Monthly Archives: October 2008

Tap tap… is this thing on?

So, um, yeah, I haven’t posted anything to my blog in way too long. Time to fix that.

Here’s my current project list with a bit of explanation on each (I’ll go into more detail on some of these later, because many of them won’t make sense unless you’re actually in UCS.)

  • User account renaming – Setting up a process to change people’s usernames on request. Actually a lot harder than it sounds.
  • User account deletion – We need a process to delete user accounts when they are no longer needed. This will be run every year or so.
  • Blog server upgrade – The new version is ready for testing… check it out at https://wou.edu/blogadmintest.
  • Course catalog information on web – We’re working on a way to more easily update and display stuff like course descriptions and degree program requirements on the Web.

Plus there’s lots of little stuff; improving the efficiency of some of our processes, improving the programs we use to manage our user databases, looking for security holes and plugging them, and the usual ongoing tasks of website, blog server, and wiki server administration.

Future projects:

  • Rewrite Websmith – I want to redo websmith in a different programming language (PHP instead of Perl) that will allow a lot tighter integration with the website, and creation of new features.
  • Automatic K: drive folders – We’re planning a system (probably for next year) that will let faculty request folders on the K: drive for specific classes, and have them be automatically created. Right now we spend a lot of time doing this manually.

That’s it for now. I’ll go more in-depth on some of these later.