Greg Allard

At a large institution like UCF, it is good to have a plan for emergencies. I set up a simple form that will update the main page at http://ucf.edu in an emergency so that important information can be realeased as fast as possible.

The main page is an html file that is copied every few minutes from our database driven application. This speeds up the website and cuts down on processor utilization considerably. A simple update to our cron job was added that checks if the site is in emergency mode and pulls from our other emergency page. This emergency page is created with a simple form and simple template file.

I created this page updater to be reliable and simple so that there is little turn arround time from emergency situation to information available. The form edits files in the filesystem instead of using a database that would require more complexity. There is a place to update the important information. That info is then put into the pre-built template when the user hits preview. Once the user is satisfied with the way it looks, there is a button to enable/disable the page. It updates the status that the cron job looks for and the main page will change in under a minute.