Before I voice my opinion on the matter lets look at the facts. First, neither side is developing the same type of sites. From the audience to the message to the types of content the only two things are similar, the desire to sell a product and the basic media that is used to sell that product. Beyond these two similarities the two worlds are really very far apart.

So how different are they? Well, lets break down the vast majority of what each camp does. First there is the private sector developers. Often they’re working for small firms (less than 100 employees) and make their living based on the quantity of work they turn out. That’s not to say they don’t do quality work, on the contrary some of the most cutting edge design comes from the private sector. However they are concerned with providing an often singular message armed with only an intermediate level knowledge (sometimes less) of the sender of the message they are trying to convey. Whether building a site for a small mom-and-pop or the largest of the fortune 500 by nature they cannot by design know the finer details of the product their message is trying to convey. Because of this their expertise tends to rely on the message itself and while effective it usually does not provide much real in depth information about the sender of the message. This works great for individual products, small companies, and many other situations where background information isn’t important however for higher ed this model simply doesn’t work.

Higher-ed is a different beast. The mission of the higher-ed developer often isn’t so much the medium in which the message is sent, but is in fact the message itself. Cutting edge graphics must be replaced by content that meets various accessibility laws, brand new photos must be passed through various levels of bureaucracy before they can be released to the public, and, worst of all, the idea of academic freedom means there are thousands of individuals providing content for and demanding their equal place throughout the site. This isn’t to say there isn’t a message to be conveyed. On the contrary higher ed has at least 3 messages to convey. First and firmost a good higher ed site must recruit students. Second, a higher ed site must engage alumni in an effort to generate donations. Finally, higher ed websites must serve a plethora of audiences with numerous tasks from test taking to class registration to housing information all from the umbrella of a single site. To due all this successfully a web department is not only nice, but required to both make sure the messages are conveyed successfully and to ensure that that the college’s brand is not lost in the numerous agendas and missions that make up the average college web presence. This is often done not with cutting edge graphic and design technologies, but instead with cutting edge code and algorithms that can handle the raw data that comprises the college’s message. From the beginning of the internet colleges and universities have worked to advance web technologies from web browsers to cloud computing to semantic web.

So who is right? Well, they both are. In the case of the webmaster title it is true that most of the private sector, particularly design firms, have turned away from it’s use and consider it antiquated. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong however. In both higher ed and other organizations the official title of webmaster has been built into the very system that must employ the people in question. In many cases this is the result of a lot of work in systems to which change isn’t on the daily menu. As a consequence some very capable web professionals still use and will continue to use the webmaster title. While the private sector my shun the word for whatever buzzword is popular at the moment, the public sector and in particular higher ed, will continue to embrace it for the foreseeable future.

Now for the second point. Who does or doesn’t have any business developing web sites? The answer is they both are necessary for the web in their industries. Private sector developers private thousands of site for brands that would otherwise not be on the web and continue to advance the technologies that present these messages on the web. On the other hand, higher ed requires their web developers for both providing the numerous applications that can make up their sites and to help provide the content that makes up the average collegiate website. For even those college that outsource the design of their site still need people who understand the web and current web technologies and can use these to merge the numerous messages with the most current and accessible technologies.

In the end, the web has room for both private sector designers and higher ed developers. Who knows, they might even learn a thing or two from each other.

Initially the idea was to update the homemade CMS we were using to make better use of technologies such as RSS and mod-rewrite. As the core of the code was 12 years old it seemed like it should be a long, but relatively straightforward project. In addition, we hoped to streamline the site content to better serve prospective and current students by eliminating obsolete features and re-writing a lot of the content to both bring it up to date and to address the needs we’ve seen arise over the last couple of years.

Like so many simple ideas this one quickly grew to an entirely new monster.

First, I decided that the department would be better served by established CMS products than by my own code. This would serve two purposes. First, it would allow me to concentrate on content rather than the functionality of the CMS. Second, it would allow for easier maintenance should I leave here (which we plan to do in a few years at most). I didn’t want something that would require constant coding and bandaids by someone whom I wasn’t familiar with the code. The only way I could see to overcome this was to use existing software.

