Minutes for December 19, 2002
The Web Developers Users' Group met on December 19, 2002, at 2:00 PM in the Parliamentary Room, PSU 313.
Site statistic logs presentation
Sara Clark, Web Coordinator, presented the features of the Logs web site. The Logs web site provides web site statistics such as number of hits and visitor demographics for campus web sites.
See the Web Resource Center's Statistics & counters web page for details on how to read the reports and to request your site to be included in future reports.
During the presentation Sara mentioned the following:
- Counters are no longer needed to keep track of the number of hits on each web page. This information can now be obtained from the site reports. The reports are generally more accurate in reporting the number of hits than counters and are less bothersome to your visitors.
- Sub-reports are automatically created for any web site under the http://www.missouristate.edu/ or http://organizations.missouristate.edu/ domains. Since http://studentorganizations.missouristate.edu/ and http://organizations.missouristate.edu/ serve as the same address, the report includes information for student organization web sites.
- Reminder emails will be sent out around the 10th of each month to notify web developers that new monthly reports have been generated.
- The report results have been filtered to display frequently requested statistics. This reduces the time to generate the logs, reduces file size, and makes the reports easier to read. If you have specific information that you think should be included in your site report please contact Sara Clark to see if that data can be added.
Web server migrations on hold
The migration to the new web server, Tholian, is currently on hold. The process will resume as soon as possible. You will receive a email notification in advance when your site is to be moved.
Web Advisory Committee update
The Web Advisory Council is still working on the strategic web plan. This plan includes topics such as implementing online course registration and a content management system.
Sara mentioned that Missouri State currently can host Missouri State chapters of outside organizations. However, we currently cannot host any outside organization's main site. She mentioned that the Web Advisory Committee will be looking into ways to allow Missouri State to host some related outside organizations' web sites.
Network backup questions
Marilyn Odneal brought up a question regarding the details of how the network files are backed up. Sara explained that Computer Services backs up all of the central web servers nightly and stores those backups for at least six months.
To request a web file to be restored from a backup you can contact Sara Clark or Lynn Dickison.
The nightly backups do not include files saved on personal workstations, and mid-day changes to the web servers cannot be recovered. Email is also not included in the backups, but Outlook can be configured to archive your Outlook data to the workstation or to export messages to a file.