New Staff Site
A number of years ago, I created a small personal website on the University webpage hosting platform. It was primarily a page of links to all the different systems I use at work - it was convenient to have them all on the one page and it also meant I could access the page on any browser and/or on any device (as opposed to having them all bookmarked in the browser). The other great thing was that it provided me with an easy way to practice html and CSS, javascript, create test pages, setup widgets, etc. It was a safe space (the whole site was password protected) with a super easy way to create/modify files/pages using SFTP. It was basic, you didn't have to fiddle around with CMS's and it worked! I had a few other pages that contained a record of some of the stuff I had done - Some Twine projects, interactive graphs and reports, a web comic, an example carousel with Book cover images that linked to our library catalogue (was playing with the idea of setting up something for 'new resources'), I also had some embedded search widgets for our collection and for Google Scholar (with our institution code embedded). It was a half-operational, half-promotional site that had been built upon over a number of years, it contained a lot of history but all of that changed as of the start of July 2025.
Like any other work day, I tried to access it but it was timing out. I raised a ticket with our IT department thinking that there must be a problem with the webserver only to find out that it has been shut down permanently! Apparently it was super old service and use had significantly dropped over the years so they decided to shut it down to 'optimise our IT infrastructure and increase the efficiency of our systems while improving our security posture'.
I can appreciate this, it was super old and hardly anyone knew about it, and even less actually used it. Our IT dept were very helpful and offered to provide a zipped copy of all the files (which is greatly appreciated - not to self - back up everything!) and offered some alternative options:
- A Wordpress site or
- A website using Reclaim Hosting
Wordpress is primarily used within the University by students to record subject reflections and other web based assessment tasks. Its ok but not really what I am after. I have decided to go for my own website via reclaim which is very similar to what I had (instead of local hosting, its all outsourced) but I'm having trouble setting up the SFTP connection. There is a file manager which seems to work well but until I get the zipped copy of my old files, I have decided to just setup the page of work system links. Password protection seems to be working ok which is good - I don't want the page to be crawled but it raises the question of whether I need to migrate all the other stuff if no one else will be able to access it. Maybe I make some of the pages public and keep all the links on a seperate page that is protected (rather than have a password for the whole site). While I am still a little bit miffed that it all has to change, it certainly opens up some possibilities. Trying to focus on the positive so I look forward to finding out what can be done on the platform.