This column covers features and resources available through the
University's Campus Wide Information System (CWIS). UNT's Home Page on the
World Wide Web can be found at http://www.unt.edu.Much has changed since the last column. For starters,
Doug Bateman is no longer the Campus Wide Information Systems Coordinator. In
his place is me, Mark Wilcox. Well I don't have room to go into everything
about me here but here's a bit: I just graduated from UNT with my Master's
Degree in Library and Information Science. I've been spewing HTML for nearly
2 years, I've got every issue of WIRED
since issue #3 (back then the cool sites were either gopher or ftp), I ran a
Webserver for the GSLIS and I just recently scored a perfect score on the
Geek Computer Quiz at the PBS site (
http://www.pbs.org/nerds). The non-geek things I'm into are sports,
horror books and television.
During the Christmas break there were two major
changes, one of which is obvious and one of which is not so obvious. The
"not so obvious" change is that we moved the main UNT Website (www.unt.edu)
to a new machine. It's a nice SUN Microsystems
Netra. It will increase the reliability and speed of access to our main Website.
Besides hosting www.unt.edu it is also hosting
www.Year2000.unt.edu and
www.music.unt.edu. During this
semester we will also be testing some other Webserver software such as the
Netscape Directory server to add more
functionality to our Website.
The other change is the one the majority of you know
about, and are probably at least a little annoyed about. We changed the name
of the server for the personal Webpages for the University to
people.unt.edu.
The technical reason for this change is that due to
the way we link to personal pages on Jove it caused an unstable environment
for us. If Jove went down, the www.unt.edu site went down, which is not a
good way to run a major Website. Also, many other universities provide a
separate URL for personal pages and this is ours. Again, I apologize for
not getting a message out sooner, but we are providing a redirect to the
new site off the old site. Please let those who link to your homepage and the
search engines know your current address.
We hope to offer more support for interactive pages
via Javascript, JAVA, VBscript, Active-X, and other client-side
technologies as they become available. Client-side applications are the
next big wave on the WWW (meaning what's hot for the next 2 months). They're
much easier, reliable, and faster to implement than CGI, but not without
their share of problems too.
Check out http://people.unt.edu for more information
on tutorials, links and other helpful information.
I look forward to an enjoyable tenure here at UNT. I
am here to help provide the best support to the people who use the Web to
improve and enrich the UNT experience. Questions, comments, flames, and/or
jokes can be sent to me at mewilcox@unt.edu.
Next ArticleIf you have any problems or questions about this server, contact us as
soon us as soon as possible. You can send mail to the following address:
www@unt.edu