A word from the Webmaster

Greetings from the Burk Hall Basement!

This is the:
San Francisco State University
Academic Technology
Media, Distribution and Support
website. (Yup, that's a mouthful)

Here you will find a ridiculous amount of information on our services, equipment and staff.

You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader installed to use our on-line forms and view instruction manuals for the electronic classrooms.
You will also need Quicktime to view the on-line video tutorials for the electronic classrooms.
Links to this software is available from our "Links" page.

Otherwise, I've tried to keep the graphics and images small so they download quickly. Some of the alphabetic listings in our media catalog can be huge (especially C and S) so using the keyword search is advised.

I spent two years building this site and have expanded it from its original 20 or so pages (not including the media catalog) to over 400 pages. It's my job to make sure that the pages are accurate and up to date. I wrote every word and designed every page (other than the media catalog which is an automated system). When I add new stuff I post it on the "News and Updates" aka "What Have We Done For You Lately" page. I'm not a graphic artist, nor am I a trained web designer, I just felt our original web site could use a few improvements and thought it would be fun to learn Dreamweaver.

Since I started working on our site in 1998, I have checked our site with Netscape 2.02, 3.01, 4.08, 4.5, 4.7; Internet Explorer 4.5, 5.0 and 6, iCab, Firefox, Opera and Safari (really!) and other than a couple of Javascript errors in Netscape 2 and 3 (whattya expect?), the site works.

From June 2000 until February 2002, the computing services center at SFSU ranked all the sites on the SFSU server (every department site and faculty page) with "LinkBot" which reports information such as: broken links, broken pages, old pages, and slow pages and we consistently received a 98 out of 100 rating. So there.

If there's anything that you think is missing or you'd like to see added to the site, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

I hope it helps you do your job better.

Laurie Sosna, webmaster AV Center
email

"I think everyone has to go through a kind of crash between... how you've been told the world functions and then how you really have to see it and somewhere in between there, you know, is a Blanche DuBois trying to get by without losing your magic..."
Susan Sarandon-Inside the Actor's Studio

Being that I have the attention-span of a 6 year old, I went through a period where I seemed to be redesigning the AV site every couple of months. I've gotten over that but I am still pretty proud of the versions I did create. They're linked below.

Here's what I wrote at the time: "In case you're wondering why the home page seems to be changing all the time, I am reminded of the conversation between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in "Annie Hall" about their relationship. Woody explains that a relationship is like a shark, it has to keep moving to survive. He sums up their current situation: "I think what we have here, is a dead shark." I don't want this web site to become a dead shark."

I then realized that if my landlord came and repainted my house every couple of months without telling me, I would get more than a little peeved. So, to all my tenants, I'm over it.

Thanks go to:
Star Trek in Sound and Vision for the "Welcome aboard" sound. (The site is no longer available and that's a freakin' shame.)
http://www.unamerican.com for the "My Macintosh Rules" graphic.
http://www.google.com for their incredible image search. (Not to mention all the other incredible stuff they do.)
http://www.artrenewal.org for the stunning Mucha poster I used on that home page.
Dave Golden, Web Specialist at the SFSU Division of Information Technology for explaining the .nsconfig file.
Junying Du, Web Specialist at the SFSU Division of Information Technology for transitioning our media catalog search engine from htdig to google.
Mozart, Vivaldi, J.S. Bach, Rimsky-Korsakov, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Sileas, the AfroCelts, Angelique Kidjo and the BarrelHouse Mamas for the music.
All the web sites I've boosted ideas from.
The third parties who supplied fonts, backgrounds, images and other stuff I'm too lazy to do myself (Photoshop makes me nuts!).
My parents for hauling me to all those art museums.

This site was designed on a Mac 4400/200 and a 450Mhz G4. It can look funky on a PC 'cause nothing in life has any business being perfect.

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