Responsible Site Development

Four things learned today 9-17-13 in conversation with guest speaker Breck Witte, Director of Library Information Technology Office.

  • Columbia Libraries wants to extend developer access to people who are not full-time developers. Since we don’t do this type of work all the time, we need to be extra careful to understand what we are doing, and how the project as a whole functions, grows, and is maintained.

  • GIT is source control software. It gives you the capability to roll the site back to an earlier version, if you have done your work properly. Rolling back may be necessitated if a change made to the functionality of a site, for example, the addition of a plug-in, has unforeseen negative consequences.

  • Think of your Web site as having three operational stages: development, test, and production. Changes to the functionality of the site (for example, the addition of plug-ins or changes to PHP code) need to be made at the development level. Then they should be tested by the group. The changes should only be pushed forward to the production level when testing is done and the group finds the changes to be acceptable.

  • When you make a change to functionality you need to provide online documentation of what you have done and why.

John L. Tofanelli

Author: John L. Tofanelli

John is Columbia’s Librarian for British and American History and Literature. His research interests include literature and religion in 18th- and 19th- century Great Britain, textual criticism, and book history. He has enjoyed the chance to explore the early architectural history of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine.