Try out the Demo Site

If you would like to give the gslounge.com demonstration site a go as an anonymous user, just visit it now.

If you'd like to visit the site and see what a student might see next year, log in with the following username and password: gstest, gstest. Look around, kick the tires! Can you find the forum? Make a blog post! Let me know what you think by email or by using the feedback form.

Thanks,

Brody

Nicolle: Gslounge.com Content Director

I have created the unofficial role of Content Director for gslounge.com. The Content Director will be in charge of all site content. Everything a visitor sees on the site is the responsibility of the Content Director. All questions and ideas about content will go to the Content Director as well as the responsibility to specify pages that need to be created that will be useful to the student body. I have appointed Nicolle Rountree to be our first ever Content Director.

Nicolle has already begun work on this and has created this spreadsheet to track ideas for pages with strong relevance toward the General Studies student body.

You can reach Nicolle by email as well as on the Facebook.

Congratulations Nicolle :-)

Brody

Host Reliability - Dreamhost Shared Hosting

I have begun a long term uptime monitoring test of the shared hosting of Dreamhost, the host I'd like to move gslounge.com. I am using three uptime monitoring services: Siteuptime.com, Alertra and Wormly. The test version of gslounge.com is currently in the shared hosting at dreamhost. This morning the shared hosting there suffered a twenty minute outage for database reasons.

Let's say there are roughly 525,960 minutes in a 365.25 day year. Per year then:

• 99.999% uptime would give us 525,954 minutes of uptime, or 6 minutes of downtime
• 99.99% uptime would give us 525,907 minutes of uptime, or 53 minutes of downtime
• 99.9% uptime would give us 525,434 minutes of uptime, 8.76 hours of downtime

This list clearly shows that shared hosting on Dreamhost, even if we start counting today, isn't in the "5 9's" category. Continued monitoring may well reveal shared hosting isn't in the four or three nines category of reliability either.

1% downtime works out to around 3 days of downtime per year. How much downtime can gslounge.com handle before students are turned off? My personal answer is that my tolerance for downtime relates directly to how much I rely on the service. GMail downtime kills me but I forgive the service because how superior it is to competitors - and how hard it would be for me to switch to another service.

The sweet spot here is to make gslounge.com as compelling as possible and simultaneously work to find the most rock-solid host (at the best price) as possible. I am not sure how to find other hosts with great uptime other than testing them myself using my hosted pages within their server farm. Anyone have any great ideas?

Thanks,

Brody

Calendar Working Group Kick-off

I just sent out questions to the eight founding members of the Calendar Working Group to help us begin our task of bringing fresh, relevant calendaring to the undergraduate students of Columbia University. Here are the questions, if you have a response, please email me or comment, any and all ideas are welcome.

• What is calendaring success in the 2007-2008 school year?
• Specific ways you hope to work with the CWG to achieve this success?
• What do think a non-goal of the CWG should be?
• Do you know of an example of great calendaring the CWG could learn from?
• Specific dates that are critical to calendaring success for your organization?
• What's the answer to a calendaring related question you wish I would have asked?

Thanks,

Brody

GSLounge Demo Site Updates

The latest changes to the demonstration site:

• Created an Orientation page
  
• Forum topics and comments are now only visible to authenticated users (following a suggestion from Dean Stellini)
  
• User log-in user interface placed in header rather than left side-bar
• Left side-bar links to Calendar, Blogs, Forum and Feedback (same links are now also located in the header)
• Users applying for gslounge.com accounts are now limited to email addresses of the following format: *@columbia.edu or *@*.columbia.edu
  
• ex.
  
• foo@columbia.edu
• bar@cs.columbia.edu
• Updated the Resources links to actually point to the Academic Calendar etc.
• Enabled the Site Contact page so anonymous and authenticated users can contact the Communications Team about anything they wish.
  

Following these directions I created the first database backup:

• mysqldump -u db_drupal -p -h data.skaftafell.net gs_drupal > ../db_backups/06032007_nodeaccess.back

Forum access was limited to authenticated users through the Nodeaccess module for Drupal. The anonymous user can see that a forum exists but they can't go deeper than that.

Nodeaccess controls which users can access certain paths. Nodeaccess, though under only prototype development for Drupal 5.1, is what I am hoping to use in order to limit access by anonymous users to sensitive areas of gslounge.com starting with the Forums.

Enabling Nodeaccess:

• ssh to host of Drupal installation
  
• wget http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/drupal/files/projects/nodeaccess-5.x-1.x-dev.tar.gz
• gzip -dc nodeaccess-5.x-1.x-dev.tar.gz
• mv nodeaccess modules
• From the Drupal admin control panel admin/build/modules
• Enable Nodeaccess
• Update node access permissions
• Administer/User Management/Nodeaccess
  
• "Forum Topic"
• Remove "view" permission from "anonymous user"
• Save Grants
• To complete this task, I wrote a message to anonymous users trying to view forums instructing them to login or register in order to read/comment on forums.
  

Thanks,

Brody

Lessons Learned: Seniors.gslounge.com

On May 7th, Jason, outgoing senior class president requested that a forum be setup for seniors to share information about events happening around campus and the city related to graduation and for activity partners. I built the site because of the need, but also because it could serve as a good case study about why or why not a forum works.

Here is the site traffic for http://seniors.gslounge.com:


As you can tell, traffic spiked the day the site was announced and then went into a fast, smooth fall back down to zero. Other than myself and Jason, only one other person posted to the forum although there were many views of forum topics.

From my perspective I think we have learned several things:

• Students don't go to forums for activity partners, they do that in person or on Facebook
• A forum with no links other than from this blog and a single email from Jason will die
• A forum with only a single, highly specialized topic for a small audience will die
• A forum isn't the ideal spot for news

We also learned a lesson stated by Deans Stellini and Rodgers:

• "Building it doesn't mean they will come.
  

This is another way of saying that just because we go through the effort to make something, that students will hear about it, understand it, participate in it and then value it.

Let me try and state the opposite of these lessons as guidelines for the new gslounge.com forums:

• Forums will be for discussion of news, politics or other topics
• Forums will be linked to from:
• Other areas of gslounge.com
• Blogs on gslounge.com
• Regular email messages from the Communications Team
• Undefined external sites
• Forums will have topics designed to appeal to a large audience
• Forums will not be used to break news for the student body

An attempt to make a positive re-statement of the Stellini/Rodgers lesson:

• If you carefully tweak it and keep trying to make it relevant, then, perhaps, just maybe, they might show up and start using it
  

Thanks,

Brody