As of last Thursday, Sept. 15, students can access a new Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC) website. Over the summer, Pomona’s student webmaster Joseph Long ’14 worked closely with ASPC Student Body President Nathaniel Brown ’12 to determine which aspects of the website needed overhauling.
Long and Brown’s primary goal was to create a website with uses that extend beyond course reviews and student elections. They wanted a site that reflected the broader functions of the ASPC, including student events, radio (KSPC), housing and course reviews, and book sales. The first step in the site’s expansion was the migration of all ASPC web services to a new server. The physical server owned by ASPC has been replaced with a virtual server managed by Pomona’s Information Technology Services (ITS). Now, ITS will be responsible for the hardware of the server, meaning ASPC will no longer have to conduct its own hardware repairs and upgrades.
The security of club- and Senate-operated websites has also been improved, solving the hacking problems that used to plague ASPC-hosted websites. All student organization websites including The Student Life which were previously hosted with ASPC have already migrated to the new server.
To complement the course reviews, Long created a course search entitled “Our Pomona” that offers a number of improvements over the course search offered by the MyPomona site. Students can finally navigate backward without the site crashing. They can also filter the results of their searches based on meeting times, campus preference, professors, keywords, and a minimum number of spots available. Once selected, the courses can be added to a schedule on the “Our Pomona” webpage. Over the coming semester, Our Pomona will become an ASPC-operated website, and it will move to the ASPC server.
Long also added a new service to the site where students can post books they want to sell to other students. Connection 47 has been replaced with a new textbook sales service called SageBooks, which has been integrated into the main website. The site also got a visual overhaul; it no longer appears to have been designed in the early ’90s. Fortunately for those prone to nostalgia, certain pages, such as elections and course reviews, will retain the vintage appearance for now until they can be updated to match the new design.
Additionally, students who access the ASPC website from their smartphones will now see a specially-formatted mobile version of the site with all of the functionality of the full-sized one. Long is still working on other aspects of the site’s expansion, which will include integrating the housing-review website into the new system and creating a calendar that will conveniently consolidate the diverse events on campus. Finally, we are providing the student body with a site that addresses the broad functions of the ASPC.
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