Website Sustainability

Sarah Fahmy recent produce a blog posting " How to feed, nourish and sustain your digital resources "   about Digitisation of resources, which I think certain links in with the focus of this blog. Resources that are already digitised such as websites still need to be preserved in some form after funding for the sites has dried up. This is especially true, in my opinion, for publicly funded projects - we have all paid for them so shouldn't they be available? This mostly overlooked area of how do we keep web resources available sustainably (often hosted-freely) and what compromises do we need to make I feel needs more consideration. Should we have ways of preserving a person's and organisation's digital legacy even when they do no longer exist. 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.eSurve...

The final report for the web sustainability is now available from:  http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/563/2/EMKN_final_report_output4337.doc Project Summary: East Midlands Knowledge Network (EMKN) is an online resource which is at risk, due to the demise of regional development agencies, the imminent closure of the company upon whose server it sits and the closure of the East Midlands Universities Association (EMUA), who created the resource. However the information held on within the site (technologies, business services and facilities within EMUA’s institutions is valuable, particularly as face-to-face Business Link (BL) services are being axed and the government has indicated that the channel for publicly-funded business advice (information, advice and guidance) will be on-line. The site contains an image (“Tube Map”) that links to various parts of the site showing various service, this was felt especially important to keep. Therefore this project looked at options on how to...

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...