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Web Operational Management Group

Minutes of the Meeting of October 31, 2001
2:00 - 3:30 pm, Porter Conference Room

Present: Chris Gray, Linda Hastings, Bill Oldfield (Recorder), Marina Wan (Facilitator), Esther Millar, and Charles Woods

  1. Approval of minutes from the meeting on October 17, 2001
    The minutes were approved without change.

  2. Business arising from the minutes of October 17th:
    Marina and Esther attended the Dreamweaver/Fireworks IST course on October 25th. While it performs the task it is still not easy and only frequent use will make someone proficient.

  3. Agenda Review
    9. Ollie - Library's DEC Alpha computer

  4. Top page design (Linda, Marina)
    The latest prototypes were discussed. They can be viewed at: http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/LibWebUse/
    prototype2/

    A few suggestions were made. The bordered box for the drop down menus is unnecessary and detracts from the appearance of the menus. The use of a button-like display for the "Quick Links" and "What's New?" headings is misleading. They look like buttons for clicking rather than just headings. CNAPG was suggested for the contact in the mailto at the bottom of the page rather than Staff Web Maintenance.

    Further action is awaiting CNAPG response.

  5. Staff Web Review - Report to DLCC (Esther, Linda, Marina)
    Draft and Summary reports have been prepared.
    Draft report: http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/staff/swreview/
    report.html
    Summary: http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/staff/swreview/
    report_summary.html

    At the suggestion of the DLCC the summary report was added.
    There was some discussion about the use of a single password for the portions that are restricted. The single password can be handled by the website indexing process and allows staff to access these resources from home. If separate passwords are used for each directory, indexing is very much complicated. IP control can also be used and will not effect the indexing. People can request that a directory be indexed by the UW spider or not. Access restrictions like IP and password will keep the Internet indexing services out.

    The server side includes in the page are split and every page using the new format will have to be manually adjusted.

  6. Access 2001 (Bill)
    A report is in preparation and the WebOps group will be notified when it is available for viewing.

  7. Use of robots.txt (Bill)
    The robot.txt file, which can be placed at the top level of a UNIX machine offering Web services, is supposed to be checked by the external spiders to see about any indexing restriction at the site. It is not known if all Internet indexing services use this protocol but any spider can ignore it. The use of IP and password access control as suggested renders the use of a robot.txt file redundant and therefore unnecessary.

  8. Database - software and development (Bill, Chris)
    Zope development has been stopped. The Library will be moving to a ColdFusion server enviroment for database delivery of the appropriate webpages.

  9. Ollie - Library's DEC Alpha computer (Charles)
    The Dec Alpha, which was the Library's original "library.uwaterloo.ca," machine has been retired. RIP
Next Meeting: Wednesday, November 14, 2001, 2-4 p.m., Porter #428
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July 15, 2005