Next, while concentrating on content, two things became very obvious. First, we were trying to do too much with one site. Our homepage was trying to be everything to everyone and winding up being less then useful to all. Second, we have been selling ourselves simply as Aviation for years. The catch is we, as flight and management, are only one piece of the total Aviation offerings. There is also an aviation technologies department which had absolutely no presence on the aviation website. This division was bad on many levels for both departments.

Finally, up until this point we have been operating on a rather obsolete mindset. Like many groups our administration viewed the website as a nice bulletin board but not much more. While students were searching Google for where they want to go to college our budget was being spent on ads in magazines that barely touch our target audience as well as give-aways and other programs geared toward a sometimes apathetic alumni base. Nothing was going to attract new blood in places where that new blood was lurking.

To address these problems required a lot more legwork than originally planned on. First, we decided to replace our site with not one single site, but two sites and a dynamic system capable of providing sites quickly for almost any aspect of our community. Next, we tackled a long standing political feud to combine the web presence of two departments into a single online presence. Finally, we spent almost 4 months on initial training and, as my colleagues call it, brain washing our people into working with us online in providing content and working to increase our presence in many areas where our competition already had a great lead.

Today our online presence is divided into 3 pieces. Our mane website, www.aviation.siuc.edu, is a recruiting and retention tool designed to provide information to students, their families, and our alumni. Next, for all our internal needs we built a wiki to allow for quick collaboration and easy editing of volumes of information that only really pertains to our faculty and staff. Finally, to provide a quick, easy, and uniform publishing platform for all of our community we created blogs.aviation.siuc.edu which allows any individual or group in the SIUC Aviation community to quickly and easily build a website specific to their own needs while still maintaining a level of control of both security and brand at the department level.

As each of these sites is designed to fulfill a different goal it follows that they each then use different software to accomplish those goals. To do this we picked Drupal for our main website, MediaWiki for our intranet/wiki, and WordPress MU(Now WordPress 3 with multisite) for the “Blogs and sites” system. Together these software packages have allowed us to expand our online presence in a manner that makes sense for everyone while preserving all that data that previous was smashed together on a single site. In addition, through the use of such common products, we have been able to train a host of users who maintain content on their own sites or projects throughout all 3 sites.

Once we had the software picked and installed and the initial users trained the cultural shift in our marketing began to take shape. For the first time we saw some of our marketing budget going to online resources instead of dying magazines and newspapers. Data from sources such as Google Analytics was finally views as something other than a bunch of lines on a piece of paper.

In the end, I’m happy to report that we have come up with a not just a website, but a solution that brings the department into the modern era. While there is still and always will be work to be done it is nice to see that we have finally shifted into drive and are proceeding ahead.

1. mod-php
   Fast, but all scripts execute under the standard apache user creating problems with file permissions in applications such as WordPress. The fact that all scripts, regardless of user, are on the same user can also lead to security problems.
2. mod-cgi with suphp
   This is slower that mod-php because the php threads have to be restarted preventing cache and creating extra overhead. It does allow for better security due to allowing all php scripts to execute under the user that created them.
3. fast-cgi with suexec
   This is the best of both worlds with the speed of mod-php and the security of suphp. The catch is the setup.

Now judging by the title of this thread I think we all know where I’m trying to go. Currently we’re running suphp. It works well, but as traffic to the server increases I would like to increase it’s performance. Although there are numerous tutorials out there, getting them to work on Ubuntu server isn’t easy.

I have numerous virtual-hosts all based in /home/[username]/public_html, a rather common setup. I’ve installed apache2-suexec-custom on the ubuntu box and pointed it to /home to overcome the home directory problem in the standard apache2/suexec package.

Now the problem is I can’t get any further than this. I got fastcgi to work by adding

FCGIWrapper /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 .php
AddHandler fcgid-script .php
Options ExecCGI Indexes

But no matter what I try I cannot get it to work with suexec. Any suggestions? I’m really pulling out what hair I have left on this one!

