What Was New Archive - links No.2
Click here for What Was New Archive Index and for current What's New?
The What Was New Archive
ARCHIVED LINKS NO.2
25 July - 17 November 1996
Compiled by the Birzeit Webmaster, webmaster@birzeit.edu.
- 17 November 1996 - It's out, it's hot and it's new! Birzeit University's Complete Guide to Palestine's Websites has been redesigned, expanded and improved. Bookmark this new link now! New features include separate categories to speed the download time as you try and get to the sites beginning with later letters in the alphabet; new Palestinian sites; which Palestinian sites are cookie-infested; notes showing when sites were added or last reviewed; and, on the homepage, "where it's at" - this month a couple of information-packed memorial sites from outside Palestine, with more of these kinds of sites to be added this coming week. An image map leads you gently through the process, or if you prefer to browse functionally, text links. And you can advertise here too, with all the proceeds being charitably channelled back to Birzeit's growing Web project. Advertise your business, service or website with a banner.
- 13 November 1996 - We've been busy beavers this week, adding a new section of the website called Final Status Issues, which at the moment contains some initial material on closure & the freedom of movement, with more to follow, most likely on Jerusalem. What we really need is funding for this, so we have made available the Palestine Archive proposal, also available as a zipped MS Word 6.0 document. With the final status talks approaching, there is a tremendous need for documentation from over here, preferably not through the lenses of the Western media. Actually some of the samplings of that media, written specifically about our website can be seen at (http://www.birzeit.edu/web/articles.html). If the Palestine Archive proposal is a little out of your funding league, why not donate a piece of equipment? An appeal to this end was attached to our "On the ground in Ramallah" website (if you want an idea of what we are trying to get funding for, linked to at numerous points below. Thanks to Ray Aranki, Fred James, Clement Henry, Elizabeth Bouri, John Tippler and Prof. E. Sanford for donations so far. Every little bit is adding up. A full report of what was donated and how it will be used will be produced at a later date. For more detailed information on what is going on with Birzeit's Web and the rest of the Web in Palestine, subscribe to our mailing list by sending an e-mail to webmaster@birzeit.edu with the word "naseej" in the subject box.
- 31 October 1996 - Faculty of Engineering now on-line. Just in time to present information about a new "Building and Construction" exhibition held by the Italian Government which will last for three days. See What's New on their site for more details. Need the e-mail address of an Engineering lecturer? See the "Staff" sections in the different departments for more details. Prior to this, only community-outreach and research centres had really made the journey onto the Web, accessible through a link in the "Brief Information" section of the website. As this is the first university faculty on-line and the Chemistry Department has already and recently joined us, we will soon be adding a new guide to all these centers accessible through the homepage.
- 28 October 1996 - Conference announcement, about Palestinian education, revitalising our events in Palestine section with new life. If you haven't seen many updates recently, it is due to the work we have been doing on fundraising. Our Appeal for web reporting resources is still in search of donors, big and small...
- 14 October 1996 - GERMAN LANGUAGE WEBSITE LAUNCHED: Thanks to Eva, and Michael before her, we can now communicate in yet another European language. Accessible off the homepage or from this link to the German language version of Brief Information, it's one small step towards making it a truly global Internet. For those that enjoyed the "On the ground in Ramallah" site (see entry below) we had during the clashes of the last few weeks, please check out our appeal for reporting resources.
- 27 September 1996, really late at night - REPORT FROM BESEIGED RAMALLAH: A group of us have been working on some information about the clashes that have torn apart the West Bank since Wednesday, after Israeli troops violently put down demonstrations with "rubber" bullets and live ammunition. At the moment there is
a Photo Diary of how the clashes
erupted. Tomorrow morning, we will add further textual material about the incident and also Thursday's press release, which the events precluded from adding to the website at that point in time. Ramallah is currently surrounded by Israeli tanks but no deep invasion into this part of Zone A has yet occurred. If you get to this page before we put a notice out to our friends on the Internet tomorrow morning, please e-mail as many people
as possible about it before you get to sleep. Good night.
- 19 September 1996
- It's press release season at the moment, with an overview of Israeli violations affecting the university since the Oslo process first began in 1993, courtesy of the Human Rights Action Project. This press release was actually released on 18 September.
- For those who want or need to get them sent direct to their e-mail in-trays, send a message to the Public Relations Office, pr@admin.birzeit.edu from your usual e-mail address with a simple message telling us you want this service, e.g. "Press Releases, please" or "Send me regular info". Organisations without e-mail in the UK that would like to receive Birzeit press releases can contact Friends of Birzeit University (FoBZU) by fax on +44-171-835-2088. The FoBZU homepage is on this server with an enabled "fax us through e-mail" link.
- For those interested, the homepage is scheduled to have a few more links added to it soon to facilitate access to department homepages and other useful/popular parts of the site.
- 16 September 1996 - A press release from 14 September about
the continuing non-implementation of the High Court decision regarding
our students in Palestinian detention. Al-Quds University has been added
to the Complete Guide to Palestine's
Websites, bringing the grand total of websites in Palestine up to
37!
