Web servers are fickle things. You never know what’s going to set them off into a fit of high loads, disk swaps and general sluggishness – it could be bad code, hack attempts, denial of service, old hardware, who knows.

The problem is you never know when these types of things are going to happen, and it always seems to be at the worst time – a visit day, app season, the day your big fund-raising campaign starts, you know, pretty much the opposite of beneficial.

I spend a lot of time online, but I can’t watch my web server 24/7 to make sure its up. I’m trying to be more proactive about monitoring my web server and its uptime, because I want to be the person to find out our website is down, not our university’s president (that happened this past weekend. Ugh.)

There are a few tools, some of which are free, that will keep an eye on your site and alert you when they find that they can’t reach it.

The one I’ve been trying out the last month or so is Mon.itor.us. They monitor, for free, over 250,000 websites across the world, checking that they’re up. It just takes a moment to set up an account, and you let it know what sites to watch. It starts pinging, every 30 minutes, to make sure you’re up. If it doesn’t get a response, you can have it text your phone, email you, or do nothing. If you want, they’ll even send you a weekly report, that looks like this.

As you can see, this blog had 100% up-time last week, as did the benchmark site, Google. My school’s site had a bit of downtime, which we’re addressing. This type of information is very important to keep our website, our most important marketing tool, online and available at all times.

Mon.itor.us has a paid service, Monitis, that will ping your site every 5 minutes from servers around the world. Plans start at $9 USD a month and go up from there to even a plan that pings your site once a minute. That might be overkill, but if you’re selling things online, every minute you’re offline means you’re losing money.

But, Mike, you say. My IT staff is already monitoring the server. Yes, that’s true and that’s very good, but if you as web person at your institution doesn’t live in the IT area, you may not be in the loop when it comes to outages and other IT issues. Since several monitoring services are free, why not sign up for one so that you are in the loop and at least have some knowledge about uptime when the issue is inevitably raised in a meeting. And trust me, it will be.

Wufoo is very full featured, with a robust API, a myriad of reporting options an several embedding options. We’ve been using it quite a bit as part of recruitment communications to customize and personalize forms as well as emails back to a user when they complete a form, which is really handy.

When we’ve had a support question or issue, it’s been answered and addressed quickly, which is nice.

So I’m 100% down with Wufoo, but I find myself wanting a few things that would take it to the next level.

1. Let me bring my own storage

At the level we’re at (the carpe diem plan at $69 a month), giving us only 3GB of storage is pretty silly. That amount of storage costs less than a dollar at any of the cloud storage services. Please, Wufoo, let me connect easily with my Amazon S3 account, where I could store as many files as possible and worry about the cost myself. I can think of a few forms where we’re asking people to upload a hi-res photo, and if a few hundred people fill out that form at a time, we could potentially get close to the limit. This should be a trivial fix.

2. Pagination

For surveys and other longer forms, it’d be really swell to break a form up across several pages. We have some applications and surveys that are so long I fear users see how long they have to scroll until they reach the end and they give up and go away. But a break in there would be nice.

3. Conditional Questions

The ability to ask a follow-up question only if a user selected a certain option in a checkbox or radio field would be nice. We’re getting this question quite a bit from people on campus.

4. A level between “Carpe Diem” and “Ad Infinitum”

It feels like there really should be one more level between their Carpe Diem plan (20 users, 3GB, 15,000 entries a month, $69.95/mo) and their Ad Infinitium plan (60 users, 10GB, 100,000 entries, $199.95/mo). We need about 40 users to cover everyone across campus. It’d be nice if there was a $99 or $129 plan where I could get 40 users, 6GB and 50,000 entries.

Wufoo, keep on keeping on. We’re huge fans of your service and so are our campus users.

Update from Wufoo::

QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes that can contain any alphanumeric text and that often feature URLs that direct users to sites where they can learn about an object or place (a practice known as “mobile tagging”). Decoding software on tools such as camera phones interprets the codes, which are increasingly found in places such as product labels, billboards, and buildings, inviting passers-by to pull out their mobile phones and uncover the encoded information.

These codes, popular in Japan, allow users to use a device, most often their cell phone camera, at a QR Code and be given information, such as a URL to visit or some other information.

While the article deals with the pedagogical uses or these codes, I think there are many possible uses on the marketing side as well.

I think it will eventually be a great resource for prospective students. For example, lets say that tomorrow we send them a postcard telling them the due date for applications is coming up. On that postcard, you include text and a URL for your online application urging them to apply. It requires the user to enter in the address manually.

