Website Sustainability

Some of the work from this web sustainability project has been summarised in a recent blog entry at:  http://blogs.northampton.ac.uk/expertsatnorthampton/2011/09/27/web-sustainability-its-gone/ The importance of sustainability of publicly funded web resources is considered. This work has been supported by funding from JISC. The site can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/site/emknorg/ or http://www.web-sustainablity.net/emkn/ Survey about this material can be found at: http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=67775a0a-336f-45a5-a222-2f1a6615752c please feel free to fill it in or http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=cec22f0a-e467-4c15-a319-74d96bb8ed9d

The most popular blog post  was the previous blog about the usage statistics for this blog. I am not sure why this is the most popular but as it is, here is an update on that blog entry for the whole lifetime of the blog. The figure above shows the summary of the usage overall over the lifetime of the blog. What isn't shown clearly here though is several people are coming to the blog from social network sites such as twitter and Facebook. A welcome surprise was the number of page views from the countries other than the UK (with the Pakistan and United States being the two largest groups). This work has been supported by funding from JISC. The site can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/site/emknorg/ and www.web-sustainability.net. This work has been supported by funding from JISC. The site can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/site/emknorg/ or http://www.web-sustainablity.net/emkn/ Survey about this material can be found at: http://www.eSurv...

The area of sustainability of websites should be an important consideration for any funding that involves public money, both during the life-time of the project and after it. Especially when government funded agencies are being rationalised finding ways to keep the sites going even if they are not updated further, they still provide a ‘snap-shot’ of the resources at a particular point in time. This project looked at possible sustainability options and has the following recommendations: ·          A sustainable web solution should be considered for funded projects. There are a number of free options. ·          Google Sites is an appropriate solution if the number of pages is small, the formatting of the pages is not too complicated and it is a new web site. ·          Amazon is appropriate for both new and previously developed material is being migrated. ...

Suitability Amazon is appropriate for both new and previously developed material is being migrated. Again static web content is easier to migrate. Integration with tools such as Google Analytics and WebMaster tools is relatively simple, especially if you start by adding Google Analytics first (you can use the Google Analytics account) to verify the web account. Things to remember Uploading files is relatively easy but I have been caught a couple of times: First way, and the most embarrassing, make sure the links actually point to the links within the Amazon site. It is fairly easy when migrating the site across in one go to have links to the 'old' site. slightly less embarrassing is when you upload the files you need to change the permissions to make public. It can be done late by right-clicking on the page in the AWS Management Console and selecting make public.  Adding users Other users can be given access to the website by using the permissions. This can be fo...

1. Introduction The project started by looking at 'rescuing' a site (www.emkn.org) by copying content to a Google Site version. The advantages and disadvantages have been found for this approach, and some suggestions have come out of the project. 2. Why Google Sites? Google Sites (www.google.com/sites/overview.html) was investigated initially as a suitable platform for several reasons: • It is a freely available resource, allowing this approach to be replicated with other at risk resources. • It allows changes for individual pages or the entire site remotely by subscription • It supports native RSS feeds for: o Announcements pages o Comments o Recent site activity • It integrates with a number of Google-based tools (such as Analytics, Webmaster tools, YouTube, Google Docs and Picasa). 3. What we found? As each page essentially needs to be provide individually (producing templates of portions of the site help, but each page does need to be produced i...

Adam Ostrow: After your final status update | Video on TED.com Not really about web sustainability directly...but the whole idea about digital legacy. Taken from TED.com: Many of us have a social media presence -- a virtual personality made up of status updates, tweets and connections, stored in the cloud. Adam Ostrow asks a big question: What happens to that personality after you've died? Could it ... live on?

One of the comments that came out from the user's survey was about searching the 'Tube Map'.    3.  Perhaps a search box on this page that users could use to quickly locate the item on the map would complement the site. A partial solution was to add a search, that search the site. this has been achieved using Google Custom Search to the www.sustainablity.net site (see below) To create the search, yo u need a Google account and then go to  http://www.google.com/cse/ Create a new Custom Search Engine and decide what sites you want to include, the name of the search and whether you want to pay.  For this project I went for the free/standard edition option which means there will be adverts, as well as the search results from the site.  When you include the sites to search the format does matter to get it to search the whole you will need to put * at the end, so for example  http://www.web-sustainablity.net/*  to search all of...