College

A little back story to the project(s) I’ve created to help out other students.

In October 2008 I started attending classes at IADTThe International Academy of Design and Technology and it didn’t take long for students to notice my knowledge and skill level. Before long I was doing tutoring sessions and even started writing a couple guides for students. Sadly the way the Campus is set up, once you finish your class you can only go back and look at the grades you got, not the content that was posted by you or others, this gave me a few ideas.

Student Hosting

Since students start and end their degree throughout the year, it may take some of them a few months before suddenly being told “You need a domain and hosting that provides PHP, MySQL, etc.” and for a variety of reasons this isn’t feasible/doable for all students. Due to the high cost of tuition or other fiscal responsibilities not everyone can afford a domain and hosting solely for college and even though free services are still around most of them aren’t sufficient for what is needed. Using the file size of the projects I’ve created for school so far, I’d guess the average student would need less then a few hundred MBmegabytes throughout their entire degree and since I have a few hundred GBgigabytes not being used I’m offering free hosting to all current and future students as long as they obey a few simple rules {Listed at the bottom}. Please note, that since I started the student hosting, IADT now provides a small amount of online storage but truthfully since I don’t need it, I’m not sure what the capacity is, the rules/regulations, or even if those files are available online via a standard URL (as required in a bunch of classes).

Original Wiki

As stated above, once you complete a class you can no longer access any of the content from within that class unless you intentionally saved it prior, so I decided to create a Wiki where tutorials and other information will be accessible at any time. A fellow student and friend named Oleg started helping me write some articles and we settled on a generalized look/feel to the site. We built up a nice selection of tutorials, links, and other ‘goodness’ for the students, but since we were both volunteering our time things kind of stalled due to other life obligations.

Wiki 2.0

Sadly due to some of my medical issues I have certain memory issuesCommonly Called 'Chemo Fog' and forgot to make a backup copy of the Wiki while performing some server updates/upgrades and lost the original Wiki. I still had local copies of most of the articles I had written but lost a lot of the other things written by some of the students that helped out with the project. I took this opportunity to change the back-end software for the Wiki and created a new Sub-Domain hosting the new Wiki among other school related projects. This new Wiki has account creation disabled to help prevent vandalism, but students can freely request topics or tutorials via the Forums {Information Below}.

Student Forums

When I created the Wiki 2.0 I created a set of Forums where students can try to create a community for themselves that expands beyond the short classes we have together. Since the Forums are relatively new there isn’t much there yet, but we have created numerous categories that we think will be useful once the user-base grows. We also have an area there dedicated to the other sites/projects I’ve created for students and that’s where you should post ideas for Wiki Topics or even better, write some topics/tutorials yourself and post there to be ‘promoted’ to a Wiki writer.

Student CMS

This site will start out just as a notification area for the above projects, for example, to notify of downtime, etc. Once the different parts of the community starts to grow we may start to ‘feature’ articles, students, etc.

Legal (and other) Information

General Information

Please note that these sites and all information contained within is neither sponsored or endorsed by IADT in any way. However, if any students are caught (or suspected of) cheating by using information from these sites, I will gladly hand over all information requested by the faculty and I will help them in any way.

All of these sites (including student hosting) are provided by AJ Phillips; owner and operator of ICT/CSC; free of charge and although hosted outside the United States are bound by both United States Federal Law and the laws of New York State. There is to be no discussion or distribution of illegal or pornographic files (including music, software, ‘keygens’, ‘cracks’, etc.) for any reason and the user will receive a maximum of one (1) warning in regards to this, but in most cases will have any and all accounts with us terminated for violation.

Specific to Student Hosting

If it comes to the attention of AJ, ICT/CSC Staff, or IADT Faculty that a student is hosting files deemed illegal in New York or against IADT Policy (such as files to facilitate cheating) the students account will be disabled and a set of ALL files may be sent to local authorities or IADT dependent on current law.

Student Forums

When signing up for the forums please use your Academy email address since registration is set up for manual validation by current staff. Once you sign up, feel free to introduce yourself or post ideas of things that can be done to enhance the community.

It appears that some hackers/spammers have abused some loopholes in the forum software to bypass the manual registration and to create spam accounts (over 1300 spam accounts) so new registration is FULLY disabled. To get an account on the forums you must email me directly (via your college email address) and I will create an account for you within 24 hours. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Student CMS and Wiki

To be promoted for ‘write’ status on the Wiki a user has to be active in the Forums and demonstrate their ability to write useful/valid tutorials or other information deemed valuable by community staff. The CMS is currently more restrictive and will have a small dedicated team.

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