Announcements

How is Voices doing?

November 6, 2009 by Educational Technology

After the accident I thought it might be nice to take a look at our Google Analytics to see how we are doing. Would you have believed that Voices has had 15,836 visitors, from 74 countries and territories, and generating 52,957 page views since the semester started on August 24? The only state that has not visited Voices is South Dakota and we’ve had over 200 visitors from the United Kingdom. Here are some screenshots from Google Analytics showing from where I pulled these highlights.

Clearly all of you are writing about things that people want to read. We just want to thank you and say keep expressing yourselves!

Comment recovery

October 30, 2009 by Educational Technology

For many of the posts we were able to recover the comments from Google’s cache. If you would like the comments for your posts please e-mail instructionaltechnology@wooster.edu and we will send you the copy of Google’s cache for your site. We have no way of entering comments as the original commenters, but you can ask your classmates to reenter their comments.

Blogs recovered

October 30, 2009 by Educational Technology

As of 4:50 PM on October 30, 2009, all blogs that were in the system on September 10, 2009 have been restored to their state on October 27, 2009, or as close as we could get with what was cached on Google. Special thanks to John McCreight for helping us save cached copies from Google. We are now beginning to recreate the accounts and blogs of users who registered after September 10, 2009. So far we have heard from 9 of the 19 users. We still need users to claim the following blogs and provide the information below so that we may recreate their accounts:

aboamah
bschlaefer
ddavis13
grandi09
injanji
kmartyniak13
meganpie18
mlh15
ohiofigment
xzhang13

If your blog is missing or missing posts here is what you need to do:

Send an e-mail to instructionaltechnology@wooster.edu containing
1. the URL of your blog (even if it no longer exists)
2. your username for the blog
3. your e-mail address
4. your name

We will search Google to try to find a cached copy of your site and posts. (You can do this yourself by entering site:yoururl into Google) Once we find a cached copy we will send you an e-mail letting you know and we will restore as many posts as we could find on Google. If you would rather restore your posts yourself just indicate this in your e-mail and we will send you any cached pages we are able to find. Our hope is to have most blogs restored by next Tuesday.
If your blog was not deleted you can continue to add posts. We will be able to add your older posts even if you continue to add new ones.
You can read Setbacks to find out what happened.

All is not lost

October 27, 2009 by Educational Technology

We may not be able to recover the data from the database backups, but since we have had Google Analytics installed from day one, Google has caches of some of the blogs. It may even have caches of all of them. Users can visit the tool provided by it exchange and input their URL to see the last date Google cached their site. If a cache date is returned then the user can go to Google and do a search for their site. Clicking on the Cached link will take the user to a cached version of their page from which they can copy their posts or which they can save using the Save Page As… option in Firefox. For example there is a cache of The Gothic Imagination which contains all of the posts from Aug 24 through Oct. 26. Users should feel free to contact a member of the Instructional Technology Department if they need help in recovering their posts from a Google cache. We are not sure how long the cached pages will remain. We are trying to save any class blogs we find and will help the faculty member with reentering the posts.

Setbacks

October 27, 2009 by Educational Technology

Some of you may have noticed that your site is missing posts. Others of you may notice that your blog is completely gone. Both are the result of a very unfortunate accident that occurred when the Systems Group tried to restore the Voices site to its state at 6 AM this morning.

As you know we were upgrading the software this morning. This afternoon it was discovered by Dr. Hayward that some users could not post to their blogs and we began investigating the issue. In the process it was decided that a reversion might be necessary. When the Systems Group restored the database containing all the user and post information, they discovered it was corrupt. As they looked for a clean backup they discovered that all backups after Sept. 10 were corrupt and so the earliest version they could restore to is Sept 10.

We are aware that roughly 40 users and hence 40 blogs were lost in this incident. Unfortunately it looks like there is no way to recover the lost users and blogs. It also means that all posts written between Sept. 10 and this morning are gone. We know that this means that several class assignments that were written as blog entries are also gone. We will continue to work with the Systems Group to try to recover as much data as possible, but be aware that it is not likely any more data will be recovered.

In the coming days we will be working with the Systems Group to develop procedures to ensure that such an accident does not occur in the future. Once these procedures have been determined we will post them to this site for the community’s benefit.

Under construction

June 23, 2009 by Educational Technology

As you can tell, this landing page is still under construction. We’re trying to get the right mix of information being displayed to make the community more vibrant and inviting. In the mean time please feel free to create a blog or explore the blogs of other members.