What a Tangled Web We Weave!

Mark Walvoord
University of Oklahoma

walvoord@ou.edu

I had the pleasure of becoming ABLE’s new “managing web editor” this past summer (taking over from Dr. Mariëlle Hoefnagels, aka “web empress,” with nary a fight).  Besides regular webpage updates, my initial duties included migrating the ABLE website from the University of Toronto server to a commercial server.  This was accomplished in mid-October, with no interruptions to visitors.

“Visitors?!” you ask with both curiosity and  pessimism.  YES, we have a relatively well-visited site.  For the week of January 26-February 1, for instance, we had an average of 51 visitors/day to our site, and each hung out ABLEing for about 4 minutes looking at 3 pages (we’re certainly not a http://www.worldpress.org/traffic.cfm, but we do pretty well).  Over the past month, we’ve had visitors from (besides the United States and Canada, our largest audiences): Belgium, Columbia, Czech Republic, France, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Malaysia, Mauritius, Pakistan, Ukraine, and the UK.  The majority of visitors (for which we can track data, anyway) come to us through Google searches, and they usually enter our site through our main page (http://www.ableweb.org) or through one of many Proceedings volumes.

What does this change mean to you, the ABLE groupies? 

1. You may need to update some bookmarks. Previously, when you went to http://www.ableweb.org you were automatically forwarded to http://www.zoo.utoronto.ca/able/ (the old server). Any sub pages you referenced or bookmarked would have been www.zoo.utoronto.ca/able pages.  This could include “favorites” on your web browser or references on your CV, for instance. Please update these to the new address.  For instance, a reference to http://www.zoo.utoronto.ca/able/news/winter05/walvoord-w05.htm would now be http://www.ableweb.org/news/winter05/walvoord-w05.htm.
2. You can now send ABLE webpage update requests directly to me, instead of Corey Goldman/Mike Serafin (of the University of Toronto).
3. You MAY find some broken links—for instance, those I have missed that still point to the University of Toronto server.  Feel free to let me know, so I can correct these (a thanks to Dr. Pliny Smith most recently for pointing out some errors).
4. We have more flexibility to update our Proceedings indices, the ability to make minor updates more quickly, and the server platform to allow future, larger-scale changes (adding a “members-only” area, starting a blog or online discussion forum, allowing scripted content and forms, etc.).

For the full “state of the ABLE web page” address, you’ll just have to wait for the Annual Meeting this summer in Mississauga!