Computing Seminar: Web Sustainability

Description:
The presentation discusses two projects looking at the questions:
- What are some of the options for a publicly funded web resources when the money is no longer there to host it?
- What could you do if there is no money there in the first place? An example site is shown with this constraint.


Presented 26th March 2014, Department of Computing and Immersive Technologies, School of Science and Technology, University of Northampton, UK as part of the Computing Research Seminar Series.

Citation:
Turner, Scott (2014): Web sustainability. figshare. 
http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1005663





Contact: scott.turner@northampton.ac.uk 

Nuffield Bursary student 1 - Web sustainability

Ahsan Anderson has being working with Scott Turner from the University of Northampton on issues around Web Sustainability using a website designed to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) outreach activities as the vehicle. The work is being funded through a Nuffield Science Bursary. 

The project has been in three parts:

• Investigating possible tools and approaches for web sustainability;
• Developing a sustainable website to specification;
• Looking an smartphones apps as a possible route for improving the use (and therefore sustainability) of the site. 

In this posting the outcomes from the first two parts are shown (the third will be a separate posting).


Investigating possible tools.

Details of this are available through these blog posts

• Best free tools for website sustainability - http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-best-free-tools-for-website.html
• How to get it out there for pennies - http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/hosting-how-to-get-it-out-there-for.html

STEM site

The site was developed and hosted using Weebly because of its easy of use, free tools and free hosting.

The site is sustainable because
- It has been design to be relatively simple to maintain
- Uses free tools
- Uses free web-hosting
- Relatively easy to transfer management
- Relatively easy to wrap most of the site and largely move it to another host.



Site: http://stemnorthamptonshire.weebly.com/home.html At the moment the outline of the site is is shown, with content to follow.

A user guide to maintaining the site has also been produced.

website sustainability

Introduction to the Project

East Midlands Knowledge Network (EMKN) is an online resource which is currently at risk, due to the demise of regional development agencies, the imminent closure of the company upon whose server it sits and the uncertain future of the East Midlands Universities Association (EMUA), who created the resource. However the information held on within the site (technologies, business services and facilities within EMUA’s institutions is valuable.

Site statistics indicate that EMKN is well used in the region, considering the small target market (BLAs) and attracts significant interest from further afield. Feedback from users has been very favourable, and the site is valued by both member HEIs and brokers (see attached letters of support).

EMKN is therefore ‘at risk’ and the issues are these

•EMKN brings together valuable resources that will promote and assist business community interaction, in line with government policy both on HE-business engagement and on-line information provision.

•EMKN was designed to meet the specific needs of (BLAs). It needs updating to be accessible by businesses directly and possibly to be incorporated into, or linked to, businesslink.gov.uk

•emda’s innovation website has content that would be a valuable addition to EMKN, but EMUA has neither the resources nor the skills in-house to incorporate these into EMKN.

•EMKN must be moved from its private sector host server by January 2011.

•EMKN is currently maintained by EMUA staff. It should be moved to an alternative server, as EMUA is also under threat.

•If the site was upgraded, maintenance could be reduced using automatic data uploads such as RSS feeds, and the content and accessibility of the information could be improved.

Therefore this project will use the need for migration of this site as a case study on protecting a valuable resource in an economical and sustainable way. The approach will:

•use free server space on Google Sites (www.google.com/sites/overview.html)

•Skilled students will be used within the migration this has the benefit of providing valuable experience for the student involving a ‘real-world’ client.

Google Sites (www.google.com/sites/overview.html) has been selected as the alternative platform for several reasons:

• It is a freely available resource, allowing this approach to be replicated with other at risk reources.

• It allows changes for individual pages or the entire site remotely by subscription

• It supports native RSS feeds for:

o Announcements pages

o Comments

o Recent site activity

• It integrates with a number of Google-based tools (such as Analytics, Webmaster tools, YouTube, Google Docs and Picasa).

Development of the site in this way will also enable the web resource to capture and include some aspects of the East Midlands Development Agency (emda) Innovation portal, which itself will no longer exist post March 2011, due to the abolishment of RDAs. 


This project has been supported by a grant from JISC.

Before starting to migrate the site from a hosted server to a Google sites, capturing the current web contents as static HTML has some benefits:
-Even though Google sites does allow for direct importing of HTML. HTML can be added to a Google Site.
-Provides all the images in one go.

Software selected for this job is the free software WinHTTrack Website Copier (http://www.httrack.com/). It is easy to install and use.

The currently free Dropbox  provides an alternative place to store a website. But only if we talking about static content (ie. content which is not changed dynamically by PHP, etc but is basically HTML). Dropbox provides a public folder which can be view by one with the appropriate link.

First we need to copy the site, so we have local copy on our own machine. This can be done using the method as an example shown in  the earlier blog entry Caught it.

Next, we need a Dropbox account. Go to www.dropbox.com and you should see the following:

Click on the download button and follow the instructions. You will need an email address. We actually on need the Typical setting.

This will add a piece of software to machine. With a little box icon at the bottom of your screen, if we click on this we see the files and folders in the dropbox, open the public folder, now.transfer files over to public folder

Go to the dropbox website and log-in

Then do

Step 2:  Right-click[control-click for a mac] this hom,e page file, then choose Dropbox > Copy Public Link. This copies the Internet link to your file so that you can paste it somewhere else.

Example:http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25018391/index.html for the East Midlands Knowledge Network

For more details on webpage sustainability go to website sustainability.