[thelist] Really bad design from an organisation that should know better

Daniel J. Cody djc at five2one.org
Wed Sep 13 00:50:32 CDT 2000


Erika Meyer wrote:
> Speaking for academia, they are always worried about funding, and most 
> universities seem chronically underfunded in the web department. The 
> PR offices  in many universities still haven't been able to deal with 
> the WWW fully, perhaps because the academic higher ups have not been 
> too quick to recognize the value of the web, nor the investment 
> required to do it well.
+1

In my former life I was the 'webmaster' for SDSU(south dakota state 
univeristy; minh-lee, an evolt member now holds that dubius position :) 
and we were always battling with someone in administration about 
something. The whole university system has come to realize that the web 
is A Good Thing(tm), and they've been scrambling to understand it. 
Meanwhile, the people like my former self that had been running it since 
the days of mosiac are caught in the middle. We're the ones who 
understand the web. The administrators are trying to play catch up and a 
power play between administration and the technical people ensues.

We ran our website on some piece of shit webserver that was put together 
from spare parts from old computer lab parts. We developed our website 
on piece of shit NT boxes that were put together from whatever we didn't 
use for the webserver.(166Mhz boxes with 32Mb of RAM. wow.). Then the 
administration would bitch about our webserver failing at times because 
it couldn't handle the traffic from alumni that saw our URL on dinner 
napkins at the $1000 a plate back-patting session they had the night 
before. At the same time they were expecting students on work study 
trying to run this on a zero dollar budget. Seriously sickning, and the 
classic example of labor vs. managment. ranting again...

I think administrators realize the value of the web in PR. What they 
don't realize is the work and money it takes to actually make their 
little feel-good session on the Internet happen. At any rate, I 
sympathize with ya.. i can only tell you the private sector is much much 
much much^1234 better(i want a new server i but it.)

Thanking god not to be stuck in that life anymore. No offense Minh :)

.djc.







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