Fall 2021

William Lin, Δ1252: Nothing much happened, Corp board bought a google drive but it's unclear what it is being used for.

[edit]Spring 2019

Justin Yu, Δ1223: My main contribution was organizing a wiki-thon to update this wiki page. Earlier this semester, almost all of the information on the wiki was outdated, most by at least 4 or 5 years. This large lapse in information is pretty saddening given how good a resource the wiki page has the potential to be. I want to push for the wiki-thon to happen every semester so that the wiki can continue to be updated.

See the Scholarship Chair wisdom page for more information regarding how the wiki-thon was run.

[edit]Spring 2018

Aidan Simpson, Δ1215: Webmaster is a job that I took when it was considered a “nothing” job for people to do just to earn points and maybe fix the wi-fi or something if needed. This was because many of the webmaster’s duties, such as the ones to do with the house server, had been replaced with the likes of MIT wi-fi and DropBox. Naturally, I set out to make the position worth something for a change and revamp its responsibilities. Besides updating the website, I decided to update this wiki so you could read it and learn something (hope that worked out). Additionally, I ran a campaign to get our historical documents digitized to preserve them for future generations which successfully ended when I asked for donations at 6294 and they decided to incorporate the project into the budget for 2018-19. Anyways, I guess the lesson here is that any position can affect real change if you are willing to put in the work. I also went to the RSA academy of the national conference and learned that other chapters had a “Social Media Chair”, so I decided to get the position of Webmaster updated to do that instead, and now the position is known as such.

[edit]Fall 2012-Spring 2012

So I've been webmaster for a while and here are my advice for future people thinking about it:

• You have a lot of flexibility with what you can do, so be sure to set goals for yourself and get the most important things done.
• Be pro-active about grabbing access to everything. It is your job to know all the passwords and all the things.
• Communicate, Communicate, Communicate. The house's opinion of you is proportional to how much you communicate what you are doing.
• Feel free to do cool side projects and count them as webmaster stuff. Some ideas of things that I meant to do and never got to include:
  • Fix the arcade speakers and lights
  • Clean up and organzine server closet (there are lots of old things to be recycled and everything could use a hit from the air compressor)
  • Make alumni features like story and picture sharing (the difficulty here is making it secure because alums don't have kerberos)
  • Give printers static IPs (then we could print to txi-brother.mit.edu. It wouldn't be hard)
  • Add a fan to the server closet so that we can close the door or something
  • Upgrade the firmware on our wireless controller so that we can implement our bandwidth capping proposal (I tried to do it, but it just took down the network. I think an upgrade would solve it).
    • Also for reference the proposal (which passed) was Proposal: Set the Average Real-Time Rate (UDP) to 2500 kilobits per second per person on the house wifi.
  • Right now our website heavily uses javascript. This is great, but it means that Google can't properly cache our site (it only hits the front page and then gets the "you need javascript" error. This means that when someone searches "theta xi mit rush" they can't get to our rush schedule because Google can't crawl there. Not sure the best way to fix this, but there should be some website fix...
  • Make the wiki even more awesome (encourage others to write content and add you own)
  • Replace the harddrive on the iMac. It is being recalled, so you can do it for free through [1]. Just get it done before the program ends on April 12, 2013.
  • Make cool web tools for the house!
    • A webapp for rooming meetings?
    • A webapp for pool/brawl/whatever ladders?
    • Anything you find exciting!
• Alex

PS Feel free to contact me with any questions (even if this is 20 years in the future :) ) Shoot me an email at [email protected] and I'll try and help.

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