On February 27th, 2006, a new version of Michigan State University’s web site launched. The next night, a team at MSU’s Division of University Relations that included myself rolled out a series of new sites for the university administration.
The updated sites were for the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, and the Board of Trustees.
The Board’s site was the easiest to launch, as it simply involved pulling down the old site and replacing it with the new one. No programming or custom software were involved.
The sites for the President and Provost were more difficult, as they each made use of the ExpressionEngine blog software.
The MSU Administration had previously used boastMachine to manage their blogs, so I first wrote a series of scripts to pull the information from that system into the new one.
When the time came to make the switch for the sites, the new blog software was already installed in a development directory. I simply ran the import scripts, deleted the old site, loaded the new site, and moved the new blog software into place.
The entire process resulted in only minutes of downtime and needed only a couple hours of tweaking after the launch to work out the immediate bugs.
The above text was copied directly from my original portfolio as I imported it over to the blog. It was not updated for re-publishing.