In an effort to ease the pain of the wiki migration, ITTS will be moving the entire wikis.ala.org domain to off site hosting this coming Wednesday, March 18th.  This means that rather than moving each wiki to an new individual hostname, as previously planned, all wikis currently hosted at wikis.ala.org will continue to function with the same addresses they currently have.  We will endeavor to make the transition as seamless as possible.  We simply request that you make no changes to your wikis on Wednesday, as changes made while the data is being migrated will be lost.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this migration.

ALA will be conducting three focus groups for the website at Midwinter
only have 24-30 slots and they are filling up
going to also do some remote online sessions with members, too
- want this to be an ongoing process

Accessibility review
had them do 15 different pages on the site and we did not do well
had them test to the Web Accessibility Guidelines, level 2
places we failed include if you’re doing multimedia content, you must have a transcript, even if you offer captioning
have many global changes we have to make

in February, we will begin group webmaster meetings broken out by like units

will move to a serif typeface
discussion of how to make links easily identifiable without forcing the user to mouse over text looking for them

RSS is now easier to both implement and display in Collage
contact Louise if you have questions about this

2. ALA Connect (Jenny)

beta testing for Connect started last week and will continue through the end of the month
five groups are doing the testing, as one has dropped out
if you know of an ALA group that would like to join the beta test, please contact Jenny

when this round of testing closes, we’ll go over the feedback and start making changes in February
when we do the soft launch will depend on how many changes we need to make
the hope is to spend the first few weeks of February tweaking and fixing in order to open the soft launch in late February/early March
from there, we’ll see how well the site scales and when we’re confident it can handle the load, we’ll do an official launch with PR
we hope this will be in March, but the timeline is completely dependent on getting things right after the beta test period ends

3. Hosted web services (Matt)

Dreamhost has changed the way one-click installs work
only the main account holder can do them now because of a security change Dreamhost made
the two options are to have Matt install a database and the unit can then do the one-click install, or to just have Matt create the database and do the install
it’s probably easier to just have Matt do it
still discussing this with Dreamhost to see if we can get this setting changed back

Blog and wiki migrations
resuming the blogs and wikis migration that slowed down over the holiday break
however, we won’t move anything until after Midwinter
Matt will contact each unit individually to work with them to set up redirects and go through any other issues with the wikis

in mid-February, Matt will do a mass migration of all of the blogs still on the old b2evolution software
logins, passwords, and skins/templates won’t migrate, but content will (posts, comments, etc.)
he’ll pick one template for everyone and do the migration

4.  Second Life (Donavan)

there’s a report about what we did in SL for Banned Books Week last fall
have a fairly large agenda for Midwinter for following what’s happening
YALSA now has a “playground” they’ll be debuting there on the Friday of Midwinter, along with some publications
there will be COGnotes and AL Direct stands
on Friday, we’ll be having a Privacy Revolution party
on Saturday, we’ll be covering Librarian of the Year award
doing some simulcasting of member group meetings
will be showing some slides of Guide to Reference in-world
hope to have some info about the awards presentations and have a book award party
plus much more

there are about 1200 self-identified librarians in SL
trying to find ways to interact with them in SL

this is a significant jump from anything we did at ALA conferences last year, and it’s taking less intensive staff resources this time

5. Five Minute Guide to Twitter (Jenny)

Jenny did a quick briefing on what Twitter is, how people (and organizations) use it, and some of the benefits
takeaways include the ability to respond quickly; broadcast to one, a specific group, or many; and the real communities growing there
ALA has a few Twitter accounts already: ALA Annual, ALA Midwinter, OIF’s Privacy Revolution, YALSA, and the Youth Media Awards.

6. Keeping up with developments

Blog w/RSS Feed – http://itts.ala.org/update/
Wikis – http://wikis.ala.org/learningcollage; http://wikis.ala.org/webplanning

