I spent the latter part of last week in Ashland, OR (tough job, but someone's got to do it) installing this project's Online Writing Lab code at Southern Oregon University.

To say that I learned a lot would be a huge understatement. If nothing else, I learned the value of testing on several platforms. They gave me space on a Suse 10 test environment, the same that I use at home, and I was abashed to admit that I never actually installed the code on my Suse box. If I had, I probably could have saved myself 4 or 5 hours of troubleshooting just trying to figure out why core PHP functions were generating error messages (the answer is that Suse breaks up the PHP into a couple packages, which, once they were installed, landed me squarely in squishing bugs in my own code, instead of web server/environmental errors).

This is the new home for the Writing Center Web Tools Project, a set of open source tools for writing centers created by Dennis Bennett, Writing Center Coordinator at Oregon State University (OSU).

The code is not yet public because the OSU version is being refactored in order to make the tools more portable. Currenty, we plan to have versions of both the Online Writing Lab (OWL) and of the Session Evaluation Form available by December, 2006. Although this site will be used for documentation, communication, and for hosting a demo version of the tools, downloads will be handled from our Sourceforge site.