Who You Calling A Jesse?

Another TODCon has come and gone in a haze of mojitos, great food, and great company. This year it was back in Orlando—my favorite place for it even though it was really hot and humid, I am getting bored with Las Vegas. This year had an amazing line-up of presentations which had little to do with ‘Adobe stuff’ and more to do with developing rich experiences on the web using whatever tools you use. Sure there was some from folks from Adobe showing off some things in CS4. Greg Rewis from Adobe gave a sneak peek of Flash CS4, there was a demo of Fireworks CS4 from Alan Musselman, and some discussion on Dreamweaver CS4.

Really looking forward to next years conference already as I think there are some changes afoot that will make it an even better community focused conference.

My two presentations were on AJAX strategy and Web Project Management. I have stuck both sets of slides up on slideshare but I don’t think they make much sense without the whole presentation ;)

Adobe has made available a public beta of the next version of Dreamweaver. Go give it a try! Scott Fegette has a bit more about the release on his blog.

It is really good to see Adobe do this after they let Photoshop CS3 out in beta last year. The next version of Dreamweaver is a big improvement over CS3 for front end developers although I would like to have seen a bit more for application developers.

In what I think is a good example for large institution web teams, the BBC has gone and offered an update to their home page. It is very Web two point oh with some widgets and gradients, big images, and larger text so its easier to read in this web world of increasingly high resolutions. They have some cool design elements like a classic looking clock, customization, and all the other bits you would expect on a site… except advertisements. The rationale for the design is offered in a blog post.

Issues to note about the BBC in my mind are:

• It is publicly funded and the public can take an ownership view on its web presence
• They have a large team but an even larger web presence
• Their primary audience is hugely diverse and crosses generations, from pre-teens to WWII vets

What I like:

• Their blog post explains what they thinking with regards to the big changes and invites conversation
• They point out there will be continuous changes (the web is not a static medium)
• It is a big change on look not content so they try to undersell it a little as a ‘lick of paint’ not a ‘redo’

Love it or hate it, its a pretty cool public process given all things.

Under what I think is the wrong category, the iPhone is named Invention of the Year by Time. It’s not an ‘invention’ at all though, unless you count the overall phone, PDA, and billing experience. Apple has maybe invented a better process for mobile computing and cellular networks. The iPhone is an enabling technology through its experience, not through its email, browser, etc. It makes the mobile device easy to use and thus inspires a load of developers to mimic that experience on their applications. For that, it is just amazing. The iPhone should get gadget of the year—which it probably will, voting is still open.

Having only played with an iPhone, owned a Blackberry and an Nokia E62, and still have to deal with the moronic customer service of Canadian cellular providers my opinion is purely based on observation but it is pretty obvious that the inability (or lack of motivation) to provide the activation, service, and billing experience that comes with AT&T in the US is what is stopping Rogers from offering the iPhone.

I still want a real keyboard btw… N810 with the iPhone OS would be perfect.

I have been on thing about figuring out coding patterns in HTML. Since I did the UW CLF back in 2004, I have been thinking about a macro-format for content generated on higher education web sites. Any CSS framework uses some abstract naming convention now—so I guess what I have been looking at is a “blueprint” that works specifically for higher ed.

What I did today was grab the code structure from about 10 higher ed web sites (three each from the UK, US, and Canada plus one more). It is just amazing how different HTML can be. Most sites are similar design wise, they have very similar content, and they supposedly trying to provide the same type of experience to the exact same audience.

Only three had Microformats on them, one had errors, and all are ‘valid’ HTML/XHTML. Good and bad ;) Well time for a break then on to more research and maybe even some prototyping. You can call what I am researching is a possible Macroformat for higher ed…

There has been a pretty interesting flame war that has erupted over a posting by Jeff Croft entitled What’s not to love about CSS frameworks? It seems like it has been quite a while since a good flame over web standards and best practices has played out. The tone of the post likely has really fueled the war but the topic itself seems to truly polarize some in the web standards community. Why is that? The devil is likely in the definition and I see it as the less formal art world colliding with the engineering world (something that has been slowly happening for a while with web development I believe).

