Oh, hello. Yes, it has been quiet around here for a while. There is work being done behind the scenes that is taking much longer than anticipated, but I digress.

I wanted to alert any of the university web pros that are interested to the fact that HSU will be testing its emergency alert system tomorrow, September 27, 2007 from 10:45 to 11:00 am Pacific Time. This will include switching our web site into emergency notification mode.

I have developed two emergency templates— one for low-level emergencies such as power outages, tsunami warnings for the county (campus itself is out of tsunami range), etc, and one for high-level emergencies such as campus shootings, major earthquakes and the like. The low-level emergency template will be used tomorrow, and retains HSU marketing messages and most functionality. The high-level template removes all images and marketing, as well at most functionality, in anticipation of high server loads. Folks from the Web Office and from Public Affairs have the ability to switch the main site to one of these emergency templates and post emergency messages.

I will follow up after tomorrow’s test with screenshots and an analysis of how well the system worked.