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Changes in store for Stressline 9/17/02 Thanks to the efforts of six senior students from the University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth who have made Cranberry Stressline their class project, readers will see some changes over the next couple of months. The first thing daily readers will notice will probably be an interim period of one to three days when they log on as usual and are redirected to a new web host, or from the new host back to the old one. Shortly, however, the entire web site's contents will be moved to a new host and I'll be asking some of you to re-list the web site on your favorites list at the new address. If you have the site listed as cranberrystressline.com you don't have to do anything. If you have it listed as greocities.com/cranberry bogs you will have to change it on favorites to cranberrystressline.com. Old articles will be accessible on both the new and old web sites for about a year, as they need to be available for people looking for information on the various search engines. The new host is ehostsource.com. This is a no frills, professional but inexpensive hosting service that for less money actually offers twenty times the space as Stressline's current host, Geocities. It will also enable you to send your emails to editor @ cranberrystressline.com. In addition the new host will display cranberrystressline.com, rather than www.geocities.com/cranberrybogs on the address line of the toolbar as it now does. All of these changes are secondary to, and necessary for, the major change being made to the web site. As those who have wadded through the Archives looking for information on a particular subject or person have seen, they aren't well organized. In fact, they are barely organized at all. A reader could use the "find" function on their browser, although I suspect some readers don't even know it exists. (On Internet Explored click EDIT and then click FIND ON THIS PAGE.) But that only searches the titles I put on the Archives page, and I haven't even listed the titles for the early editions of Stressline. Many of you have seen the "search this site" box on major web sites like The New York Times and CNN.com. As opposed to a search engine like Google which searches the entire Internet when you type in your keywords, these search engines only search the web site that you are on. Soon, with the efforts of six of Professor Tim Shea's students: Brian Ackley, Kathy Costa, Sean Giroux, Jaren Hawxwell, Marlaine Scanlan and Justin Scheri, Cranberry Stressline will offer a state-of-the-art feature that, frankly, I wouldn't have even known how to start, let alone complete. I certainly couldn't have afforded to hire even one IT specialist. The student are Brian Ackley, Kathy Costa, Sean Giroux, Jaren Hawxwell, Marlaine Scanlan and Justin Scheri. They bill themselves as "CranSoft, your Info Tech Solution Specialists." Already the hundreds of text and picture files that add up to nearly 30MB of information, have been downloaded onto CD and are about to be uploaded onto the new host server. I would like to thank not only the students who elected to undertake this project, and Professor Tim Shea, but Professor Nora Ganim Barnes, also of UMass-Dartmouth, for her invaluable help in getting this enterprise off the ground. |