Jeff Croft posted some follow ups: A follow up on CSS frameworks and The final word on frameworks, from someone way smarter than me. Andy Clarke interjected a comical What’s not to love about instant cake mixes in between that offered some satirical insight. The comments on the posts are shocking in some ways but once the definitions were clarified I think it comes down to artistic approaches meeting formal engineering process.

If you agree a framework is just a collection of reusable code that offers enough abstraction that you could apply it to whatever project you are working on then you have probably some engineering exposure ;) Reusing things is common practice, if you have a problem with that then you are just plain dumb with your time. This reuse of code features is part of what makes Dreamweaver CS3 such a good tool for rapid development. The CSS templates that come with it offer a powerful ‘framework’ to start with. Would you consider that a framework? I dunno. The ‘CSS Framework’ proper that is implied (blueprintCSS ) is in fact a more extensive framework that tries to solve more problems.

I think frameworks are great. I am building one now along with my GUI team of co-op students for a new system here. We are using a more formal engineering process to approach it but what we are essentially doing is creating a framework of GUI elements along with their HTML and JavaScript. Love them or hate them frameworks are just another thing the web dev world ‘re-invented’ from the software engineering world.

My role at work has me looking at a UI for a fairly complex application (known as jobmine) that has three distinct audiences with three distinct reasons for using the web app. The web application is the primary business tool for the co-operative education process at the University of Waterloo. This process sees anywhere from 10-25K people using it at least a couple times every four months. Staff in the CECS department use it for their day-to-day activities.

What is a co-op system? My definition is based on being a student and now an alumni, it is no way the ‘official’ take. Co-operative education is an approach to education that gives students a chance to learn outside of the classroom (and in the case of UW, make some good money) and gain experience in the ‘real world.’ If you are a student you look for and apply to jobs, manage your resume/CV, and find out about interview times and locations, accept and decline job offers. For an employer you post jobs, sort through applications, arrange interviews, and offer jobs. For staff you make sure this all works by supporting both students and employers, generating reports, manage a massive amount of data. Generally speaking.

It would seem easy enough if you walked up to it from a user perspective. You have your role, an idea of what needs to get done, and off you go. The expectations aren’t a whole lot different than say Workopolis or Monster.com.

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Looking to browse book covers but not wanting to walk down to the book store? Check out Zoomii. You can fly around the book shelves and get a feel for the book size, select what you want, and then purchase it through Amazon.

Chris Theisson has been busy over the last few months showing off his new Amazon affiliate site Zoomii to folks at DemoCampGuelph, DemoCampToronto, and BarCampWaterloo.

This store shows you 20 000 or so book covers and their relative size. You can simply browse the shelf and check out the interesting looking books. For an AJAX based site it is just amazing to fly around the book shelves. I love how fast it is and the search results are just nicer than what Amazon normally gives you. If you are a visual person, this store is certainly more fun than the typical Amazon experience. You have to bounce over to Amazon to make your purchase (maintains your comfort level with Amazon).

If you want to try it out I have a couple invites available to me so just post a comment.

It has been over a year since I made a decision (inspired by a student, Mitch) to switch development focus from PHP to Ruby on Rails. It all started with the need to build an events management system in a way that other co-op students can pick up and understand quickly. We now have two version of UW Events, Kiwi, Opinion, Experts guide, a conference registration system, and a new app based on Twitter that is known as chatter (still very much a development version).

First the advantages; It is dead simple to manage, gems are just amazingly helpful, the community is great, applications are portable, stable, and expandable. All things you probably have heard from one source or another. What I find as the biggest advantage is that the Rails framework ideal for an environment where you have a different co-op student coding every four months.

