[seul-edu] GEO Status Report #2

[Michael Viron <mviron@wsdo.sao.uwf.edu>]

It's been quite some time since I posted any status report regarding
General Education Online, and so I finally have managed to find time to
bring people up-to-date.  (See archives at
http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/edu/Jan-2001/msg00029.html )

As of May 15th, 2001, GEO surpassed 7,500 links to educational facilities
worldwide.  This puts GEO on track to exceed 10,000 links in the next few
years.  At the same time, GEO has experienced tremendous growth during the
last few months, going from approx 30,000 visits to over 80,000 (May 2001,
month to date).

GEO is also heavily working on updating the primary php infrastructure of
the project, converting most of the database queries, and html formatting
to "functions" that will be much more flexible.

GEO v2 "Beta" was supposed to be released in March 2001.  Instead, it has
been publicly available since February 1, 2001, with GEO v2.0 on the
horizon for some time toward the end of 2001.

Work on GEO v3 (Alpha) will also start in the near future, with radical
changes to the existing database structures to accommodate several
improvements requested by end-users of the site:

* A search engine of some sort, allowing users to search all entries, a
specific country, and possibly (for the US / Canada listings) by province /
state.

* User customization of the site design.

* State / Province listings for the United States and Canada

* Drilldown features

* Comment feature per school

I recently checked alexa.com's information on General Education Online.
Out of over 3 million sites in there database (don't have an exact count),
GEO is ranked at #583,217th--not bad for a site that has been "promoted"
through word-of-mouth only.

If you would be interested in assisting in any of several on-going
"projects" of GEO, please contact me.

Also, with assistance from Roger Dingledine, GEO has now successfully
transitioned from belegost to moria.

Michael

--
Michael Viron
Project Coordinator / Primary Developer
General Education Online
http://www.findaschool.org