Who You Calling a Jesse?

Contribute is eating my PHP

If you are using Dreamweaver templates (DWT) that have PHP extensions in Contribute you might have noticed something really annoying: Contribute 3 is not managing your links inside the PHP. I am not entirely sure the extent of the problem but where it really annoys me is with PHP includes. Say you have:

php include(”../includes/UWheader.html”);

In your DWT this makes perfect sense and Dreamweaver 8 and MX 2004 has no problem managing that. If you have a new file from template created in the parent directory you get:

php include(“includes/UWheader.html”);

But if you create a file in Contribute 3 from the DWT.php it doesn’t do anything. It just leaves the original path. What you are left with is a broken include. To work around you need to put the full path to your include in your template but then you have another problem with rendering when you drop this in your include:

php include(“http://yoursite.com/includes/UWheader.html”);

Dreamweaver 8 has no problem with this as it will render it for you but Contribute 3, well Contribute won’t render the includes in render mode (edit mode) either. Which is nuts considering it renders it fine in the browser mode.

Anyone else notice annoyances with Contribute 3 and PHP?

Tips for working with Co-op students on web projects

With the beginning of a new term some departments on campus might be welcoming their new Co-op student employee to their new web job. They may have been hired to web and ‘other’ stuff or they may just be hired to work on your web site. Over the past few years I have had the pleasure of working with a large number of students and here are some suggestions for both employers of Co-ops and the Co-ops themselves:

1. Understand Co-op students are still at school. This is not to suggest the student can not act professional, quite the opposite as students at UW are serious about their education are conduct themselves in a professional manner, but what I mean is that they may want to take a class or maintain connections with student clubs are organizations. Let them.
2. Projects need to take less than two weeks to complete. You can break larger projects into smaller ones if you have to but its important to have a sense that things are moving ahead and they are doing something useful they can see.
3. When planning projects make a little for them to pick a project. It gives them some time to explore an area they are interested in and might even help you out in the long run.
4. Make sure there is documentation and its accurate and it isn’t created in the last two weeks of employment.
5. Use the tools and programming languages that are common on campus: PHP, mySQL, Dreamweaver, Contribute, XHMTL, CSS. It will make it a lot easier for someone to help you and/or hand the work off to someone else.
6. Plan your web site. Know what you want to do before the coding starts. It will save a lot of time.
7. Have fun.

…and one last thing. If you are looking to hire students for web work and you aren’t building web applications, try not to focus on Math/CS/Engineering as your only source of good web employees. The web is a communication medium, it is about using technology almost more than it is about developing it, give Arts and ES a chance.

MIT’s homepage discussion on UIE

I love the MIT site, but is it a good idea or bad idea to change your home page so drastically? UIE Brain Sparks has posed the question in MIT’s Homepage: Preposterous or Ingenious?

I can see how the drastic changes in the look can put some people off but if used wisely it could be an effective use of the web page to get relevant events and information to the user. I wish we were able to utilize our main image more for things like what the MIT changes its whole page for.

Predictions and more predictions… meh

I was going to list a few predictions for 2006 and then link to a bunch more… but that would be boring. There are a load of predictions for 2006 in the web world out there and I will stick some in the cool stuff category. One thing for sure—there will be some real great stuff developed but I wonder if the web things people use everyday will improve or not? Like student registration systems, banking websites, buying books, searching for course information, etc.

What I plan for 2006 is more JS, XML, XSLT, PHP, mySQL, Adobe tools in my dock, and OS X.5 hopefully What does that mean for the users of sites I am responsible for? Well so far my goals:

• searching for people, places, and things and UW will become much more useful—but must be careful to not provide the information overload.
• a much better designed, elastic width UW home page designed (not sure if it will ever see production but I am working on it now).
• news and information from CPA will come in many forms, maybe even with some podcasts.
• more images. Someone please hook me up with the UW photography club! I would love to feature their photos and credit them
• ..and for me: organize myself better—not in a Getting Things Done sense, just in a ‘i want to see my desktop’ way.

With that out of the way… bring on 2006! Five goals that should be easy to achieve. Oh, and check out who made Joe Clark’s Failed Redesigns list. Its good.