October 21, 2010

Why doesn’t my page update right away?

When you make changes to content on or supplied to one of our websites, it may update immediately, or it may take a few minutes to update, or perhaps a day or so. The range depends upon the application and how the content is stored and used. Following are some of the most frequent content changes and the specifics about when, how, and why they update when they do. LiveWhale http://www.lclark.edu, college.lclark.edu, graduate.lclark.edu, law.lclark.edu When …

By David McKelvey

 

When you make changes to content on or supplied to one of our websites, it may update immediately, or it may take a few minutes to update, or perhaps a day or so. The range depends upon the application and how the content is stored and used. Following are some of the most frequent content changes and the specifics about when, how, and why they update when they do.

LiveWhale
http://www.lclark.educollege.lclark.edugraduate.lclark.edulaw.lclark.edu
When you edit pages, news, events, blurbs, etc. in LiveWhale, most updates to front-side webpages are immediate, but there are a few exceptions. We run caching software to help the webserver be very responsive to visitor requests. We cache pages (and the news, events, blurbs, etc. that feed them) for 5 minutes. If you’ve updated a pre-existing image, it might take up to 15 minutes to refresh. If you’ve requested updates to navigation or contact information from New Media, they generally appear in 5 minutes as well.

Search Engine
search.lclark.edudirectory.apps.lclark.edu
The search engine refreshes its content nightly. This applies to the content created in LiveWhale which the search engine indexes, so changes you make today to your pages appear in the search engine tomorrow. This also applies (via business day) to personal/organizational information. Where possible, we’ve integrated our systems with core institution-wide information systems (Colleague, via LDAP for the tech-heads). This means that if your personal office phone number changed, you’d ask HR to make the change. It will percolate through to the connected web systems the day after. (We’ll be releasing a new system to make updates, or suggest central system updates soon.)

Contact Us
main websites, right column beneath navigation
For most sites the contact information is manually updated by New Media (when you email us updates). However, we are currently rolling out the ability to edit this information yourself, through a new feature of the search engine. If your site has been so-enabled, it would take 5 minutes to update the basic information (phone, fax, MSC, etc.) and a day for bigger changes, like organization name, since they come from central databases.

Faculty Pages
various locations
All the contact and basic name and title information for the faculty pages comes to us through the central information systems, so they take about a day to update. You need only request the change of HR. Faculty biographies and other assorted CV information are often stored in LiveWhale like any other page. In the near future however, we will be moving all these resources into the search engine along with your other personal information.

Administration Page
http://www.lclark.edu/administration
The administration page about to debut (or already depending on relative launch) contains contact information for institutional organizational units. Should you have a change, use the feedback/contact form and New Media will update the search engine, or pass this information to HR where applicable. In the coming months, we’ll be releasing a method that you can do this all yourself too. Changes occur on a 5 minute or one day schedule, depending on whether the change must be made to central systems.