Microformats in Education wiki
As part of my promise to the Edu TF mail list, I have started a wiki to discuss Microformats in education and allow the larger Higher Education web community to have some input and share ideas on Microformats and how they apply to Edu’s. Anyone is welcome to submit ideas and information, the hope is that we can build a discussion and a community of people that are interested in pursuing.
I realize the Microformats has a section for discussion but I think this discussion covers more than just one topic. Once topics are identified and narrowed down they can moved to the Microformats site (I hope). Students are welcome to submit their ideas as well 
Looking for a co-op student in the fall term
Not sure how many UW Co-op students read this thing but ah well… here goes. I am looking for a student to fill the position of web developer for the fall term of 2006. It is in jobmine under ID# 00040903 but the job description tells half the story.
Over the fall term we will be focusing on some tweaks for the UW home page as well as major work on the 50th Anniversary web site. This will mean some work with podcasts, vodcasts, and all that neat Web 2.0 stuff. Plus you get to work on a cool G5 iMac spend time decrypting my white board ramblings (I have a big white board).
What I am looking for is someone who loves web technology and has some idea how to handle Ruby on Rails, PHP, and JavaScript… a decent web designer who can work some Flash would also work out nicely.
If you are interested please apply in jobmine and send me an email so I know who you are (if you read this blog you get an interview!). People like working for me… honest they do
Two new apps ready for testing: CPA Search, UW Events
After a lot of work by both Jackie (last terms student) and Mitch (this terms student) we (CPA) now have a couple apps for testing. The first is the search from the home page that you all know and love. Mitch has rebuilt it using much of the previous code but we now have much better term tracking and cleaner code. It is a little bit faster, switches to Yahoo when Google doesn’t return anything (which has been happening more often than it should), and has faculty and department specific searching. Give it a try:
The second application is like testing two at once. We have a new UW Events system that is built with Ruby on Rails that utilizes a new authetication system called Kiwi that will start to appear in all applications created by CPA with an API for others to use, if they want, in the future.
First off, I know it is slow – FastCGI hasn’t been installed on the testing server yet, so please bare with it. Also, the home page for the events page isn’t much to look at but that is because there aren’t any events that have been approved. The iCal versions (yes you can subscribe to UW Events in the near future) will be empty for now. If you have a UWdir username and password go ahead and give it a try, we need some events submitted to try out the admin section:
There will be loads of documentation about Kiwi, the search, and the events system soon. I just wanted to get this out there now and start hearing back from you guys. There are a few issues we now about but post away any thoughts/issues/etc. By the end of the week we will fix a few things and expand the testing.
University of Calgary goes with Drupal for CMS
I like Drupal, I like the community built around it, and I love just how easy it is to deploy and customize. I am pleasantly surprised that the University of Calgary selects Drupal as “official” content management system. Content Management Systems for University web spaces are pretty tricky to deploy. The inconsistancies with resources in decentralized enviroments makes a centralized system an odd change for some. The thing a really like is that from the blog account of the process it was a community effort that has the support of IT. Best of luck to U of Calgary, should be interesting to see the fruits of their labour with a new home page (standards friendly of course).
New version of Spry on Adobe Labs, now with hijax?
A new version of Spry has appeared on Adobe labs along with some updates posted in their forum. Two things catch my attention on the forum post:
- Switched to using namespaced attributes. Attributes are now of the form spry:. The Spry namespace is defined by adding the the following attribute to the HTML tag of the document: xmlns:spry=”http://ns.adobe.com/spry”.
- Added support for the new spry:content attribute, which allows the replacement of static content with dynamic content when JavaScript is enabled. This allows pages to work in a non scripting environment.
The first one is a workaround to the creative XHTML being used (and techincally is allowed, part of the point of *extensible bit of XHTML over HTML, is it necessary for AJAX is another post altogether) but the second is perhaps a way to address accessibility. Hopefully I will have some time to play with it in the next few days. I will definiately be watching the forum to see what people get up to with it.
A little gem in there is an example of progressive enhancement in spry/samples/products-hijax/ – take a look at that! Now that is step in the right direction. If you turn your js off it still works but the data isn’t dynamic either. I suppose you could achieve the same functionality with a php version pulling from a database.
Of interest to me is that although I know it is a messy way of doing AJAX compared to protoype.js, it keeps improving. Which is a good sign but I do hope to see some better behaviour in the XHTML Download the latest and give them some feedback! Oh and if anyone around here has tried out Spry, leave a message.
