EEB Webmaster
From EEBedia
The current EEB webmaster is Paul O. Lewis, a faculty member in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department.
Services provided by the webmaster
- maintain the computer hardware and software for serving web sites maintained by EEB department faculty, staff and graduate students
- create computer accounts for faculty, staff and graduate students wishing to create a personal web page or manage a course web site
- provide password-protected access to specific course or project directories as needed
- create and maintain the PHP programs that manage the database supplying information about courses, events, people and publications to web pages created on the fly
- ensure that nightly backups are performed so that data housed on the web server can be fully restored in the event of hacker intrusion or hard disk failure
- maintain a second server mirroring the main server so that in the event that the main server goes down a replacement can be put in place within minutes
- Note that creating web pages for individuals is not part of the job description of the webmaster
Improvements made to the EEB web site
- Static web pages were replaced by PHP-driven dynamic pages that utilize information supplied by a MySQL database to ensure consistency and accuracy of information (the old web site often had conflicting and/or out-of-date information about courses and people because in order to update information, numerous static web pages had to be edited)
- Administration pages were created allowing Kathy Tebo and Jen Murphy to easily update the database. Kathy manages information about people, events and publications, whereas Jen manages information about courses
- The EEBedia was created to allow easier creation and editing of web pages. The Central Authentication Service Wikipedia:Central_Authentication_Service CAS was implemented for authenticating users. This allows authorized users to login using their UConn NetID, removing the need to remember yet another username/password combination, and has the additional benefit of preventing vandalism (a common problem with Wikipedia). This is the first such "CASsified" Wiki to be created on the UConn campus.