Teaching
Everyday after lunch, I teach a class on how to build our Web site. We have three new developers on the team, and because we use a lot of proprietary software and development tools there is some learning to do. I expect this class to go on for the next few weeks until they are all comfortable with working on the Web site with our tools.
After class, I like to write up a summary of what we learned that day and send it out to the team. Then I write up notes for the next day's class (unless I forget to -- like today).
Server Maintenance
The afternoon is when I usually get the time to actually write HTML or program CGIs. Today however, the server decided to go down for about 5 minutes. While it wasn't down very long, this still generates a lot of calls from all over the company as people hit the site right then and get a server error.
Creating Web Pages
After we got through the server "crisis", I went back to working on some new pages that I want to have up by the end of next week. When I work on Web pages, I generally do all the writing, all the HTML, and most of the graphics. If there are forms or CGIs involved I write them as well.
Webmaster Mail
At the end of the day, I like to read and answer Webmaster mail. We usually only get around 10 new messages a day, but a lot of them are really interesting to read and answer. The most common email is a report of a bad link. Because we have several thousand pages it's really hard to keep up with all the links. We have a QE engineer who runs a link checking program over the site, but it can take several days to process and then another several days to verify and fix all the bad links. At that point, some of the good links have gone bad.
As usual, right when I get to a really long message from a customer with an interesting question or problem, my husband shows up to go home. Needless to say, we almost never leave on time.
So that is what it's like to be a Webmaster.