What I mean by that is the framework enforces consistency in style and encourages code reuse. These two things have been the biggest problems when you have a new developer come in that just doesn’t code the same quality or style as the previous developer. Some are learning as they go (CS students that can code Java not Ruby), others are experienced and have their own style. That is not to say a PHP or ASP or Python framework wouldn’t achieve the same thing.

Related to the framework advantage is that it enables me, the manager, to be able to relatively easily jump into the code and check the quality. I haven’t done that as much as I should but that is because I haven’t seen ugly Ruby code yet (in just over a year) so I don’t feel the need to spend a load of time checking up on the student.

Now the negatives; server end support on campus is not ideal (not officially supported), other campus web folks aren’t using it, Dreamweaver and others tools of choice for front end don’t work with it, students aren’t confident with it, and the gems can let you down at times. The last point is actually the worst one for one big reason—you will hear ‘oh its easy just to rewrite it’ from the developer.

The moment you hear that is the moment you know the framework ideal is weak with this developer. You need to get back on top of things and see why the developer/student is thinking it needs a rewrite. It is a time sink to start mucking with gems so don’t do it unless it is absolutely necessary.

The server support probably needs an explanation. Server wise it is one part rails one part learning curve. Rails is easy if you just stick to fcgi, relatively simple sites, and lower traffic. The moment your traffic spikes is the moment you need to think about this differently. With our latest project we have taken on the whole mongrel cluster world, dove into proper subversion management, and use capistrano to publish the application. That learning curve is rough but worth it. It has certainly reduced the weight of the negative.

Fourteen months later I am still in love with Ruby on Rails even after the romance starts to fade.

The past week is a bit of a blur but I figure I should update this thing with what has been going on. First off TODCon 2007. With a ratio of one Adobe person to every nine (or so) attendees it was a great opportunity for folks to speak their minds to the big red A. Along with the great line up of presenters and attendees made it another successful conference.

For those that have never been, TODCon is a small (110-125 people) conference of web folks that are mostly Dreamweaver and Flash enthusiasts (although that seems to be changing). It is a lot like an organized BarCamp with its atmosphere of collaboration and discussion. Thanks again Ray for putting it on, looking forward to TODCon 2008!

Around here I managed to just now get my head above water. Still haven’t caught up on three weeks of email and I doubt I ever will. In CPA we are close to putting Chatter and Kiwi into RubyForge. There are just some authentication issues to work out, you will need to plug kiwi into your LDAP or use kiwi’s database authentication in order to have Chatter work for you. For UW folks please do not install your own Kiwi. We are fixing the API key management so you can just use the one we have. It will support the whole log in once, have access to all kiwi enabled apps, as well. We just need to slowly modify our apps to support it.

Anyway, I will post here when we have that done (in the next few days).

It certainly isn’t perfect but it is pretty cool. Our big Ruby on Rails app, UW Events version 2.0 is now running in production with only a couple hiccups this morning. This long awaited update has:

• upcoming.org integration
• Facebook integration
• email and SMS reminders
• personal events – things that don’t need to be approved and appear in your own ical feed
• some profile information so the email and SMS work – it will only be used in UW Events, if that bugs you, don’t use the feature
• improvements in the search
• live-ish preview on the submission page and some tweaks on its layout

As with the previous version we have hCal all over the place, some hCard in the footer, and a simple approval process. After a few bug fixes and creating a mobile version, we are going to leave it alone for a bit unless something big is broken. Over the next few weeks we will fix some CSS oddness but beyond that we are done for now ;) We will have it in RubyForge by the end of April though so if you want new features, that will be your chance.

There is a pretty cool Ruby project that will consume April so look for that in May!

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…

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:

• CPA Search 3.0.1

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:

• UW Events Beta

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.

