What you see
is not all you get.

Who are your Content People?

Welcome to the Content Administration Home Page. We are a collection of 2 to 3 students and one faculty member who maintain the web layout, structure, and look of the Computer Science department at Earlham College. Our faces vary from year to year as new students join the group and old students move on. We fish for new members at the end of fall semester. The 2006-2007 members are Shawn Smith, Tom Weiss-Lehman, Jon Bogaty, Dustin Simeone and Jama Rinehart, with Ebru Celikel as faculty advisor.

Jama Rinehart (spring, 2006 - present), a freshman, who pretends to be a sophomore. She enjoys winter sports, despite growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee where snow rarely touches ground. She is new to the world of coding, but has a voracious appetite for new languages, both digital and spoken.

Dustin Simeone (spring, 2006 - present), also a freshman, enjoys video games, stumbling upon the internet, a rousing game of D&D (Dungeons & Dragons for the uninformed), and all manner of geekery. There is a 95% chance Dustin will go on to major in the CS Department.

Jonathan Bogaty is a nineteen-year-old frosh at Earlham College. Already with a professional web-services design consulting business flourishing jonbdesign.com, he hopes to bring his work in PHP, XML, and other exciting, relatively new client and server oriented web-programming languages to the table in the Content group and learn even more. He also likes long walks in the snow, rolling in snow, and occasionally playing with magnesium and watching it explode in the snow. He likes snow.

Shawn Smith (spring, 2005 - present), a senior, is a CS major interested in long walks on the beach, Scottish romance novels by candlelight, and video gaming. He is one of the only CS majors of the incoming class of 2003 who does not contradance.

Tom Weiss-Lehman, a senior, is a CS major who has problems with commas. Tom is learning PHP and increasing his CSS skills - because of Tom, this page is CSS validated. He enjoys flyfishing, frisbee, and facts. Now that he's back from his semester in the Southwest, we once again enjoy his company and code. Tom was a member of the group from the spring of 2004 until the end of the following fall. He and Kevin Hunter coded the AlumniDB we're still working to put up as a Databases project. Tom is responsible for the CSS used throughout the CS webspace.

Ebru Celikel (fall, 2005 - spring, 2006) is the interim faculty advisor for the Content Group while Jim is on sabbatical. She holds degrees from Ege University in Turkey. Ebru's fields of study in CS are cryptology (the subject of the Topics course in the spring), lossless compression, and security. She enjoys tennis, jogging, jazz, powerpoint and roadtripping in the States.

What do we do?

Content Admin's primary responsiblities are the development and maintenance of the department's public presence online. We strive for comprehensive and coherent structures on the department web. One of our most significant goals is to develop dynamically updated content which minimizes the amount of hand maintenance required.

We meet once weekly and discuss problems, solutions, and perks while making obscure CS jokes. We work over the course of the week to implement changes and improve our skills through study and learning from more experienced builders. Coming in, many of our group did not know the languages they soon mastered - Content is about learning by doing. In this case, the thing learned is how to build a good webpage.

Content builds good webpages.

What are we doing?

Our current big project is AlumniDB, a database for, at first, CS alumns and eventually perhaps everyone. This database is intended to be a secure forum for alumni to find out information about their fellow graduates - contact information, what everyone's been doing for the last ten years, anybody have job openings available? Kevin and Tom have been the major movers on this project. On the side, Jean has been adding information to the site as it comes in and editing faulty Perl scripts. Shawn brings a new knowledge of PHP to the group and has shown up with some good icons. We're also working on changing the site over to valid xhtml - it's currently in html 4.01, and we hear that that doesn't work on every single browser ever.

What have we done?

Fall, 2004, was a busy semester. We finished all of the changes and consulting on the new page and PUT IT UP. After a breathing period of relief, we continued to improve it, adding links, editing text, making new icons. We finished incorporating the newsblog (on the mainpage) in November. Tom and Kevin have been working hard on AlumniDB, our newest oldest project. See 'What are we doing?' for more information.

In the spring semester of 2004, Content worked on building the CS department's new web page. Our focus was on making a page that would work correctly in most browsers and degrade gracefully when it did not work correctly. If you encounter a problem with the page on your browser, please let us know. We're also the people that deal with broken links, but we hope you'll never find one. We worked on a method that would load images last so that slow connections would have something to look at while images did load; we constructed pages whose beauty lies in their simplicity and in the fact that they work. Anyone can slap a website together; Content has constructed a solidly structured edifice of information. Also, we giggled a lot.

The weeks leading up to September 21st, 2004, were full of html and css. The old page had been up for 8 years; the new one finally arrived.