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Department of Engineering |
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The WWW's history at CUED
Introduction
CUED's first WWW pages go back to the early days of the WWW. At least
one group had a server running in 1993. Our
first departmental home page appeared in March 1994. Since then
much has changed regarding WWW usage at CUED.
Some of the more significant milestones will be noted here, and snapshots
of activity provided.
Development of Services
The department provides various types of support to web authors and users.
Development of Web Usage
Web usage has extended across nearly all areas of departmental activity,
though progress has been slower in some areas than in others.
Themes
Central/distributed control
Both in terms of server management and page production the balance
between central and devolved control has shifted. For many years, any user
has been able to put material online without central intervention.
There was a phase when researchers had the same freedom to run webservers,
but now this is unpopular both with research groups and the computer group
because of security issues. Instead, we now maintain a centralised
server on which groups can set up sites.
As regards page production, there
was some pump-priming but now all the teaching and research pages
and many of the
admin pages are looked after by non-computer-staff - many are
looked after by secretaries rather than academics.
Internal/external viewpoints
Initially one page served as our home-page both for internal and external
users. Now we have a main home page for outsiders looking in, and a
local page
aimed at internal users, but little of the information on the latter
there has access restrictions.
A few pages (directories of personal information, exam results,
research project details) are for internal use only.
More commonly material (press-releases, etc) is aimed specifically at
external users.
Access patterns
We have log summaries going back to 1996. Interpretation of them isn't straightforward
- as other sites use caches and as our research groups leave the centralised
services to run their own servers, the patterns of access alter. Also we're
moving towards dynamic pages (using PHP or databases) which affects
logs too. Here are some points
- Access hasn't always risen each year.
Taking November as a typical in-term month, access to our home
page has been as follows
Year | Accesses |
1996 | 7911 |
1997 | 12408 |
1998 | 17597 |
1999 | (lost logs) |
2000 | 35351 |
2001 | 49106 |
2002 | 62084 |
2003 | 80194 |
2004 | 72035 |
2005 | 69455 |
- The relative popularity of many pages changes through the academic year, but here's
a fairly representative sample of some term-time statistics from our main server
in February.
Page | 2002 | 2006 |
Intranet home page | 14333 | 24168 |
Main research page | 5020 | 6752 |
Undergraduate admissions | 3140 | 3042 |
Postgraduate admissions | 2933 | 1536 |
Directory of People | 2863 | 2053 |
Main Teaching Page | 1292 | 5960 |
Jobs Page | 1078 | 2465 |
News and Events | 814 | 725 |
- The help system continues to account for about 33% of the accesses to
our central servers. The server has many more pages than the other
servers do (13k files, most of them not written by us), the pages are
older, and linked-to more than files on our other servers are. Some of the
specialist pages are amongst the most popular.
Here's a sample of some statistics from February (sed is a little-used unix utility)
Page | 2002 | 2006 |
Main LaTeX page | 11056 | 14697 |
Main help page | 3640 | 1520 |
Main C++ page | 2286 | 1818 |
sed page | 2078 | 3168 |
A graph of activity from June 2000 to November 2003 gives an indication of seasonal fluctuations.
- Our central servers perform different tasks which in turn influences
how much local use they get. The differences are striking. March 2002 is used in this first sample
Machine | Purpose | Requests | Bytes sent | % access from within Univ |
www | Central Server | 1M | 10G | 65% |
www-h | Help System | 0.7M | 5G | 3% |
www2 | Student Server | 0.3M | 6G | 18% |
www-g | Group Server | 0.3M | 7G | 48% |
One would expect our central server to have many local accesses (it hosts
the default home-page of our browsers). It also hosts scanned images
which account for about 60% of the 'bytes sent'. In February 2006 (termtime) with more movies online, the stats were as follows
Machine | Purpose | Requests | Bytes sent | % access from within Univ |
www | Central Server | 2.1M | 71G | 78% |
www-h | Help System | 1M | 8.2G | 5% |
www2 | Student Server | 0.5M | 29G | 18% |
www-g | Group Server | 0.8M | 20G | 12% |
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