For the readers of the Daily Bulletin you will notice a bit of change today. A new XHTML/CSS layout is showing itself on today’s June 1st issue and marks the second layout change in the 5 years I have been here. It is maintained in Contribute using a DWT and PHP scripts to automate some back end moving of files. It was an interesting experience to set up but I learned a bit about Contribute, I will post more about it later. I have posted screen shots on Flickr if you want to see the old one in all it’s glory.

update (June 2, 2006): We now have a RSS Feed for the Bulletin that is essentially what you get on uw.general except the images and links work. The down side is the extra stuff in the left comes before the stories but short of breaking that up I don’t know what to do that would work better than that. Chris doesn’t want the DB to be broken up into sections as it is one whole posting. I can’t argue with the logic as he is the editor and it is his publication ;) Thank you to Mitch (Co-op student this term) for creating the script.

After much delay we now have a version 3 of the CPA search ready for testing. Give it a try but be nice. The changes with version 3 are more to do with the code behind it than anything else. The test version is only a test. I know there are a few things missing but what have now is:

• queries UW LDAP instead of UW Dir for people
• automagic switch to the Yahoo! search API if Google fails
• way more MVC in the back end

A big thanks to Co-op students Jackie McKoy (winter 2006) and Mitch Hargreaves (spring 2006) for getting this rebuilt and ready to go.

This one really is for the folks around campus but I would feedback from the larger web world if you want to give it. We have a people search integrated into the CPA search application that you use from the home page. It uses a sort of hack to query UWdir (UW custom directory) and then we reformat it. We cache the entire search query for about 12 hours to reduce our hits to the Google API over a 24 hour period.

The problem is the hack for UWdir is exactly that, a hack. If someone was to offer a sort of SOAP like API for queries life would be better from the web service provision angle. It would be great if that same API allowed for authetication depending on your id…

So my question is this… what formats are out there that would offer something similar to the Google API? What would people recommend? Directory services are not my thing.

With the buzz of SXSW setting the web design/development community the Web Standards Project has launched its newly designed site at its general meeting. This redesign features more focus on the task forces and a site for each, Andy Clarke explains the new design on his site. Of particular interest to folks around here might be the Education Task Force and the Dreamweaver Task Force (which I am on).

Take a look, subscribe to the feeds, dig around for resources. There should be lots coming from the Web Standards Project in the near future ;)

Going through my RSS feeds and sorting through email, what do I find this evening? An email from Jeffrey Veen (which was obviously sent to all Measuremap users) explaining how Google has bought them! Odd. In the email he refers to this post on the Google Blog and now I left wondering… what the heck is going on? Google just hired Jeffrey Veen and acquired a prettier interface to their Google Analytics software I guess.

For those wondering, Measuremap is a pretty cool little tool to monitor your blog traffic. It’s designed specifically for blogs. I have been using it here for about a month now and I have found it really interesting… and Jeffrey Veen is a pretty well known web dude with an impressive portfolio. He is one of the big minds in user centered design, which I think we all can admit Google needs to work on their UI a little ;) I have not yet had a chance to attend one of his presentations but I hear they are pretty good.

Anyway… acquisitions everywhere, dot com bubble 2.0?

There is at least one UW professor that has a podcast of his lectures. Robert Park has made available ANTH 320 in podcast form. I think this is the first podcast of a UW lecture and it’s from an Arts prof! Also, this is still unofficial rumor but at least one Engineering prof will be making podcasts of his lectures available in the Spring 2006 term.

Some things that have yet to be worked out:

1. What is the most simple workflow available?
2. What tools should be required?
3. Is automation required?

Robert’s lectures are posted manually and he makes the mp3’s available outside of the XML. I like that because it means any student with access to a computer can listen to the lectures. Hopefully that becomes part of the standard practice.

Lets see how many more profs try this out…

A couple weeks ago I thought: where are all the web people in the Waterloo region? Since this region is so tech savvy I wonder who the web folks are and would they want to get together? As I start I propose a Google group called Web Dev Waterloo Region that is open to the public, so sign up local web people and spread the word (cause Measuremap tells me only about 30-50 people visit this place a day—not really that many is it?).

Is there interest in a campus group for students? Prefer to make it a community group that looks at AJAX, Ruby, etc.

Just around a year after putting together the Dreamweaver template for the CLF I have written an article for Macromedia’s DevNet that is entitled Modifying Page Layouts with Template Conditional Statements and Multiple CSS Files. If you want to make your own templates or just curious what makes them work in DW, this simple little article should help you out.

There are a number of ‘better’ things about the template in that article. The biggest is that the XHTML/CSS allows for total fluid design, has a little less code to achieve the layout, and offers an option to put #secondnavarea directly under the #primarynavarea. Sure the one with the article is simple (no graphics, no search, etc) but it would take very little time to make it look like a UW CLF web page. Funny how much you learn in a year ;)

My second least favorite term of the moment is ‘Web 2.0.’ It just urksirks me to try and mark a ‘new’ web when all that really happened was Netscape 4.x has finally died – and RSS news readers have come onto the scene. This is all fueled largely by blogs and established reporters that report on blogs. What is Web 2.0? Check out O’Reilly’s essay on the topic. In short its a label that was thought up in a brainstorming session. Then enjoy The era of web 2.0ver – cause if there was a switch, its done, lets move on. Well for techies anyway.

Why do I bring this up when Digital Web has just mentioned it? Well because even though it is over many Universities have yet to join in. Assuming a 1.0 existed and a 2.0 exists: There are a load of Web 1.0 technologies still dominating our business systems along with the philosophy behind it. Even if the technological leap of 1.0 to 2.0 is over the philosophy behind it is ‘new.’ As the Digital Web post points out, for the average user the new stuff is just starting. Sites like Yahoo and Google will bring it them whether they know it or not. Makes me wonder if Hotmail has an update looming? Oh wait, we are just talking about updating functionality of web pages right? huh? Gah! Labels.

Interesting thought, is 2.0 over or just starting? I vote for starting… but prefer to say the web is just maturing… and I still dislike the term but if that is what it takes to get the word out, I can live with that.

Well it seems we have some issues with the new search – for example it stopped working today at 8:30 am after what appears to be only 6000 queries or so. Does this mean we stop using the Google API? I don’t know. I will update this post today as we take a look at what happened. What actually happened was the wrong Google API key was in there and it did run out of queries. It is fixed now and I feel silly. I need to keep an eye on the queries though, there are an awful lot in a 24 hour period. Also, there are problems with the keyword search and how it all functions. That will be fixed.

• not query Google if UWdir results are returned, why? Because you have to be pretty accurate to get UWdir results so you are likely looking for a person.
• Keyword queries need to be more forgiving because very few ‘titles’ in the db have keywords associated with them. 800 or so entries over 8 years, tough to keep on top of. Just working on cleaning that up. That is why the old one is long dead.
• better tracking of search terms and results

Oh and the stuff listed in the other post…

A few minutes ago I made the switch in the searches over to the new tri-search (UWdir, keywords, google). Over 800 unique queries were made over the past week on the beta run and only a handful of emails were sent. I hope people like the new search. It will be considered ‘done until the next version’ tomorrow ;) A big thanks to Areeb Shams (Co-op student that worked for me last term), his hard work is really what created this search. I just tweaked it for a couple weeks.

The major change with this search is that the new search brings back the keyword database. People really seemed to have missed that and given the confusion for some that Google can bring, its good to have it back. Plus there are no choices to miss, no more ‘how do I search for people’ email I hope.

• search cache – speeds things up, allows us to track queries in the future
• UWdir results refined – removed the userid’s, id numbers, bolded names, and got rid of some other junk.
• Google API – SOAP is good, hopefully take full advantage of it in the near future
• Keyword search – people have requested it return but we had to rebuild, it is back! and folks with UWdir access can submit changes.

• faster search, seems UWdir is really slowing it down – that and/or the Google API
• keyword API

…and we are getting about 15-20 queries a minute right now. Should be interesting.