Thankfully, the fix was a lot easier than a new host. I installed the WP Super Cache plugin and for the last few weeks I haven’t been throttled for more than a few seconds a day. What a lifesaver!

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Although these may sound like trivial items to many groups, unfortunately the powers that be where I work have not, until recently, been convinced of the power of online marketing and started to take it seriously. Now in many ways this shift does make my work a little harder with added oversight and more pressure, but it is a challenge I have looked forward to for years.

It has been a good day!

My solution to this problem has been to use my own wp-signup.php page within my sign-up theme. Here’s how it’s done:

Before you start, make sure your server supports Apache mod-rewrite. An easy way to do this is to simply go to a post on one of your blogs. If you don’t see ?= anywhere in the address you should be OK. If not, go to http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php and see if permalinks are available on your server. If they are not you will need to get this enabled by your server administrator before going any further.

Next, the most important part, open up the .htaccess file in the root of your WordPress MU installation in your text editor. You may need to create the file if you haven’t been using any redirects previously.

Find the line:

RewriteBase /

Right below it (before anything else) add the line

RewriteRule ^wp-signup\.php(.*)$ wp-content/themes/[your theme name]/wp-signup.php$1

Save the file.

Finally, copy (don’t move) wp-signup.php from the root of your WordPress MU installation to your theme directory (usually wp-content/themes/default). Make sure you leave the original file in place. Moving the file alters the WordPress MU core installation which is never a good practice.

Now you may edit the wp-signup.php file to your heart’s content. Redirects to the new file should be seamless to your users.

If you would like to see how I’ve used this take a look at http://blogs.aviation.siuc.edu/wp-signup.php. Now my needs were simple, we just wanted to clarify some of the text to reduce confusion for our users. There is a lot more that can be done to make this form yours.

* edited Feb 27th, 2010: added a couple of important lines *
Never write on a deadline when you don’t have to. I forgot to change 2 important line.

In your new wp-signup.php page (the one in your themes folder) find the following 2 lines:

require( dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-load.php’ );
require( ‘wp-blog-header.php’ );

and replace them with the following:

require( ‘../../../wp-load.php’ );
require( ‘../../../wp-blog-header.php’ );

This will ensure that WordPress MU can find the files it needs to process your data.

1. Akismet
   The one plugin that is now included with a base install of WordPress, Akismet is the ultimate in WordPress Spam protection. It creates a “Spam” box in your WordPress comments and has the unmatched distinction of being the only spam blocker in any app I use to not miss a bad comment.
2. WP Security Scan
   Every new WordPress installation has it’s problems. Whether it’s weak passwords, file permission problems, or some other glitch it doesn’t take much for an attacker to exploit an insecure WordPress installation. WP Security Scan will find the most pressing problems and offers instructions and scripts for repairing them before they bring down your site.
3. Login LockDown
   Another security plugin, login lockdown prevents brute-force attacks on your WordPress administration pages by locking any account after a specified number of bad login attempts. After using WordPress MU in a public University I can tell you first hand that Login Lockdown not only improves the security of your site, but can also help reduce server load by reducing the number of allowed bad login attempts.
4. Header and Footer
   Header and Footer is a handy little plugin allowing for inclusion of custom code in the header and footer of all your pages. Items such as Google Analytics code, Yahoo Site Explorer meta tags, and numerous others can be added, removed, and changed at ease with this simple little plugin.
5. Clean Options
   I’ve added Clean Options to the list somewhat reluctantly as it may be a little much for some novice users. However it is an incredibly handy tool to have on any blog or site that has been out there for more than a little while. As other plugins are updated, added, or removed many of their options stay in place in your database. Do this enough times and it can start to impact the performance of your MySQL database. Clean Options fixes this by removing unused and obsolete options from the database allowing for a much more streamlined options table.

Of course these aren’t the only good plugins out there, and in fact putting this list together wasn’t as easy as I originally thought. A few of the plugins that didn’t make the cut include: All In One SEO Pack, WordPress Mobile Pack, and WordPress.com Stats among others. Have something else that I missed? Let me know so I can give it a try.