- 4 September 1996 - Today the popular Ramallah Online Travel Guide was "majorly updated", with a clearer look and site design. Informationally, photos were added to some formerly bald pages and the Where to Eat section had brief reviews added to the restaurant names. Also, hotels fell under the microscope as to whether they seemed like nice places to stay or not with a smiley face ratings system - : ) : | : ( - to endear us to the local hoteliers. Check the Where to Stay section for more details. Finally, the Complete Guide was again updated, with 36 known websites in Palestine! The latest addition - The Jerusalem Times, Palestine's only English-language newspaper - can be found by clicking the 'media' option in Birzeit University's Complete Guide to Palestine's Websites. Note that there will be no updates for around a
week as the webmaster is on holiday, beginning in five minutes!
- 27 August 1996 - The most popular page on our site, after the
homepage, is Birzeit University's Complete
Guide to Palestine's Websites, of which there
are now 35 in existence. In fact, we just won an NBNSOFT content award for
it and it seems to be making the e-mail rounds on the Internet quite
rapidly. The Guide has just been updated, and you may
wish to check out the British School of Archaeology, Gamasoft Online, Assali
Ltd., the Institute for Palestine Studies and a couple of new personal
homepages. If you haven't visited this site yet, it's an excellent
indicator of how the Internet community is growing here.
- 26 August 1996 - The Chemistry department makes an appearance! Also, the Personal Diary has had three new entries added. Check out the Personal Diary's What's New? section for more information.
- 22 August 1996 - For those of you who have been following the
court case with our ten students detained in the Palestinian prison in
Ramallah for over five months, there was very
good news in the court case. Unfortunately they have not been
released yet. As a result, Palestinian human
rights organisations have made a joint statement today. Next
installment soon!
- 5 August 1996 - Unfortunately, this site has been down for
a week due to major technical difficulties. These have now been sorted out and we will be offering possibly two mirror sites (one in Palestine, one in the United States) in the comi
ng months. None of this would happen if the Internet situation here was solved, but it remains very much unresolved. Many apologies to our users and please note that our service provider, UNDP, is blameless in this matter! Anyway, read on and see what we have been spending the last month doing to our site.
- 25 July 1996 - DESIGN CHANGES:
- What's New? The whole website actually. We binned the old design and introduced a cleaner, crisper look with a handy imagemap (see left) on all main pages to help you navigate around the site.
- Link colours are now consistent and work in a more intuitive way. Untravelled hyperlinks are now green (think "live" or "go") and travelled hyperlinks are now a red/reddish-brown colour (think "dead" or "stop")! Department homepages will not necessarily follow this pattern but we're asking them nicely.
- No Java/VMRL? You're right, there are no dancing olive trees or rotating logos anywhere on the Birzeit website. Information content is our first priority at this point in time.
NEW ADDITIONS TO THE WEBSITE:
- The very exciting Birzeit University's Complete Guide to Palestine's Websites has been added to the Palestine Archive, to help out in the period before that particular project takes off. The guide includes links to all known existing sites in, not about Palestine. Reviews and awards are provided. Becoming Palestine has been deemphasised until someone will kindly provide the funding for it and the many other project modules we have planned. Do you get the feeling we keep going on about this?
- The Law Centre has made an appearance. Model link colours, a simple site and an excellent introduction to Palestinian law.
- A report has been added to the Palestine International Festival 1996 website and the wider Events in Palestine section of our website has been formalised and expanded, although still very much in the developmental stage.
- The first and most detailed of its kind, a tourist and information guide has been added, providing a look at what there is Around Birzeit. You won't find this level of detail in Lonely Planet who say, in the last version I saw of their guidebook, that they haven't been sending their people to the West Bank for years because it's dangerous. Heh heh heh.
- A Birzeit University campus tour is coming very soon, but pressing that particular button on the imagemap bar will bring you no joy just yet. We removed the old campus tour as it was an "early HTML/scanning days" effort that we'd rather forget.
- A Personal Diary in the Palestine Archive has had many new entries added, as well as a new look.
- The Human Rights Archive has been updated with a new section linking to articles published related to human rights at Birzeit and the most recent Human Rights Record, No. 16.
- You can now find out Who's Who at Birzeit, an "interim, preparatory, step towards the realisation of" a searchable index of all faculty and administration (cheeky paraphrase courtesy of the September 1993 Oslo document). Translation: you're not likely to see it for a long time to come but we are working on it.
- Birzeit and the Web has had some major revisions and new additions that you may wish to check out. These include a very good background article on the telecommunications infrastructure in Palestine by Marwan Tarazi, director of the computer centre.
- As for the website as a whole, a text only section and a French-language section have been added, both containing information from the existing "Brief Information".
- Finally, a link has been added to the homepage to help people having trouble contacting the university during periods when the phone connection lines to the university aren't...um...there.
Page created: 16 June 1996.
Comments to: webmaster@birzeit.edu.