The Red and Black

"for all intensive purposes" -- maybe you mean "for all intents and purposes"... no wonder you need a class with 95% As...

Personally, I blame Jeremiah Johnson. He was leading the "Save the Key" movement and then he got brainwashed by the SGA crowd. And then nobody was left to hold SGA accountable. (As Josh's occasional ranting editorials are largely ignored...)

"The Key," don't you mean "The Crutch?" Anyone that uses that thing past Sophmore year is a joke, even worse using it into their Senior year. I thought the whole purpose of college was to learn, and I don't really think you are going to learn to much in one of those 70%-A courses, especially once you get to your final year. Yeah, yeah, it is good for those knock off core classes, but you can't take it seriously for your major classes, you gotta go with the best professor regardless of grades.

Hey Josh, are you advocating abolishing SGA? If you really think SGA is incapable of providing what students need then why don't you do something about it, run for President and try your hand at their job. If we lose SGA we will lose what little organized voice we have left here at UGA, and I am sure the administration would love a blank check of sorts to run UGA as they see fit. Granted SGA accomplishes very little, so there is nothing wrong with criticizing SGA, in fact I encourage it to keep them on their toes, but this needs to change, and the only way to do that is to get involved (everyone, students and professors).

I suppose I should go ahead and put much of this to rest. I take most of the responsibility for the key not being updated. I was the webmaster for the Student Government Association this past year. The method for the updating of the key is a bit of a pain. The president must go to meet with OIR - the office of institutional research - to get a simple text file with over 20,000 lines of data. The SGA webmaster receives that file, and it is up to he/she to make it into the key. It takes about 1-2 hours to get the text file to a point when it can be entered into the database. We are not allowed to post information for classes with less than 20 students in an effort to keep grades confidential, so those must be edited out. After that, the text file is uploaded to the database and it is a 2-3 hour ordeal to make it into a new key page.

I received the data for the key last fall and was given 2 days to get it done before the end of drop/add. During those two days, I had a close relative pass away and was not able to complete it. I took a look at the data the following week and realized that it was a compilation of two different semesters...spring '06 and summer '06, one of which was already represented in the key. I emailed the president and told her I wanted to wait until the next semester to get some fresh data into the key. Since then, I have become less and less involved in SGA and have not been asked to do any more work on the key. I have been asked to meet with one of the new senators/committee chairs to discuss the key, but we were never able to work out a time to do it this past semester. Perhaps the new president was not informed of the process that she needs to follow concerning the key. Perhaps they do not have a new web person to update it. Perhaps they want me to but are scared to ask. I don't know at this point.

I am not paid hundreds of dollars per year, although I have not looked at the budget and am not aware if someone else is being paid to be the webmaster now. It was a one-time payment for the initial site design and setup. I have seen the pay-for-website issue brought up a lot over the past year, so here is the exact story of what happened for anyone wondering:

I did not ask to be paid to be the webmaster. I had been updating the old site for 3 semesters with no pay, but it was getting very out of date and was coded terribly. I planned to build a new site for SGA over last summer. Jamie offered to pay me to build it, and I accepted. I did not ask and was not really even aware it was being discussed. She specified the amount, which was to be $1,000. I spent roughly 50 hours on the initial design, as well as another 30 on various updates, the key site, and the SGA reports. The average professional web designer makes around $25-50/hour. For this project, I made somewhere around $12.50/hour...which is about average for an amateur from my experience.

If you believe I was paid too much, go to any web designer in athens and ask them how much it would cost for a 30+ page website plus a custom "The Key" site built in php or ruby. I'm nearly positive you'd be looking at more than the $1,000 I was paid. You'd probably be closer to $2,500 at minimum, although I could be wrong.