Hello! My name is Warren Mayer. I am the web designer and developer for Newark Computing Services. I guess the best place to start is at the beginning. Dorothy began at the beginning and followed the yellow brick road all the way to the wonders of OZ, so we will begin our journey at much the same place. I was born in a log cabin.. wait, no, that is Abraham Lincoln's beginning. Turning the page, to my beginning (yet not quite that far back)...
Contact me if you wish. I'm available for consultation.
I was hired by Newark Computing Services in the spring of 1988 as a general computing support specialist. I had prior experience working with NCS the year earlier working on a grant funded project called the Faculty Development Center, housed in the basement of Dana Library. My duties then and up through 1996 were to provide support for Macintosh and Windows-based pc's, applications, and email. I guess you can put it that I started out doing Help Desk support. As my interest in the internet grew, and my knowledge of the applications of computing technology to academia, I was asked to speak at a business conference held by the Graduate School of Management on the New Brunswick campus. I spoke about the present nature of, and future advances in, the application of the internet to the business world. How things have changed!
When the internet was "born", or perhaps I should say when the "world wide web (www)" was born, Rutgers had a centralized information system known then as INFO, written completely in a system called gopher. It was a crude method of finding things ... looking through lists... sort of like choosing "one from column A and one from column B" on a chinese menu. I was given the task of replacing this system with one more tuned for the new "www". I remember writing the new pages in HTML by hand.... using nothing but a text editor. Boy that was hard work, but it paid off. By the time I was finished, the Newark community was finding academic and administrative information over the web. Whew! And the site has been evolving ever since.
Also in 1997 I had the task of developing and maintaining the Newark Campus web site. That was a much larger project that took a lot of time and effort, but I enjoyed that also.
The web grows by leaps and bounds, and I stay on top of things by constantly reading.. reading.. reading... and working on new methods of programming. I've branched out from the simple HTML in its early stages, to using PHP to interact with web servers, SQL to talk to on-line databases, and other devices to get information to the masses. Constantly looking for new challenges, I have been experimenting with the latest and greatest.... Pod Casting. It is my hope to have a stable method of providing information to the campus community in a more real-time delivery. You should be able to subscribe to the online news service and get our news announcements and updated notices via your IPod or perhaps even your cell phone. Who knows where the future will bring us!
