What Was New Archive - links No.3
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The What Was New Archive
ARCHIVED LINKS NO.3
10 December 1996 - 22 May 1997
Compiled by the Birzeit Webmaster, webmaster@birzeit.edu.
- 22 May 1997 - The "where it's at" section of Complete Guide to Palestine's Websites, found on the homepage, is featuring the website of Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab this month, since his arrest yesterday by the Palestinian Authority.
- 17 May 1997 - The Complete Guide to Palestine's Websites has updated with a few new websites, bringing the total to 64. The Websites About Palestine section of the Complete Guide now includes links to some of the most interesting or significant Israeli websites. In related news, the Israeli Internet Blackout is coming on May 29th, 1997. What has the Israeli Internet got to do with any Palestinian website? Nothing, if you ignore the fact that all Palestinian websites are still part of the Israeli Internet. Confused? See Birzeit and the Web's look at "Palestine and the World Wide Web".
- 6 May 1997 - The Department of Economics is now online. Slowly but surely, the various academic nooks and crannies in the university are creeping on the Web. Congratualtions to the Economics Department for being the most recent!
SAFE TO SURF AT BIRZEIT - Yesterday, we rated our website with the Recreational Software Advisory Council, an organisation that enables parents to filter out content they do not wish their children to see. Basically, the whole website is completely acceptable with regards to sex, nudity, language and violence, but we did mark two subsections as being potentially disturbing for children. These were On the Ground in Ramallah: Reports from a Town Become Battlefield, our visual and textual record of the September 1996 clashes, and A Personal Diary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which also includes some images and text relating to "the death of human beings" and a few "mild expletives". Users of Microsoft Internet Explorer version 3.0 and above can enable the built-in RSAC filter very easily.
It should be noted that none of the material on either website could be said to be gratuitous by any stretch of the imagination. A Personal Diary has been chosen as a Norton Publishers resource for secondary school students studying the Arab-Israeli conflict, so one can safely assume that the Diary has a sound educational value and - after all - sometimes being a little disturbed is a good thing.
In the future, we will be re-rating the On the Ground website on a page-by-page basis, as only one or two pages (related to the intensive care ward in Ramallah hospital) actually include disturbing images out of a total of about 50. The Personal Diary website will be a little more difficult as it is already due for a directory restructure and comprises of around 4 times as many pages. But again, we are only talking about 5 or 6 pages out of a potential 120 or more.
Why go to all this trouble? The advantage of rating your websites is that some parents or guardians may choose to block access to all sites which are not rated, a reality which would make the whole Birzeit website unavailable. Also, the filter has gradiations, and while some parents may understandably not wish their children to see "graphic sexual violence", they may believe it is a good thing for them to be exposed to existing realities of "violence in a social context".
- 3 May 1997 - The Mathematics and Computer Science Department has gone online. Please see the Birzeit Homepage for a full list of online departments, research and community-outreach centers.
A commentary on the 1997 Birzeit election results was also added.
- 14 April 1997 - HOLIDAY ANNOUNCEMENTS: Birzeit University will be on vacation for the 'Eid Al-Adha ("Feast of Sacrifice") vacation between Wednesday 16th and Sunday 20th April (inclusive), and 'Eid Al-Fisehh (Easter) between Friday 25th and 28th April 1997 (inclusive). The Birzeit Webmaster and webteam will be on holiday from Wednesday 16th until Wednesday 30th (inclusive). E-mails to webmaster@birzeit.edu will be answered after this period. Have a nice holiday!
- 7 April 1997 - It's election time! The Birzeit Web Team have put up a website to cover the current student council elections. The site offers the election results from the last two years, background to the proportional representation system, photos from previous years, details of the competing blocs, and daily photos and updates on the developing campaigns. This year's results will be posted on Wednesday 9 April 1997, at 8:00pm Palestinian Time (GMT+3hrs). All in all, a useful website.
- 2 April 1997 - 20-year-old Birzeit student Abdallah Khalil Abdallah Salah was shot dead on Saturday. The university sent out a press release and the Abu Ghnaim section of A Personal Diary was updated with reports and photographs. The university community has spent the last three days in mourning. Regular readers of What's New? will notice that it is only 51 days since our last student died as a result of Israeli violence, on 6 February 1997.
The university's Press Release Archive has been reorganised and a missing release from 1996 added along with all of the press releases from 1997. A new feature includes a link to whatever the latest release is, on the Press Release Archive index.
- 27 March 1997 - The Center for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society's website is now up and running, in time for the coming conference at Birzeit for Deir Yassin's 49th anniversary. The website - like the Center - is partly dedicated to recording the history of Palestinians who lived in towns and villages which were in territories that were annexed to become modern day Israel. Also, Birzeit News covered the clashes yesterday in Ramallah.
- 18 March 1997 - A Personal Diary gets a surprise award and goes to Abu Ghnaim. Also, the Human Right Action Project's homepage gets a facelift.
- 25 February 1997 - The Academic Freedom First website is gearing up for a 3rd March petition drive. Check out their website and support the Gazan students in their quest for the "right" to education.
- 17 February 1997 - Birzeit News has a few interesting new entries that shed light on student life here.
