26 November 2008

a classic work moment

i work for/by/in the Werkgroep Informatica. if you google that, you'll find an [extremely] outdated and non-user friendly website that's also not very informative. as such, we could definitely use a revision. in a meeting of the werkgroep discussed it further - seeing as our computer systems guy (the werkgroep has its own computer guy! nice, eh?) is fairly busy coding and what-not for the syntax program(s), it didn't seem the best idea for him to have to work on the website. so, i get to look at it a bit more - as i have some computer knowledge and work much better if i have several projects (thus far, i've only had one project - the syntax of Ezekiel - and the novelty has started to wear off, especially after staring too long at the last chapters of Ezekiel and crashing the syntax program almost daily).

having done some basic research on the website, and the information related to the werkgroep on the internet, i bumped into another website related to the werkgroep. it's very simple but with more helpful information, including a form for accessing our database and a more recent bibliography (including a helpful analysis of the linguistics system of the syntax program by the computer guy). this was more what the werkgroep website should look like! but nowhere did it appear that the first website and the second website were at all connected, which raised a lot of questions.

the mystery of the sorry state of the website and the lack of links to and from the much better second website was solved at lunch the other day. we were talking about the state of the werkgroep website with the computer guy, and he seemed a bit puzzled. according to him, we don't have a website - it stopped being udpated and was taken off aeons ago (an exaggeration i'm sure, but i missed the exact date). we disagreed - after all, when you google us, you do find something that looks like us and is pretty official! turns out that what you find is a copy of our original website that's on the Vrije Universiteit's site - that obviously has not been anyone's official responsibility for awhile. the mystery of the sorry state of the website solved, the discussion continued further about how a website could be helpful and how it could also be a nuisance.

and i wonder how long this sorry website will remain online. i guess i could consider it part of my new responsibility to do something about it - although seeing as how difficult it is to find things that should be on the VU website, i'm not sure how easy it will be to remove something that shouldn't be....

No comments: