Post by kcolton on May 12, 2006 17:29:55 GMT -5
Hi, I would like to clear up a few misconceptions that many members of this
board seem to have about the Plainedge district and high school web pages;
Mostly in response to the post:
plainedgechat.proboards57.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1125612227
I guess I should start by introducing myself, my name is Ken Colton a current senior at Plainedge high school soon to be attending Georgia Institute of Technology majoring in computer science. For the past 4 years of my high school career I have been maintaining the district and high school web pages. If anyone is curious of my background in this area, I have been designing web pages for almost 8 years and writing custom advanced content management that integrates database software for websites for 4 years. The fact is that me and one other senior from PHS (Steve McKeefrey) get paid minimum wage to work on the web sites as a service to the community.
The high school website was designed, and the content management system that allows easy posting of information, was created and programmed by myself from scratch. Not some expensive design company. Any kind of custom content such as the system that allows the inexpensive creation of the district calendar, or even the side navigation link system on the left of the district website was programmed by me. This is an extremely low cost operation that is being run here and to make any inclinations that it can be done for less money at the same quality is completely absurd and based on incorrect information. Our websites are not simply pages thrown together in Front Page and uploaded to a web server, they are complex content management systems that integrate with databases written in professional programming languages with custom additions that tailor to the school districts needs.
I would also like to address the concern of some who think that when the website was "hacked" and down for about a week that it was just some cover up by the school administration to lock out the community. I was there sitting in an office configuring the new server myself and moving over all of the information and believe me, there is no cover up. For those of you who suggest that the site should have been brought back up in a matter of hours are misinformed. It was not simply a matter of removing the corrupted content and putting everything back up, we took the unfortunate situations at hand and tried to make the best of it. We had been meaning to take the site off of the nemesis2.com server (I would also like to point out that the hosting and extreme bandwidth costs and requirements for this service on nemesis2 were entirely donated by Ms. Cynthia LaPier) and move all of the web pages to a brand new in house server and preform a much needed update to the current content management system that was running the district site. This required configuring the brand new web server from scratch with all of the right software needed to run our sites, then retrieving the huge amounts of the uncorrupted information that we could from the nemesis2 server and putting it on the new server and then modifying all of the custom content management additions that we had wrote over the course of 3 years to the new requirements of the new server. This is a very long process which required a large amount of dedicated time by our entire web staff in order to get the website back up, which considering the circumstances, happened in a very timely manner.
I encourage everyone on this board to PLEASE email me with your questions about how the website is maintained and run before you make assumptions that are unfair to me and the rest of the technology group.
Sincerely,
Ken Colton (kcolton@plainedgeschools.org)
Steve McKeefrey (smckeefrey@plainedgeschools.org)
board seem to have about the Plainedge district and high school web pages;
Mostly in response to the post:
plainedgechat.proboards57.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1125612227
I guess I should start by introducing myself, my name is Ken Colton a current senior at Plainedge high school soon to be attending Georgia Institute of Technology majoring in computer science. For the past 4 years of my high school career I have been maintaining the district and high school web pages. If anyone is curious of my background in this area, I have been designing web pages for almost 8 years and writing custom advanced content management that integrates database software for websites for 4 years. The fact is that me and one other senior from PHS (Steve McKeefrey) get paid minimum wage to work on the web sites as a service to the community.
The high school website was designed, and the content management system that allows easy posting of information, was created and programmed by myself from scratch. Not some expensive design company. Any kind of custom content such as the system that allows the inexpensive creation of the district calendar, or even the side navigation link system on the left of the district website was programmed by me. This is an extremely low cost operation that is being run here and to make any inclinations that it can be done for less money at the same quality is completely absurd and based on incorrect information. Our websites are not simply pages thrown together in Front Page and uploaded to a web server, they are complex content management systems that integrate with databases written in professional programming languages with custom additions that tailor to the school districts needs.
I would also like to address the concern of some who think that when the website was "hacked" and down for about a week that it was just some cover up by the school administration to lock out the community. I was there sitting in an office configuring the new server myself and moving over all of the information and believe me, there is no cover up. For those of you who suggest that the site should have been brought back up in a matter of hours are misinformed. It was not simply a matter of removing the corrupted content and putting everything back up, we took the unfortunate situations at hand and tried to make the best of it. We had been meaning to take the site off of the nemesis2.com server (I would also like to point out that the hosting and extreme bandwidth costs and requirements for this service on nemesis2 were entirely donated by Ms. Cynthia LaPier) and move all of the web pages to a brand new in house server and preform a much needed update to the current content management system that was running the district site. This required configuring the brand new web server from scratch with all of the right software needed to run our sites, then retrieving the huge amounts of the uncorrupted information that we could from the nemesis2 server and putting it on the new server and then modifying all of the custom content management additions that we had wrote over the course of 3 years to the new requirements of the new server. This is a very long process which required a large amount of dedicated time by our entire web staff in order to get the website back up, which considering the circumstances, happened in a very timely manner.
I encourage everyone on this board to PLEASE email me with your questions about how the website is maintained and run before you make assumptions that are unfair to me and the rest of the technology group.
Sincerely,
Ken Colton (kcolton@plainedgeschools.org)
Steve McKeefrey (smckeefrey@plainedgeschools.org)