Another student-run Web site has made its way into the Duke cyberspace community to help students navigate the Web from a centralized location.
Launched July 18, dailydevils.com has been a work in progress since April, and houses some of the most useful resources for any Duke student, said sophomore Sterling Cross, co-creator of the Web site.
"What we wanted it to be was a home page, primarily, so that all students could use it," he said. "So as far as I'm concerned we have major links that Duke students use."
The site features 18 links and an eight-engine search on its home page, with links ranging from ACES to Facebook and search engines such as Google, Duke.edu and Wikipedia. The page also contains up-to-date weather forecasts and headlines from six news sources, generating an average 1,000 page views a day, Cross said.
Characteristic of dailydevils.com, however, is its comprehensive calendar, Cross said, noting that it lists daily events approved or added by him.
"What I really intended to do to set the site apart from other sites out there... but the calendar is different from all those sites," Cross said. "Freshman year I was like, 'Man, I want to go out on Wednesday, what can I do?' And you know, there was no place for that [kind of event listing]."
Dean of Undergraduate Education Steve Nowicki is working to make that possible on Duke sites.
"I've heard from many students that there's an urgent need for a useful, inclusive calendar that speaks directly to the interests of Duke students," he said. "Susan [Kauffman, special assistant to the senior vice president for public affairs and government relations] will be working on many aspects of communications as they affect the lives of undergrads, including making sure that we have a useful calendar for Duke students."
For dailydevils.com, the calendar is already bringing in visitors.
"[The site] is really helpful, especially for the isolated freshmen, to find out about upcoming parties or social events," freshman Anne Moriarity said. "The calendar makes it a lot easier to plan out the weekend's activities and decide how to spend your nights out."
Cross said soon, other students will be able to make more use of the calendar when sporting events, season openers and concerts are added to it more regularly.
Even so, not everyone enjoys the site.
"Other people were complaining that it was too complicated, that they like QuickDuke better, which is absolutely fine," Cross said. "But we try to simplify [dailydevils.com], make it more user-friendly."
He said he has even greater plans for expansion, such as partnering with senior Stesha Doku, co-founder of Babbledocket-another Duke-based Web community where students can share campus events. He said he aims to integrate a log-in system for dailydevils.com where students can add and view their own personal events that interest them.
"We are always thinking about how to make the site better," he said. "There are a lot of ideas flying around. We're thinking about doing something with the student organizations here, but since there are like a million of them, we're going to try to create an open-source calendar just for the student groups."
Without classes on Tuesdays or Thursdays, Cross said he dedicates those days to updating the site. Dylan Burkhardt, co-creator of the Web site and a sophomore at the University of Michigan, is in charge of web design and technical details.
Dailydevils.com is an entrepreneurial endeavor. A single advertisement, combined with the low cost of running the site, produce monthly profits of about $60 to $70, which Cross splits with Burkhardt, who said he is impressed with the results.
"I'm proud that we got it off the ground from the start," Burkhardt said. "That is the hardest part and it will go from here, but now we have to keep innovating to keep it going."
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