[seul-edu] GEO - Status Report #1 (long)

[Michael Viron <mviron@wsdo.sao.uwf.edu>]

Hello everyone,

My name is Michael Viron (some of you have probably already seen some of my
previous posts) and I would like to take a moment to provide the first
status report on General Education Online.

General Education Online (GEO) started the process of transitioning to
findaschool.org / intledresources.org, hosted by SEUL from the current
server located at the University of West Florida (UWF) this week.  Since I
just recently graduated, Web Spinners at UWF has started the process of
spinning off General Education Online (GEO) into a fully independent
project.  As a result, the GEO project was tasked to transition off of the
Web Spinners server before the end of calendar year 2001.

General Education Online was started in November 1995, when I first
realized that there were no up-to-date websites that provided information
regarding higher educational facilities websites.  By the end of November
1995, GEO was born and had about 500 links in about 10 countries worldwide
and was receiving about 10 visits per day.

During 1999 and 2000, GEO project developers began the process of
converting the web site from static html pages to dynamic pages with
information pulled out of a MySQL database backend.  In 1999, before the
re-design, a complete update took upwards of 6 months (or longer) and
required 2 of the 3 developers to complete.  As yet, no complete update has
been attempted since the switch to the database backend.

In 2000, GEO has become one of the most recognized higher educational link
sites in the country, receiving about 2,000 visits a day and providing
links to 7,297 facilities in over 160 different countries worldwide.

In March 2001, GEO plans to release a beta version of the web application
known as GEO v2 (right now at an alpha release).

I would like to take this opportunity to thank both Roger Dingledine and
Graham Seaman for the help that they have provided in the transition
effort, as well as the SEUL organization for hosting the GEO project.

Michael

--
Michael Viron <mviron@findaschool.org>
Project Coordinator / Primary Developer
General Education Online / GEO Database Project
http://findaschool.org or http://intledresources.org