New Year Glitches

On December 29th, our school website host rolled over some changes. While most features look the same some do not and any content created and added after December 15th went missing. At first, there was no panic because I saw my folk tale links and surely they were my most recent addition. As I powered up my teacher computer and double clicked on the large blue e for Explorer, I gulped. Due to the rollover, the address for individual pages was just slightly different, probably off by just a number or two, but as a result, instead of going to the designated home page, all computers and their users were going to get an error message. So, I sent a clarifying email with directions to reconfigure your homepage, but I knew this was not what anyone wanted to walk into on the first day following winter break. I also told each and every class that I saw about this and we reviewed how to get to the district home page - the old fashioned way - by typing in the address - gasp!

Then during my third period, I realized the link lists for that period and my last period were gone and irretrievably so. Yuck. Feeling very poorly prepared, I decided I would fix it. I showed them where the theoretical page would/will be and promised that I would have that page re-constructed, as if nothing had happened, in a snap. By the time they were done checking out books. Then I encountered the new site manager layout and felt..quite lost. And I'm good at these things. Really good at these things. Needless to say, the page has not yet been reconstructed. Nor was the page for the last period. There was a tutorial video. I was supposed to watch it before the rollover. I didn't. I will. Tomorrow. And then I'll rebuild what was lost and improve even further.

The home page debacle forced me to do something I'd been meaning to do. The computers on the lab side of the library were still set to a computer lab homepage and the computers in the circulation area were set to the school's homepage. When I finally got around to re-setting the homepages, I set them all to the library's homepage. There were also two shortcuts on each desktop for the library catalog. One with a tile icon (functional) and one with an Internet explorer icon that went to the high school catalog. Every so often, students would click on the explorer icon and search for something in the high school catalog or try to log onto Destiny through the high school portal (which doesn't work for elementary students). So I took the opportunity to also