Web Support News

Following on the success of our recent open-format Drupal User Group meetings, Central Web Support would like to announce, in conjunction with the URCM Web Development Center, our new weekly office hours on campus.

Ever wished you could have someone talk you through your web development questions in person? Now you can; just stop by ISB 143 on any given Wednesday between 1:30pm and 3:00pm, starting tomorrow, January 26. Each of our offices will be sending someone to help answer any questions you may have.

Hope to see you there!

When: Thursday December 16; 2pm-3pm

Where: McConnell Hall Lab (Enter the front entrance of McConnell hall
and the lab is immediately to the right)

Agenda:

Following the success of last month's session, there will again be no formal presentation this month. Instead, staff from Central Web Support and the Web Development Center will be available to provide in-person advice and help with any questions you may have, or problems you may be experiencing. There will be 20 computers available, so it will be possible to work completely "hands-on". We hope that this will be of service to many campus webmasters, especially as you may be preparing for the upcoming spring semester.

Here are some of the topics for which we'll be available to help:

• General Drupal questions
• Custom module development
• Theming/css
• Javascript
• Writing for the web
• Information Architecture

The Texas State Historical Association has a College Work Study position available on campus which involves editing and creating web pages on Drupal websites. Applicants familiar with HTML and Adobe software will be given preference. A knowledge of Texas geography will also be helpful, but is not required. Future projects may also involve helping create eBooks and apps for mobile devices. The job is posted on the UNT Career Center website, job number CW-1368. For more details, please see the TSHA website.

We recently updated our SLA to clarify what kinds of sites should be hosted on UNT's UNTtranet. Here's an excerpt:

Intranet/Wiki and Document management sites should be hosted with the university's official intranet system, SharePoint. Support for SharePoint may be found at http://citc.unt.edu/untranet.

If you haven't read our SLA recently, you may wish to take a look and familiarize yourself with some of the services we offer. We constantly strive to improve our technical and support offerings, and welcome any feedback from the campus community.

From the UNT Libraries: UNT Libraries will begin the Fall 2010 UNT domain crawl November 29. Twice a year, we crawl the unt.edu domain and discoverable *.unt.edu subdomains in order to archive UNT's Web presence and online documents. If you are aware of sites with UNT content that do not have a *.unt.edu address that you would like included in this harvest, please email Lauren Ko at lauren.ko@unt.edu.

If you are the webmaster for a CWS-hosted website that does not have a *.unt.edu address, we would encourage you to contact UNT libraries and get your site included in this project.

When: Thursday November 18; 2pm-3pm

Where: McConnell Hall Lab (Enter the front entrance of McConnell hall
and the lab is immediately to the right)

Agenda:

There will be no formal presentation this month. Instead, staff from Central Web Support and the Web Development Center will be available to provide in-person advice and help with any questions you may have, or problems you may be experiencing. There will be 20 computers available, so it will be possible to work completely "hands-on". We hope that this will be of service to many campus webmasters, especially as you may be preparing for the upcoming spring semester.

Here are some of the topics for which we'll be available to help:

• General Drupal questions
• Custom module development
• Theming/css
• Javascript
• Writing for the web
• Information Architecture

When: Thursday October 21; 2pm-3pm
Where: Marquis Hall 118

This meeting's agenda:

1. Marissa Alanis from the URCM Web Development Center will be presenting on "Writing for the Web", written by Stephen McGinn.
2. CWS and WDC staff will be available after the presentation to field any site building, web content, or web strategy questions.

Demonstration Description:

Writing for the Web isn't the same as writing for print. On the Web,
people read differently as they try to find information. Therefore,
it's important that the content is readable and scannable. The
writing needs to be brief, direct and simple. This presentation will
cover how people read information on the Web, and provide tips on how
to write for the Web.

We recently updated our SLA to add guidelines on how quickly you may expect certain types of support requests to be completed. Here's an excerpt:

CWS staff will respond to support requests (submitted via the online ticketing system at https://webadmin.unt.edu) within 2 hours on business days. All requests will receive a prompt response; however, certain requests will take longer than 2 hours to complete. This may be due to the existing request volume at the time of the request, or the nature of the request:

• New site creation. CWS will set up new site installations within one business day of approval.
• Site migrations. Migrations will be completed within one business day. If you need a migration to occur at a specific time, please schedule it at least one day in advance.
• Advanced development questions requiring research are answered on a strictly time-available basis, and generally will take at least 1-2 business days.

If you haven't read our SLA recently, you may wish to take a look and familiarize yourself with some of the services we offer. We constantly strive to improve our technical and support offerings, and welcome any feedback from the campus community.