For more than 10 years, Ohio University students have been able to create personal websites on the Oak server.
Some have used these sites to experiment with web design and others have used them to post portfolios online. No one will be using their Oak websites after June, though, because the Office of Information Technology (OIT) will be shutting them down.
Any student who has an Oak account can opt to redirect their site to OU’s new host server, People. The need for equipment upgrades has been a recurring theme in all of OIT’s latest developments, and replacing the server is no different.
Almost all students and alumni have switched to Catmail from Webmail, and employees and graduate students are now using Microsoft Exchange, a locally hosted email system. Retiring the personal websites will be the final stage in OU’s farewell to its decade-old Oak system.
“We looked to see which pages people actually got into in the last year and figured those people might actually want (to switch) so we communicated with them,” said Jay Beam, web services director at OU.
There were about 70,000 personal web pages on the Oak server, but the university only sent emails to the 25,926 users who have accessed their sites in the past year. As of last Tuesday, 302 students, alumni and faculty had made the switch to People. OIT expects about 20,000 people to create People sites before the switch is finalized.
“Some people use this as their own personal website,” said Sean O’Malley, Information Technology communications manager. “They update it regularly, and we don’t want those people’s files to just go away.”
The new server will still be limited to static, non-interactive web content. Currently, students can use text editors or programs like Dreamweaver to build their sites. Links to videos and multimedia can be downloaded onto static websites but cannot be directly streamed through the browser.
Dynamic sites, however, change on the fly depending on the viewer. These sites, similar to Yahoo! or eBay, are easier to build and navigate for the not-so-tech-savvy.
“This is an interface for people who want to be able to edit web pages but don’t want to have to be a web developer,” O’Malley said.
OIT remains focused on switching static sites, but the new People server might allow OU students to create interactive sites in the future.
Student organizations such as Phi Beta Kappa and the field hockey club team are currently experimenting with these interactive features, Beam said.“Our original plan from a web services standpoint is to eventually give students the ability to provide themselves with an Ohio University professional webpage,” he said.
With the upgrade to People, OU will also say farewell to the tilde. Old URL addresses will be shortened from oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~ohioid to ohio.edu/people/ohioid.
The OIT website and the thousands of emails sent include instructions on how to redirect personal websites to the new and improved host site.
“If you want to learn how to build your own website, this is the playground to do it,” O’Malley said.
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