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Site History

What you're currently looking at is approximately the second CS Departmental website. The first planned site was constructed by Chris Hardie in 1996, who has this to say about it (in 2004):

I first encountered the Earlham CS pages in what I think was the Spring of 1995, when I visited campus as a prospective student. At the time, student and CS sysadmin Jack Rabbah was working on a page for the department, and he showed me the draft he was working on (in the Mosaic web br/owser!). Between that time and the fall of 1995 when I came to campus as a first year, I think Jack and a few other students put together and launched what could be considered the first EC-CS website.

(For what it's worth, I also think I remember that Charlie was wearing a Grateful Dead shirt to the class he taught that I sat in on that day.)

Over the next year, the site was sort of updated and expanded as needed, but without any real structure or plan in mind, so it got to be a real mess and was becoming hard to use.

I did an internship at a professional website development firm during the summer of 1996, so in September of that year, I worked on a new design for the site, with my stated goals (in an e-mail on Sep 15th) as "a structure that makes navigation easy, a design that allows for short loading times (currently no more than 10K in total graphics are used), and an appearance that makes people actually want to br/owse the information."

It looks like the new site launched sometime in November or December of that year. And I guess that, at least in terms of the graphics files and look/feel being used, it's remained largely similar up to the present time.

The site that Chris worked on remained the official version, with changes and updates, until the fall of 2004. Then, the Content Group, after long trials, finally published this: CSWeb 2.0.

Chris is now working at Summersault, LLC, a web developing and consulting company based in Richmond that he co-founded with another Earlham graduate.

About This Site

This site is written in XHTML 1.0 transitional with CSS 2. We've striven to make it viewable on a variety of br/owsers - if you do encounter a problem on yours, we'd like to know about it.

In order to cut down on spammail, we've eliminated all mailto links and replaced them by means of a script called 'Barndoor', created by Jeremy br/own and Kevin Hunter. Barndoor is a cgi script designed to keep the precious email addresses safe in the barn so that evil harvesting spambots cannot get at them. Unfortunately, we closed the barndoor after some horses had escaped; perhaps you can do better. Barndoor is open source - for more information, send us an email. We'd be glad to share.

On a related note, you may have discovered a derived project - Project br/owndoor, written by Jeremy. The br/owndoor closes the server when applied to pages which may be useful oncampus but the entire world does not need to see.

The motto of the Department, adopted in September of 2004 by faculty consensus, is 'Rigor Sine Mortis', which just sounds better in Latin.