Slides for plenary talk on "Lightweight Web Management" given by Chris Gutteridge at the IWMW 2009 event held at the University of Essex, Colchester Campus, from 28 to 30 July 2009. See http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2009/talks/gutteridge/

1. Practical Web
Management
Christopher Gutteridge
IWMW 2009

2. Christopher Gutteridge?
Full time webmaster/manager for
Southampton Electronics and Computer
Science (ECS) since 1997
ECS has
Webteam of 3(ish)
10 Infrastructure webservers running 310 sites.
100 research webservers.

3. QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

4. Find out what's actually going on
Work out what you are
supposed to be doing
Fix what's
not working
Expand and optimize
what's working
Improve ways of
knowing what's
going on
…repeat until promoted

5. 1. Know what's going on
2. Have a plan
3. Be pragmatic

6. QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

7. What does an
IWManager do?
Same as anyone at a University should be doing!
Doing or Facilitating:
 Teaching
 Research
 Communication of Research via
Publications (and websites)
Events
Working with Industry

8. Where we were failing
 Losing research output
 sites "go away" or software bit-rots
 Dropping the ball on basic requests
 Not shutting down broken unloved sites
 Finding out about issues via user reports
 Not knowing what software we're running
 Wiki's, blogs etc.
 Unable to perform basic security patches
 Team not sharing information
 Not knowing who owns a website

9. Solutions to Problems
Technology,
Policy
&
Culture

10. Problem: Dropping the
ball
Basic tasks:
Create a new website
Create a MySQL DB
Set up a wiki
Set up a blog
Correct an error on a page

11. Solution: Dropping the
Ball
 Identify standard essential tasks
 Create simple web forms for each
 Ask all the questions in one go
 Manage expectations
 Web form submits to a queue
 Shared web account
 Task management system
 DON’T NEGLECT THIS QUEUE
 Create scripts!

12. Research
Communication
Most Researchers only think as far as the
next funding bid.
It's our problem!
We provide continuity
Better to plan from the start, than pick up
the pieces after each project ends.
Or worse, let it rot.

13. Problems of Preserving
Research Output
Website maintenance
patching wikis and blog software
Web 2.0 sites (Flickr, Twitter, Blogger,
YouTube, Slideshare)
Orgs I.P. beyond your control
Short term/external DNS registrations
Conferences and Projects
Costs
Moving sites

14. Soloution:
Maintaining Tools
Provide central blog & wiki services
Plan how to "fossilise" dynamic sites
Encourage use of central services and
wiki/blog software suitable for fossilising.

15. Solution: Offsite
Content
Blogs
Provide hosted blog service
Wordpress is a good choice
Twitter
No best practice yet

16. Solution: Offsite
Content
Youtube, Slideshare, Flickr
Encourage staff to also deposit this content in
the IR (Institutional Repository)
Make the IR provide the cool features that have
driven users to use external tools

17. <advertisement>

18. Embeddable slide-shows and streaming video
coming soon to…
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

19. <advertisement>

20. Solutions: DNS
Registrations
Web team registers domains for projects,
requiring X years payment in advance
At least 3 years beyond end of project
Conferences maybe 10 years or more
Good use for a request form
Monitor DNS entry for each website

21. Problem: Who owns a
site?
Whom to forward queries to
Trying to shut unwanted sites down
To see where resources are being used
Who to bill about DNS
Security Issues

22. Solution: Website
Database
Built from comments in apache config.
#meta owner=cjg23r,dsc93
#meta type=project
Script to build webpage report periodically
Join against your list of current users to see
when a site is a candidate for deletion.
Keep config. files in version control
Generate useful reports

23. Discovering webservers
Ask the firewall manager about port 80
Virtual Servers are causing a proliferation!

24. Problem:
Waiting for complaints
Unprofessional
Hard to manage workload
Often would have been easier to fix earlier

25. QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

26. Solution:
Build a batcomputer
Nagios is a good starting place
Needs to be actively looked after
Usually "champion" moves on and it rots
Monitor failures and uptime

27. What to Monitor…
PING
HTTP & HTTPS
Hardware (Disks failing etc.)
Backups
HTTP from external site
HTTPS Certificate expiry
MySQL Servers
Rivals?

29. Uptime
Monitor your webserver uptime
Monitor things beyond your control which
make it unavailable
External connectivity
Building power
Don't bother getting your uptime (much)
higher than the things beyond your control!

30. Some Benefits of
Monitoring
You and your team know what's going on
Fix problems before they cause harm
(nobody will call you a hero anymore)
Uptime graphs help make pragmatic
decisions, and justify them
Provide management with facts and figures
about what you do

31. Standardisation Fever
Standard solutions are Good
Enforced standardisation can be very Bad
One Size does not always fit all!

32. Summary
Don't try and be a hero
Find out what's going on
Know where your job is
Have a plan
Build a Batcomputer