If you have been paying attention you will have noticed that the link in the right hand column called the “Current College Libraries website” has been updated. As discussed in the previous post this is because a redirect has been created to point a person to the college libraries new website.

The official URL for the new website is:

http://www.libraries.potsdam.edu

However the following URL’s have been created to take a person to the one listed above:

• http://www.lib.potsdam.edu
• http://www.library.potsdam.edu

When having a conversation with someone about the College Libraries website it is easier for me to say “lib dot potsdam dot edu” than “libraries dot potsdam dot edu”. For me it is always been more difficult to pronounce words that end in “ies” or “ly”. Just don’t forget to include the www in front of the name. Maybe I should add that to my language when talking about the URL. Maybe saying “www dot lib dot potsdam dot edu”.

What do you thing? Would this be easier to understand when stating the www or is it assumed?

It has been a while since a post has been made to the blog. There have been several hours of work and late nights that have gone into the new website. The last post discussed that the permission issues of the web server had been resolved. Things have been stable and there has not been any more issues since the very begging of January.

The past few weeks has been dedicated to the following things

• All content has been added to the website
• The scripts that process the forms have been created
• Editing the content has been taking place
• Website went live on Thursday, January 17, 2012 at 1:32 p.m.

It is more difficult to write about the past few weeks because several things have taken place and they are more of the basic components that make a website come to life. In order for the new website to go live a redirect was created on the web server. The redirect points a person from the URL that is no longer in use to the new one. For the libraries website if a person goes to the old URL http://wwwx.potsdam.edu/library they will be taken directly to the new one, which is http://www.libraries.potsdam.edu.

Adding the rest of the content to the new website was the easiest thing to do during the past few weeks. As discussed in earlier posts Basecamp a project management tool was used for people to write the content for the new website. This made it easy to copy the content that was in Basecamp and put it directly into the new website. With Basecamp being a web based product all of the content that was written was plain text. The only thing that you had to do after copying the content into the website was to create headings, ordered lists, and/or numbered lists. HTML is simply plain text wrapped in what is called a tag to display content through a web browser. Basecamp + plain text = a hapy web person.

From the list of things listed above the most exciting and challenging thing that took place was that the new SUNY Potsdam College Libraries website went live two weeks ago. The transformation was almost as simple as turning on a light switch. All of a sudden there was a new website. This is only just the beginning in ongoing updates and enhancements to the website. As a reader you will have to stay tuned to find out how things move forward. The work has only just begun!