If you get a chance, please try out this new search by using the search box in the top right. More documentation to follow over the next couple days. Update: Documentation is now up and includes a list of bugs and features. If you can, try it out in handhelds and in a text based browser. There are a bunch of relative links that should make it better for those using small screens. The CSS may change over the next few days.

Please give a little attention to modifying keyword entries. Please let me know how that works for all the non-IE users.

More detailed information to follow in the coming days but for now I am looking for some testers. Please give this search a try and let me know what you think by posting below. You can enter your own searches in the top right box on that page. It will only give you the first 10 results however.

We have built a search that hits up UWdir, a keyword database, and Google using the Google API. If you have a UWdir user and pass you can try out submitting changes to the keyword database but don’t try with IE, it won’t work. The Javascript is Firefox/Safari/Opera only for the keyword changes at the moment.

Yes there are cosmetic issues, but looking more for functional problems at the moment. Let me know what you think!

update: the authentication issue on changing the keywords is a result of a vhost setting on pole that is forcing .htaccess style authentication on put, get, etc commands in https://cpadev – request has been sent, should work fine tomorrow. Fixed now, issue was related to webDAV settings. So please go and test submitting keyword changes.

On 8/8 Macromedia has announced Studio 8 – which could be the last release of Studio under Macromedia. With this version comes the standard tools you can use – Flash Professional 8, Fireworks 8, Contribute 3.11, and Dreamweaver 8.

Dreamweaver 8

For me the big deal is Dreamweaver 8 (DW8). First off, dropping MX (insert name here) naming is a great step. Easier to talk about and it gives me a three letter way to refer to it – DW8. There is a real good feature tour on the Macromedia site.

Working with Contribute Publishing Services (CPS)

DW8’s only feature related to the Web Publishing Systems CPS is that was added is with the event logging. All your file movements are logged just as they are with Contribute 3. This is really nice for places that rely on those logs as a sort of audit trail for page updates. It also opens up some possibilities. As soon as something appears online about that, I will link to it.

Of course DW8 should work nicely the roll backs, notes, check in/out, etc.

DW 8 and Accessibility

What does DW8 do that MX2004 doesn’t? I am not entirely sure. Problem with accessibility is that so little of it has to do with actual code. With regards to DW8, it will not get in the way of accessible code and it gives you a way to check your code. But the design, layout, content, and structure is up to you. No tool will do that for you.

To upgrade or not?

For UW sites based on the CLF, it should work pretty well. You no longer need to use the Design Time Style Sheets to render the central CSS as DW8 can render any CSS you link to (as long as you are online). The panels will be of a huge benefit for you as you create your CSS as well.

Is DW8 required for CLF sites? No it is not, it is simply recommended. In fact all that is required is that your XHTML uses certain div tags and you point to a specific set of CSS and images. You can use any tool for that. But DW8 will make larger site management a little easier.

Stay tuned for some ‘working with new features and CLF pages’ posts.

After yesterday’s rant I will still pretty worn out on what is going on with some of this CSS. There is a whitespace issue with the collage on most UW pages based on the CLF – why? Well in this code:

<div id="collage"> <img src="home_collage.jpg" alt=" " /> </div>

There is a space between the div tags and the img. What happens is IE sticks some space under it. A quick fix is either remove the whitespace manually or stick this in the CSS:

#collage img { display: block; }

Yes it is minor but it makes pages look unfinished. There is a recent mention on Style Gala which is where I got the CSS fix. No real response to the post yet as to other ways to fix it.

This is one thing contributing to some frustration over the placement of those right columns…. back to the fun.

WATS.ca is reporting that the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act has become Law in Ontario. Some big changes (thanks Derek) are:

• It applies to the private sector.
• Enforcement of the law is now possible for both the public and private sector.
• Timelines for compliance based on a number of factors, but there will be different timelines for different things. (guess is 1-3 yrs for web).