In the future, perhaps we will send students a postcard urging them to apply with a QR or other 2d barcode image on it. They point their phone or mobile device at it (or hold it up to the camera in their netbook) and they are instantly taken to your application. In fact, I’ve mocked up a sample to show you what that could look like. 2 caveats: I’m not a graphic designer in any sense and the picture is from Selwyn College in Cambridge.

Click for a larger version.

If you’re tracking your conversions closely, you should know these URLs can contain all sorts of analytics data, so you would be able to get very reliable information about response rates, perhaps better then using other redirect techniques.

While the technology is ready for use today, you may not be at a point where it would make sense to introduce these types of codes. When I think about where mobile technology will be in two years, I think there will be demand for it. Today’s 14-year-olds will be starting their college searches before you know it.

Resources:
Online, free QR Code Generator
2D Sense, iPhone app that will read QR Codes
NeoReader

In 2003, we launched a web application on our campus that allows users to send us web changes and initiate new web projects. Here’s the first screen users see when they want to send us an update. Other than a new field or two, it hasn’t changed at all since 2003.

For 6 years, this form has worked just fine. Campus users who have used it since its launch have had no problems at all.

But for people who are newer to campus who need to send us updates, we’ve noticed something interesting. If you enlarge that screenshot above, you’ll see we ask for a field called “Title.” Our web team interprets this to be something like “Update Orientation Dates” or “Post a new picture.” It’s a title to the project they are sending us. Newer people on campus were putting in their job titles in there and our team was getting projects with the title “Secretary.”

After a rash of them the last few weeks, we made a simple change. I changed “Title” to read “Project Title.” It’s a change that took about 15 seconds and involved no changes to code or other functions behind the scenes. Here’s the new form:

I also took away the “reset form” button that had been there since launch. It was in the way and could potentially cause confusion.

In the end, I think this will save some confusion and give our web team a bit more information on the projects we’re being sent, that’s a good thing.

Do you have any examples of quick fixes that you’ve made to an app? I’d be interested to hear about them.

The challenge is that we have many different people working on pages across several departments, and they are all not “web people,” so creating pages that comply with web standards isn’t their top priority. So, a few years back, we wrote a web app to help us with tracking pages, which I’d like to share with you today.

No fancy Web 2.0 stuff here, it’s straight-up ease of use for the only audience this tool has – me, Josh and our students. This page shows a list of pages that we need to check. It shows me if the page has been assigned to someone to fix, and what style sheet the page uses. The first step is to check the validity of any page. So, clicking on a link brings me to this page.

This page is made up of two frames. Let’s start with the bottom frame. It’s the W3C results of a validation test, which is pulled in automatically depending on the URL we feed it. Once the results are in, I can set the validation status of the page as well as see a history of the times we’ve checked this page. We are adding content to pages just about every day, so it’s not uncommon for a page not to validate from time to time. Our code also pulls the style sheet the page is using, so we also know if the page CSS was changed at some point.

Once the information is submitted, the window closes and our main app updates. Next, I need to assign these pages to someone, either myself or one of our students. I select the checkboxes next to the pages and select who will update these pages at the top of the form. At this point, the pages to be updated are automatically created as a new project in our homegrown web project management tool. The next time the student logs into the project system, they’ll see the pages they’ve been assigned and can start work on them.

It’s quick and easy and makes validation, as well as the sometimes annoying task of keeping up with validation, less of a burden.

My ideas about this are two-fold. One, look for open-source solutions. Second, look for web services that can fit a need. They are often very low-cost, or better yet, free.

Open Source

There are many open source products that we web developers can use to solve problems and get things done. You may already be using many of these technologies already.

Your web site is probably served by Apache. Maybe you code web apps in PHP, and use MySQL for databases. Maybe you code in Ruby on Rails. All these are open source products with great communities of developers.

Looking for a blogging platform? WordPress is a great, free platform you can build all sorts of sites on top of.

Need a CMS? Plenty of options there, including the aforementioned WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Typo and many, many more.

Can’t get budget monies for that Adobe CS4 upgrade? Check out the Gimp, an open-source image processing tool. Want to do 3-D modeling? Check out Blender.

Web Services

Don’t forget there are many great web services you can use that will help you save time and money.

Our career services team wanted a custom calendar for all their recruiting events. We didn’t have the time to build or customize a calendar application, so we looked to Google’s Calendar product. Now, career services staff and students enter events into an online calendar and we take that and embed it one of their web pages. Google Calendar also allows users to subscribe to the calendar by RSS, Google Cal or iCal. It’s a great solution that was very quick for us to set up and we don’t have to spend a lot of time maintaining it.

