Online Campus Guide Debuts

A new website combining descriptions of on- and off-campus events, a shuttle schedule, restaurant listings, and an online marketplace opened yesterday, adding Harvard to a growing network of college websites called the Daily Jolt.

The Harvard-specific website in the network, located at crimson.dailyjolt.com, was launched by Jonathan C. Bardin ’06-’07, Ona M. Strikas ’08, Jessica S. O. Worl ’08, and Michael W. Reckhow ’06. The goal was to provide a centralized resource for information relevant to students, said Bardin, who is also a Crimson editor.

“Part of what our website does is to bring together all the Harvard websites—libraries, registrar, dean’s office, Harvard box office, intramural standings, and more into one—everything you want with less clicks. No other website does that,” Bardin wrote in an e-mail yesterday.

Reckhow—who also developed the website for Redline Textbooks, which sells discounted books for popular courses—said he programmed the shuttle schedule utility and some other Harvard-specific tools for the Harvard version of the Daily Jolt.

“I think it’s a good homepage because it provides quick information that people want on a daily basis, such as weather and news, and also combines a lot of the information that we use on college websites and other resources that they want to link to,” Reckhow said. “When students open their browsers to the Daily Jolt they can get to just about any information that they would need on campus.”

Over the course of the next two weeks, the website shows 35 events, 32 of which will take place at Harvard. In this section, users can post and view upcoming events and also comment on existing posts.

Strikas, one of the website’s creators, said that she used her familiarity with the Institute of Politics to collect information about upcoming events, which she then added to the Daily Jolt’s calendar. She said that she gathered other information from friends and from mailing lists.

“We want the student body’s input as much as they’ll give it, and we’re open to anything that they think would make the site better,” Strikas said.

Bardin said the listing of events was the most important part of the site, since “it doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

The website also contains a section in which students can write amusing quotations from their professors.

Bardin said that by contrast to the Daily Jolt, my.harvard.edu was “pretty pathetic.”

“The administration sort of does the bare minimum to provide you with course shopping, e-mail…and maybe your grades,” Bardin said in an interview. “What other websites are lacking is a central deposit of information about events.”

Another section of the Daily Jolt is devoted to procrastination, made up of links to websites such as “Virtual Bubble Wrap” and “101 Ways to Annoy Your Roommate.”

The Daily Jolt started at Amherst College several years ago and afterwards spread to 100 colleges and universities across the country. Bardin said he learned of the website through his frequent visits to Brown University, the second school to create a Daily Jolt website.

Joshua D. Saal, a freshman at Brown, said he uses the website to check the various cafeteria menus on campus in order to decide where to eat.

“It helps me make a more rational decision about where I eat,” he said.

Saal predicted that the Daily Jolt will catch on at Harvard as it has at Brown.

“I imagine students will use it once the word spreads,” he said. “It’s delicious.”

—Staff writer Matthew S. Lebowitz can be reached at mslebow@fas.harvard.edu.