Looking back there are a number of goals completed, a number still to go, and a few that I never even anticipated. In the case of our redesign we started in April, the main site is still to be done. This is due primarily to the uncertain outcome of our university’s web standards committee. We don’t want to over-invest in a product that will not meet whatever standards they decide to come up with. While waiting however I’ve had time to really refocus and expand our web presence while [hopefully] being able to provide a far more useful product to all of our customers. We’ve installed and launched WordPress MU for individual, group, and class sites. We’re nearing the launch of a MediaWiki installation to be used as our local intranet. Finally, we’ve greatly expanded our social media presence and finally convinced the powers that be that our marketing dollars are better spent on the web than limited magazines and other media.

Stepping away from the web I’ve made a lot of headway in a number of projects. We launched (and then decommissioned) a Squid proxy to restrict internet access during the day due to very limited bandwidth. It worked almost too well and was quickly removed for mostly political considerations. We’ve also begun the rollout of non Microsoft desktops to our faculty and staff in the form of Ubuntu as the primary OS. Only 3 desktops and our webserver have been migrated so far but considering that we had never looked away from MS before that it is definitely a good start. Finally, we added a windows update server to provide more control and better use of our bandwidth while still maintaining the ability to make sure all systems are completely patched.

Now on to the future. My first priority is, as always, our web presence. Pending the outcome of the campus web standards committee I hope to get a new main site in place very quickly. In addition, depending on current content contributions, I would like to see our new Wiki launch at the beginning of the Spring semester. It has been in the making for a little while now and promises to provide a much more complete and, more importantly, standardized method of intra-department communication. Beyond that I would like to see our file services migrated to Samba and Linux away from MS Active Directory as well as continue the gradual migration of departmental desktops to the Linux platform.

With all that I’m sure it will be another busy semester. However as with every semester I look forward to the challenges and can’t wait to see the outcomes!

Fast forward a few years later and things have changes. First we went to a PHP/MySQL combination on our windows server and were using a number of, shall we say, rudimentary techniques to force issues such as SEF friendly URLs, etc. Then last spring we decided we didn’t want IIS at all anymore and switched to a LAMP stack on Ubuntu server and in the process eliminated our use of WebDav, FTP, and RDC relying solely on SSH for all non Apache tasks.

As we move to a new server now I find myself asking the question as to whether the dual NIC setup is worth it given the independant structure of the various services and the fact that we don’t allow any non-public data on the machine. What do you guys think? Should I continue to segregate the CMS and SSH services by IP therefore restricting their access to the campus CAN through a hardware firewall, or should I just use a single IP without using up scarce IPv4 addresses/etc.

Please let me know what you guys think in the comments?

Day in and day out we go through our lives at work and home without much reason to change. Although what we are doing now might work, we often don’t have much incentive to learn anything new. Blogging helps by forcing you to learn something new as you investigate material for your writing. For example, us techie bloggers can find all sorts of new tricks and tools in the quest to research the topic of our latest post. More often than not these can be some pretty cool items we would never have heard about otherwise.

2.) Blogging educates others

Blogging is about educating others. It is about taking something you have learned and passing that information out to others in your field, interest group etc. There is no better way in today’s society to get you ideas published than by doing so yourself on the internet.

3.) Blogging makes you a better writer

Most of us were not trained as writers or journalists and lets face it, when we try we can often use some help. Like so many other skills in life writing is one in which practice makes perfect. and in an economy where the ability to efficiently communicate our ideas and experience through writing is so crucial a little practice can go a long way.

4.) Blogging increases your visibility

You might be the best in your field, but if no one knows about you what good does it do? Whether your an experienced professional or new rookie, writing in your field gets your name out there.

5.) Blogging can be fun

Not much to say about this one except it is a cool experience to see one of your posts make the front page of a service like Digg.

Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC)

SIUC has had a long history on the web dating back about 20 years. The current version of the site does it’s best to help users navigate with links targeted to the demographic of the visitor. As a whole the site does a descent job at getting users where they need to be, however with a decentralized web structure in which each campus department, unit, etc is tasked with the development and maintenance of its own site it tends to confuse users as they browse for various academic programs and other information most students would need. It does so by not providing any central summary of programs, but instead directly links users to various departmental sites which often bear little or no resemblance to the main SIUC site.