7. Q&A

None this time

the website is a work in progress
we’ve been focusing on stability issues with the ActiveMatter server (forms, ecommerce transactions, etc.)
- updated the Access databases to Microsoft SQL databases, restricted access to a small number of IP addresses to help address this issue
- this also let us restrict search engines from indexing old content
- got rid of tagged pages from the old ActiveMatter server

we’re in the process of upgrading to a new server with more disk space and a faster processor
- hope to have that done in the next week

working with Duo on tagged content displays, division news feeds, and RSS feeds on the home page

a few weeks ago, a few of us met with Michael Stephens, the current chair of the Web Advisory Committee and came up with two objectives for the site
- for current information (this requires a systematically consistent approach for tagging, etc.)
- a marketing tool

the Web Editorial Board will try to lead several initiatives in these areas
- encouraging staff with web responsibilities to add keeping the site current as a goal on their evaluations
- need some quality control to achieve this; will allow us to set goals (”get your shadow assets down 10% from where it is today,” etc.)
- revamping the Web Editorial Board into two separate teams
- “tag team” – will review the site structure, will consult with offices on restructuring content; create standards; review and finalize the web style guide; examining the website to determine to what extent it should be used as an archive; examining advantages and disadvantages of decentralized site management; tagging items for listing pages; checking for ALT text on images; proper page headlines; use of transcripts for audio and video files; procedural documentation; etc.
- “communications impact team” – encourage use of images, pods, etc.; consulting with units to develop individual areas of the site for maximum effect; optimizing pages; accessibility issues

the Web Editorial Board is going to expand and add more members

2. ALA Connect (Jenny)

just got back from vacation yesterday so hasn’t had a chance to check in with the development site to see recent changes made to the functionality
Urban Insight has successfully imported the active committees from iMIS and categorized them into “communities” (currently divisions), “committees,” and “events”
hope to have a demo to show on November 18, as we are hoping to alpha test in November and beta test in December for a roll out before Midwinter in January

3. Wiki Migration (Matt)

all wikis currently hosted at wikis.ala.org will be moved to Dreamhost domains because the wikis.ala.org server was never really intended to house these applications
Matt will be able to migrate 6-8 wikis each week without requiring the wiki owners to do anything
he’ll send out a message about this today or tomorrow
he’ll change nothing about your wiki, other than the beginnings of the URL (”wikis.ala.org/acrlwiki” will become something like “acrl.ala.org/acrlwiki” in the domain unless you specify otherwise) – basically, “wikis” just becomes your acronym

migrating the wikis to Dreamhost has some other benefits, including the addition of an audio captcha for spam control

all of this will happen over the next 4-5 weeks, and Matt will notify you when this is happening for your site
while your wiki is migrated, it will be down for 1-2 hours

everything in your current wiki will get migrated, including content, users, blocked users, images, files, etc.

4. Virtual Private Hosting (Matt)

if you already have blogs, wikis, or Moodle on Dreamhost, you may have noticed that it slows down from time-to-time
but earlier this month, we upgraded to “virtual private hosting” service, which means we’re now paying a monthly fee for reserved processor time and more importantly, memory

this means we’ll no longer be throttled back when other users overload the server, so speed and response time should improve dramatically and should be more consistent
we also have no maximum ceiling now, as our usage is burstable

if you do encounter problems, let Matt know right away because he has more options for troubleshooting now (such as rebooting our virtual server)

Moodle chat now works (insofar as Moodle chat works)

Matt also noted that when you use FTP on Dreamhost, make sure you’re using your domain name (eg, rusa.ala.org), rather than a server name

5. Meeting room resources in Outlook (Sherri)

coming soon – we’ll be implementing the ability to book meeting rooms in Outlook
just have to get this set up and will then send out a tech tip about it

6. Keeping up with developments
Blog w/RSS Feed – http://itts.ala.org/update/
Wikis – http://wikis.ala.org/learningcollage; http://wikis.ala.org/webplanning

Matt Ivaliotes – ITTS

On the Tech support wiki, you will find an instruction document on how to make this migration (thanks to Stephanie Kuenn for putting this together after going through the migration process herself).  Please look the instructions over, and plan to move your weblog in the next several weeks. I of course will be happy to answer questions you may have about this process. Note that Stephanie references using an FTP site for uploading a blog theme. If your unit already has applications on Dreamhost, you should have a login and password for FTP-ing files. If not, when you request the new WordPress blog from me, I will send you the FTP information.

Going forward, we will be posting information on how to migrate all blogs hosted on b2evolution at blogs.ala.org as well as all wikis hosted at wikis.ala.org to our outside hosting space. Expect both the blog and wiki instructions by early next week.

Matthew Ivaliotes
Information Technology & Telecommunication Services
American Library Association