Want to build a quick form? Try Wufoo’s free plan.

Use Flickr’s free account to post photos. Put videos for free on YouTube. Want to get suggestions and recommendations from your visitors? Try UserVoice’s free plan. Get free stats from Google Analytics.

As you can see, there are a ton of options and hopefully the lack of budget monies won’t keep you from creating great sites and web apps.

It’s a tough question to answer, and often it can be hard to track, discover and hopefully improve. You’ve got focus groups, user studies, surveys and so on. In my mind, nothing beats watching people try to use the site.

There are a few services online that will do that, including CrazyEgg, Clicktale and TeaLeaf. Now there’s a new site to help you track user activity.

Enter Userfly. It’s a new online tool that allows you to watch users interact with your site. They accomplish this with one line of javascript that follows where your users are mousing, clicking, and so on. You track these sessions and you can go back at a later time and playback in real-time what the user was doing.

Here’s a video overview.

userfly.com from Chris Estreich on Vimeo.

It looks like a great tool, and right now it’s free to try, and they’ll track 10 users an hour. They have a pro plan with allows for unlimited users, but they haven’t figured out a pricing structure yet. From their website:

We are still trying to figure out our pricing structure, but we will most likely charge per user, and let you set a cap on the amount you’d like to pay. Once your cap is hit, we stop capturing users, and you can buy more captures at any time.

Sounds like a tool definitely worth checking out.

Update: They’re experiencing heavy loads after being featured on a few sites like Read Write Web today, so they’re getting a bit hammered. Maybe give this one a few days to try out.

If you had an extra seat or needed a ride somewhere, you could post a note and hopefully meet up and share the expenses and pass the time.

Post renovation, the rideboard was gone, and they missed it. So, we came up with the idea to do an online version. Using PHP, the Google Maps API and a bit of RSS, I think we came up with a pretty good solution. The bulk of the coding on this was done by students working for me at the time.

If you click on that image, you’ll get a larger version where you can see the detail a little better. Since the site is limited to on-campus IP addresses, you can’t see the real thing.

Once you click on a pushpin, you’re taken to a detail page of that city, and the rides needed and being offered to that place. Signing up is simple – just a few fields of information are asked, since we know only students of our college will be using this page. The student gets an email right away with a link and code to approve their listing, and once they do it’s live. The code also works if they need to amend their listing, such as the number of seats available. Honestly, I haven’t had to touch this app in a long time since it’s coded to take care of itself.

Is anyone interested in the code for use on their campuses? I think we could open source it if a few people are interested. It would be our little attempt to be a bit greener. Let me know what you think.

Mturk, for short, is Amazon’s human-powered marketplace. Just like you can provision servers on demand, with Mturk you provision small work units that you pay people to complete. These are often small tasks, such as a web search or transcribing a few seconds of audio, and for the work that you do, you get paid, from a penny per unit on up. If you’re concerned about the quality of the responses you get, you can assign each task to multiple people, so it’s done two or three times and you can verify the quality of the response.

Here’s a quick video about the service from the user perspective.

Anyone can also submit work units to Amazon to be completed. Here are three really interesting blog posts about people’s positive experiences with Mturk.

NewsCred.com used the service to help categorize RSS feeds.

iamelgringo.com used the service to verify 6,000 business URLs and addresses. His project was completed in 5 days at a total project cost of $300.

Andy Baio used Mturk to transcribe an audio interview, breaking it down into small chunks for easy transcribing. Transcriping 36 minutes of audio took only 3 hours and cost $15.40.

Are there uses for this type of service in higher ed? It sounds like it could really help on grunt work or large sets of data that need verified or cleaned up.

Enter S3Stat.com.

Every night, they will parse your S3 logs and transform them into Apache logs, which can be run through Webalizer and output back to an area on S3 where you can analyze to your heart’s extent. The stats are ongoing, so you can easily go back and check out last month or earlier in the year, which is nice. Here’s a quick screen grab:

S3Stat Screenshot

The one caveat is that you give S3Stat your S3 login and pass. That allows them to grab you logs and post the results back to your S3 account. This is similar to giving your login to RightScale to manage your EC2 resources. S3Stat has done nothing to question my trust in them, so we’ll continue to use the service.

Signing up for the service is easy, and you get a free 30 day trial. After that, the service is miniscule $2 a month. That’s a small price to pay for not having to wade through Amazon’s default stats.