Other than the decentralized nature, the site does do an excellent job of trying to make navigation as simple as possible as no department is more than 2-3 clicks away. In addition, although not quite in school colors, the main page has a pleasant design and color scheme that avoids both being overly harsh or overly generic, a problem seen on far too many sites today.

Overall, SIUC has an excellent long-standing web presence limited only by it’s decentralized nature.

This is where I stand right now with our primary website at work (http://www.aviation.siu.edu). I have been actively developing this site on my own for about 10 years with some very basic concepts. First, there was no direction from anyone in the department. This means that in everything from features to server configuration and more I had free control over it all. Heck, I couldn’t even get a critique if I begged for it. I know to some this might not seem like a problem, and for years it hasn’t been to me. What is a problem is that with only one person working unguided on a site of 1000′s of pages it can lead to numerous unused features and an administration that is slow to react with trends in online marketing. Second, I’ve been designing and redesigning a custom content management system for the site since the beginning. This also has never really been a problem, but combined with no direction it has lead to a system with little documentation and virtually no connection to other common systems users our familiar with such as WordPress and others.

Now things are changing. The administration in our department has realized that putting all its advertising money into magazine ads isn’t the most efficient use of their budget. Consequently they are turning their sites to the web. Although I haven’t been officially asked to do anything (and still find very little guidance as to their vision) I recognize this shift in ideology and know that I need to work to making the most use of our advertising budget and at the same time work to redesign not only our site, but much of our entire marketing strategy.

So where do I start? First I realize that I cannot do everything by myself if for no other reason that a second person can see things I cannot. Consequently I am getting help from a small team I’ve put together. Although beneficial, at the airport this is quite a change in philosophy and like any such change requires a little getting used to (I must say that of everything that’s changing, a team is the most positive change for both me and the department as I like working in teams normally). Second, although the CMS I have used is nice, there is a lot of good open-source products on the market now that provide the features we need as well as excellent documentation and other features making it easy to incorporate information from more sources.

Putting this all together has left me with quite a headache. Stepping back from 10 years of one direction and refocusing on a new one has not been easy at all. The good thing however is that I realize when it’s done we will have a better product for the entire SIU Aviation community (even though it might take a little longer than I originally hoped).

So about 2 months ago we decided on Drupal. It’s feature set including current ACL and more really made it the only choice for our project in which we are moving from a proprietary CMS to something more standard.When we started this I was really excited that not only would there be good community support for our CMS, but also it would be nice to not have to re-invent the wheel in duplication features such as user management and others.

As good as the new software is I greatly over-estimated the learning curve. So far I really haven’t done much site building at all and have instead been working on trying to reproduce certain aspects of our current site including the calendar and a few others. I naively thought that Drupal’s modules would take care of the bulk of my problems, but unfortunately I was wrong. Oh well, more proof that nothing in life is easy, lol.

or

1.) Aptana Studio

Aptana Studio is an excellent developer environment for coding in nearly all the popular languages found around the web today. With a growing user base and a foundation in the solid Eclipse platform it will give any web developer the tools he or she needs to produce powerful, complex code for their projects. I have personally replaced Dreamweaver CS4 with Aptana and couldn’t be happier

http://www.aptana.com

2.) Firefox

The Firefox web browser might not be the fastest currently on the market, but with an abundance of addons and solid support on nearly every operating system in existence it is hard to overlook as an excellent choice for your primary browser.

http://www.firefox.com

3.) Filezilla

If you do much work on a website you’re probably gonna need an utility to transfer files between your computer and your web server. Filezilla can do that with ease with support for FTP, SSH, and more.

http://filezilla-project.org

4.) XAMPP

There are a lot of ways to display your site on your local computer, but XAMPP is the only one I’ve found that will run on all the major platforms. It is easy to install and administer and comes with all the necessary features to turn your local machine into a top-notch test server (I’ve even seen it run on a few production web servers although I wouldn’t recommend the practice myself)

