Category Archives: Web Design

Changes to Tombrarian

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For a while, I have wanted to make some changes to Tombrarian. Mainly, I want to move it to my own host so that I have more control over look and functionality and to be able to learn more about CSS and other design options. A few months ago, I found a host (Bluehost) and began fooling around with a personal site. I created a space for Tombrarian and planned on moving it at the beginning of the year but got busy and never got to it. I am optimistic that I can get to it soon and figure the process itself is a topic worthy of Tombrarian. I want to learn from the process and can share that with other people who may be thinking of moving from a WordPress site to their own hosted site.

In chosing Bluehost, I picked a few brains for suggestions and a couple people recommended it, so I decided to go with it. Although I haven’t done much with the site yet, I have no complaints about Bluehost. It was easy enough to set-up and they have a desktop client that allows you to drag and drop files. The other option is to uplaod them through their website which is slow and burdensome if you have a lot of files to move. Bluehost supports WordPress and a few other blogs, so setting up a WordPress blog through Bluehost was very easy.

I chose the Blueline 1.0 theme because the CSS code seemed pretty straightforward and I tweaked the color scheme and some other basic elements. I’ll include an image in addition to the link because I am sure I will be changing it and want to preserve the changes to see how the site develops.

Speaking of the link, I secured http://www.tombrarian.net. It’s live now, but content free. After I play with the look a little more, I will try exporting the content from this site and upload it into the new site. So look for that move hopefully sooner rather than later.

Crimson Connect

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This is interesting six ways to Sunday: apparently, some students at Harvard became frustrated with Harvard’s portal, so they went and designed their own: Crimson Connect.

As The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog reports, Harvard asked the creators of this site to remove proprietary information that was originally stored on the password protected Harvard portal and the creators complied. The Chronicle doesn’t explicitly say the removal was due to copyright issues, but one would suspect that was a big reason. The students were including course materials that in all likelihood needed to be password protected for Fair Use and/or TEACH Act requirements.

But as many of the commenters point out, plenty of other issues arise, among them usability, branding and PR, and Intellectual Property.

I just find it fascinating that students took it upon themselves to create a university portal. And it raises the question as to who should be putting out this information and/or how involved students should be in the creation of a portal.