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In the last issue of the Newsletter, I made an announcement of CSA's new Web site. That announcement turned out to be a bit premature. While I had reserved the domain name archcomp.org (meant to put people in mind of archaeological computing), I had not done any testing or checking concerning the desirability of the name. In fact, when I did ask people what they thought, everyone to whom I spoke - the CSA board, Susan Jones, my wife, even my dogs - found archcomp (and comparch, one of my alternates) to be difficult to remember and without redeeming characteristics of any sort. We went back to the drawing board and started looking for other domain names, and following the suggestion of CSA board member Sam Francis, focused on possibilities using CSA as a part of a larger name. CSAONLINE and CSANET - both with and without hyphens - were suggested, along with a few other possibilities. The result - this time carefully discussed with a multitude of advisors and gadflies - was the registration of csanet.org as the new domain name for our Web site. Although archcomp will also point to the CSA Web site, we will allow that domain registration to lapse at the end of the current paid-up period.
Access to the CSA Web site is now best obtained via http://csanet.org. You may prefix the ubiquitous three w's, making the URL www.csanet.org, and www.csanet.org may appear as the URL in the location box of your browser even if you don't type www. Nevertheless, requesting any page from our site may be done with or without the use of www in the URL. Using archcomp.org as the domain should also work, but I would not recommend that, since it will not be supported in the future.
The new site has been re-arranged in some important ways. Everything you have used in the past is there, but substituting csanet.org for csa.brynmawr.edu will not necessarily bring up the correct page. Our site had grown in some haphazard ways, and changes to make it easier to manage were required. We have reorganized the site in two ways that you may want to understand before starting in with the new home page. First, we have incorporated all the archival activities of CSA - the archiving of CAD models, the archiving of high-resolution TIFF images from the Bryn Mawr Lantern Slide Project, discussions of archiving procedures, and the Archaeological Data Archive Project into a single ARCHIVE area. Second, we have grouped together the various materials about using computer technology in archaeology and architectural history (but not the Newsletter articles, which remain separate) under the heading of "CSA Information Technology Web Page." CSA Projects remain accessible from the Home Page, of course, as well as general information about the organization. It seemed best to make those changes when we were also changing the URL (and moving to a commercial vendor to host the site). If you find that the changes create problems or if you have any difficulties with the new site, I hope you will let us know so that we can try to make everything work as it ought. Meanwhile, I will try to restrain myself in the future so that I look before I leap. (Since the commercial Web host is now responsible for maintaining the equipment and keeping everything up and running, we would also appreciate knowing if you have trouble reaching the site at any time.)
We have a pointer on Bryn Mawr College's server to redirect calls to the new URL. Thus, requests to the CSA Sun workstation that formerly hosted the site are now being redirected to the new server. That will often lead you to the wrong page, because of the organizational changes mentioned above, but you should get a page that will help you find the correct one. (Note that, if you have bookmarked a URL from the previous site that includes ":443," trying to access that document will fail. Unfortunately, the browser will not give you an error message; it will just keep searching until you tell it to stop.)
In addition to the new Web server, Susan Jones and I now have email addresses through the domain rather than through Bryn Mawr College. Our new addresses are users nicke and scjones, each at (@) the domain csanet.org. The old addresses will continue to work, but the new ones are preferred.
-- H. Eiteljorg, II
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Table of Contents for the Fall, 2000 issue of the CSA Newsletter (Vol. XIII, no. 2)
Table of Contents for all CSA Newsletter issues on the Web