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

5.) The Gimp

Photoshop might be the most popular image manipulation program on the market, but it isn’t the only one that can handle image manipulation for the web. The Gimp is an excellent, if somewhat complicated, image editing package which can work all sorts of magic on any photo you want to put online. For vector graphics it can be used in conjunction with Inkscape to provide a solid package for creating and editing everything from logos to pictures from your last company picnic.

http://gimp.org

6.) SmartSVN

SmartSVN is a Subversion client which allows you to interact with a Subversion repository. Subversion, in turn, is a version control system allowing you to not only keep a repository of all the data in your project, but it can also keep track of changes, rollback changes, and perform all sorts of other tasks of use to a web developer. It can even be a solid alternative for deploying your work to your production server without the use of FTP or another file transfer method in which it can be easy to forget a file. There is even an excellent free SVN host available at XP-dev

http://www.syntevo.com/smartsvn/index.html

7.) VirtualBox

Virtualbox is a free virtual machine from SUN. It allows you to run other operating systems on top of your main system which can then be used for testing your project on other browsers and configurations. For example, if you have a Mac you could run Windows within VirtualBox on your mac and use it to see how your project looks in Internet Explorer or other browsers not available on your Mac.

http://www.virtualbox.org

8.) Xmarks

Originally known as Foxmarks, Xmarks is a service which can backup and sync the bookmarks and passwords from your browser. This is a must if you use multiple machines yourself or even if you just want to pull up a page on a machine other than your own as you can even access your bookmarks from their online interface. Currently it works with Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer on all the major operating systems

http://www.xmarks.com

9.) DropBox

DropBox is a cross-platform file backup and synchronization service that not only backs up your most important data, but also seamlessly synchronizes it on your other computers. Of all the applications I use on a daily basis this one is definitely the handiest as I never have to worry about forgetting anything important. Like Xmarks it even has a web interface in case your at a different computer and need access to one of your documents.

http://www.getdropbox.com

10.) Google Apps

Although not a local application like the rest of this list, Google Apps is an excellent resource for helping you set up your personal web identity as well as those of your clients. It allows for hosted email, calendar, and other services on your own domain name and does so while providing users with the often familiar GMail interface that so many people already know.

http://www.google.com/apps

So what are your favorites?

By the way the site is at http://www.aviation.siu.edu. Please give me some ideas!

I’m on Twitter for two very different reasons. First and foremost I’m there to learn. My job doesn’t give me the luxury of attending numerous conferences or interacting with too many others here in this small town, and although I can learn a lot from a Google Search you are still often limited by your own imagination. Twitter gives me the power to follow others in my industry and gain all sorts of ideas from the links they post and sometimes even the posts themselves. For instance, following a lot of Joomla tweeters has lead me to believe that Joomla is the way for me to go with my own sites. Also, when I was looking for a new web-host Twitter gave me numerous real-time feedback on a number of hosts I would not have otherwise considered.

In addition to random ideas and trends Twitter is also invaluable in the ability to get a question answered quickly by people not in your normal network. I’ve seen everything from twitter tech support for web hosting companies to the name of a song gained within minutes by posting a simple tweet. Of course in this respect it can also be beneficial to answer questions when the pop-up and help those as they might help you.

Next, I use twitter simply to interact with people who are not in my normal network. Although conversations might not be as long or detailed as those in real life there is still a lot to be gained in 140 characters. Not only can these conversations be entertaining and help build your network, but they can also be a great way to brainstorm and throw around some new ideas as you can always get feedback from someone.

In many ways both of these goals reflect my following and tweeting habits. I follow as many people as possible without worrying if they follow me back. No, I can’t track every tweet from every person I follow, but I don’t need to. Instead the enormous amounts of new tweets give me the opportunity to scan for information that is important to me and follow up where necessary and that, in my opinion, really is the whole point.

So while self-promotion and tracking your favorite celebrities are certainly valuable pursuits for some, it is the wealth of information that can be gained and shared that is the true value of Twitter and is, in fact, why I Tweet.