- 6 February 1997 - Birzeit University's Complete Guide to Palestine's Websites has been updated. New additions can be found in the "academic & research", "government & services", "human rights" and "internet services" sections. Palestine now has a grand total of 61 websites. As you tour the website, you will also notice advertising, a new feature. Before you hit 'send' in your e-mail programme, note that this will bring in revenue for the university's web activities and fear not - you will not be seeing advertising spread all over the university website.
Also new, check out the MARHABA! directory of Palestinians with e-mail worldwide. Sign up today, if you are a Palestinian! You can search for fellow wired Palestinians by name, present location, home town, employment, and others, an excellent service brought to you by Jack Rabah, in cooperation between Palnet, Birzeit University and Baraka. It is hoped that the new directory will put Palestinians directly in touch with the approach of the final status talks, when the future of Palestine will be decided and will need discussion amongst Palestinians everywhere.
Unfortunately, we just heard that Yasser Abdul Ghani, a Birzeit student injured in the clashes at end-September 1996, passed away today after almost 4-and-a-half months in intensive care. The Birzeit University community would like to take this opportunity to say "Lahoor rahmeh walakum min ba'adahe toolal-bakaa'" ("Mercy upon him and for you a long life") to Yasser's family. The university community will be having a memorial rally when we return from the 'Eid al-Fitter break, on Wednesday. For those who have not seen the website yet about the clashes, and want links to the sections that mention Yasser, here they are: On the ground in Ramallah website | Yasser's mother in Ramallah hospital | Yasser in the Intensive Care Unit | Yasser's father in Ramallah hospital. Some images will be disturbing.
- 25 January 1997 - Websites about Palestine has been launched finally. Some peace-related websites and personal homepages of Palestinians have been added, with more to follow. Don't hold your breath, as it is busy days on the Birzeit website. Thanks to UNDP for a recent donation of US7,000 of equipment which will at least give us the correct tools to work with, computers, equipment to scan slides and negatives, and to add video to the site. More is still needed to reach our appeal target for Web reporting resources. HTML-friendly interns are welcomed to work in the office.
- 22 January 1997 - Hebron Redeployment Diary. Maps, photos and commentary.
- 9 January 1997 - Birzeit and the Web has been updated, with details of how you can help us build a World Wide Web resource library. Old Web-related magazines and books cluttering up the house or office? Send them to Birzeit! In this page you will find a pitiful list of what we have and a big list of what we need. As the Arabic proverb goes, "You are so generous and we deserve it!"
- 8 January 1997 - A few updates and additions. The Human Rights Action Project has expanded its website and added several new editions of the Birzeit Human Rights Record and some new press releases to our various archives. The latter are usually dealt with as the happen but various computer problems and the usual excuses prevailed and they - in fact - no longer could be said to be "new" under any definition of the word. Also, the Complete Guide to Palestine's Websites has had three websites added to it, bringing the total to 45 in Palestine. Recently, the New York Times has been linking to this site, bringing a whole new category of browsing person our way. We were listed below the Jerusalem Post but above the Israeli Foreign Ministry and U.S. State department for some reason, and it was not alphabetical order. : )
- 4 January 1997 - Our print publication What's New on the Web at BZU? is now available online in the Birzeit and the Web section of the Website. The two issues so far published offer an inside view of how we perceive our Web mission, commentaries, server statistics and e-mail received related to the website. This was supposed to be on-line a lot sooner, but that last closure got in the way of that one. Any funding agency that wants to help us out by supporting an assistant webmaster, is advised to get in contact with webmaster@birzeit.edu swiftly. The volume of work is getting a little uncontrollable and needs to increase if anything.
- 2 January 1997 - Happy New Year! We were busy over the Christmas break with a special project, producing a website for the historic opening of the new dome of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Check out http://www.birzeit.edu/palnews/sepulchre for some stunning photographs.
- 23 December 1996 - Merry Christmas! We break up today to arrive back on January 2nd. An important new addition to the website is now available. The first Birzeit on-line campaign, ACADEMIC FREEDOM FIRST, has a homepage. The Gazan students are the subject. You are the focus. Help us help them. Today's entry to the BIRZEIT NEWS is also available.
- 19 December 1996 - The distraction from the planned updates continues with the addition of a new section to the Website, BIRZEIT NEWS. Bookmark this site for regular but not daily (!) updates from the university. News will include details of conferences, visitors, events, and developments with photos and related links to other sections of the Birzeit website. If you haven't visited our website for a while please note the link above to previous entries of What's New? in the What Was New Archive above.
- 14 December 1996 - Famous last words re: more updates soon. Birzeit University is currently disfunctional owing to a closure of Ramallah. Entries from A Personal Diary give some insight in what has been happening. http://www.birzeit.edu/diary
- 10 December 1996 - A long time between updates. Sorry, but Birzeit's PR office has just added a World Wide Web Center! Redecorating and relocating have put us out of touch for a while. The Palestine &: Arabic Studies Program has launched it's website! The brochure is now on-line for international students interested in studying at Birzeit but reports from PAS students and other features will be added soon. Watch this space. More updates very soon!
Page created: 1 June 1997.
Comments to: webmaster@birzeit.edu.