Who You Calling A Jesse?

Well September is here, nearly 6000 new faces on campus, and it is time to look back at what has been a really productive summer. The theme of this summer was Ruby on Rails, which has proven itself to be a very nice development environment that I hope to learn a lot more about. A new UW Events, conference site and authetication system are the already known things that have been built with Ruby on Rails but there are a couple of others that get there first mention here. A little PHP was improved as well. An improved feedback form and search application is out there now. Mitch Hargreaves was the lucky co-op student who had the position of Web Developer here in CPA and I think he did a pretty good job and deserves much of the credit for this stuff.

I will go over three big projects this summer: Blogs and Podcasts, UW Events, and Kiwi.

Blogs and Podcasts

Lets start with the new application: Blogs and Podcasts at Waterloo. This application is a fairly simple agregator that offers UW students, staff, and faculty a place to subscribe their blogs. It offers one large feed of all the blogs so you don’t have to subscribe to each on your own. To subscribe your feed you will need a UW Dir ID and password but this also means your stuff is associated with you at UW so if you are prone to rant please don’t subscribe your blog. You could create a UW topic in your blog though and subscribe the feed for that so you know what goes there and it is sort of ‘safe for work.’ You can also subscribe a podcast or vodcast feed.

UW Events

This application needs a whole lot more documention so I will just summarize:

• supports iCal and hCal
• there are streams you can subscribe to for different categories or pull into your website, if you think one should be added just email me
• people can be named admins for streams, so in the case of a Feds club they could control their own stream—but it doesn’t mean you can approve for the main UW events stream, just your own stream
• need UWdir to submit stuff

I think that is the highlights. I will be writting more detail documentation over the next couple of weeks.

Kiwi authetication

You have seen it with the Power of IDEAS conference and in UW Events. We now have a key generator for those that want to use it but keep in mind all it does is secure the authetication. If you have content transactions in your site that require confidentiality you need to have a SSL for the entire application (which means https). If all you want to do is make sure the login is secure, kiwi is for you.

Kiwi’s documentation is ugly but tells the story, check it out. The general gist is that your application controls which ID’s can access your site, all kiwi does is autheticate them with UWdir securely so you don’t have to take care of that. It also has a Wordpress plug-in so you can autheticate with UWdir in Wordpress but not through XML-RPC as yet, just the normal way. There is some potential here that you can have one sign on and lots of access as long as your cookie is good an active. Look for it maybe make its way to a customized home page for 2007.

Fall term and such

I will update the documentation on the search and have a post about that as well as the feedback form, some improvements for the 50th site, and some other little things. Overall this term has been crazy. It has been anything but a lazy summer but I hope you folks find some of the stuff useful.

Sasha Papo will be the web developer for the Fall and he starts on Wednesday. Should be another good term but I hope to pull back a bit and take care of bugs that will surely arise in the stuff we have. We are going to work on an update for the home page for the 50th anniversary, the 50th anniversary site itself, and some other things here and there. Sasha gets to pick a project as well so who knows ;)

Oh, and the job for winter term will be posted in the first round this time…