as a medium through which to enact initiatives.

So if the Web Committee has already empowered other committees to publish online, what's left to do? Pretty urgent yet dull stuff: apply minor corrections and updates to pages, address accessibility complaints, answer a lot of "can we" and "how to" questions (50 e-mails in April, over 100 in May in addition to the usual broadcast and listserv messages), work with society-level folks on society-level web-based services, and -- ahh! -- troubleshoot downtime!

Exile of (Not From) a Site

To all of you who feared looking like an idiot because you had trouble reaching our chapter web site over the years, and especially since mid-April, I say, "You're not crazy." Sporadic reports of web site downtime grew to a feverish pitch in the last week of April as our "web host" -- the company on whose servers our chapter web site resided -- folded. We weren't alone as two sites can attest.

Does it make sense for a "site" to be in exile?

Magically, another company picked up the slack. Will we keep our site on that sorcerer's server? Will the new company live up to our expectations?

Stay tuned bat-fans...

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