So what does this mean for UW web pages? Unsure as yet. Government people have yet to be put in place and other things decided. I would expect a trickle over the summer… shall try to stay updated. Right now it doesn’t mean a whole lot. The CLF introduces a new standards based solution for web pages and a templating scheme that will make accessibility based additions very easy. Office for Person’s with Disabilities along with other groups on campus will be looking at accessibility and the legislations impact on campus over the coming months.

The trick for now will be in your content. How you code, what you code, how do you refer to .ppt’s, PDF’s, .doc’s, Flash, etc. I am currently working on a style guide that includes a mark-up guide, CSS naming conventions, and best practices for referring to other document types. Expect to see pieces of it up shortly in draft form.

This was updated after a discussion with Rose Padacz, Director of the Office for Person’s with Disabilities.

OK so this site hasn’t been re-designed as yet. Working on it as time allows… What have I been doing? Keeping my co-op student (Areeb) busy of course.

• RSS feed for news releases fixed – that was acting up for a while. It now pulls the XML from the DB and validates. Yay for that.
• Keeping on top of home page feedback and making adjustments to the home page where required – I wonder if people think before they type? 99% great stuff, just that 1% that don’t get it – “your site sucks” is not feedback, it is whinging. For all web folks on campus, distinguish between the legitimate stuff and the soap box rant and don’t let it get to you.
• PHP script for a DevNet article which happens to make a good training excercise for Areeb. Not sure if he thinks so. Anyway, I will post more about the article closer to publication time.
• Co-op boot camps – great fun had by all. Loads of students working on campus web sites this term. I would expect great things by the fall term!!! ;)

The only thing stopping this site from being worked on is that centering bug (collapse window and site slides left). Not sure how to fix that with the CSS I have. But shall see.

Back to code.. grr.

Ok so I posted this a couple days late. I really wanted to get part 3 written before I did anything else though. This blog will undergo a redesign shortly – as soon as I get through yesterday’s feedback. I really want to re-state that the UW home page as it is right now is still being worked on. We are not going to make any major navigation changes but you will see lots of cosmetic upgrades.

This is another late night of working on things. Tonight the work is actually so everything works for the usability test tomorrow. Checking links, sorting out colour oddness, trying to figure out some odd bug in a nifty cornered box – it never ends. Lots of features dropped that would help with usability but this is just the beta (how can web pages be ‘beta’ as they aren’t software? – the web is a platform – but it is still a hybrid of communications and software development). What features you say? Wait for the recommendations ;)

Then I read Derek’s Browser Elitism Part 2 and nearly start a rant in the comment box. A good rant on how trying to get things to work in IE are just not worth it! Ok suppose they are but sheesh. Funny how IE use to be the easiest browser to design for, now Firefox is. Stupid web standards.

Other cool things that I have come across though:

• Edit in Place with JavaScript and CSS – wow, just like Google News!
• Oh goodness me… Clearing floats is driving me nuts.
• Colour paletes are a very good idea when doing your custom.css. The free plug-in for windows Fireworks users might be worth it. For those that want a quick online version, check out this brilliant colour palete generator that is mentioned in the Malarkey link posted earlier in this sentence.

Back to work with me. We have around 20 people signed up for tomorrow and Friday. Not bad. Preliminary results of the study will be out later next week. A full report with recommendations will be out the end of May or early June – if your site is in a template scheme it will be easy to adjust to the recommendations if you would like to.

Argh is all I have to say. Yes I have frustrated myself with adding new features to the new home page. Some I have been playing with include:

• Nifty Corners
• sIFR

For now. One thing I find with sIFR is that the title font does not render very nicely although it does render. I need to exhaust some ideas before I give up. Funny that some links work great, others look really bad.

Why put myself through that? Well I am trying to work in some features for handheld browsing, which will likely help with accessibility as well. So off for some CollyLogic wisdom on the subject of handheld browsing. The title bar being text over an image makes it a lot nicer looking in a handheld (testing in a Blackberry 7290).

I have also been tied up in usability testing and interviewing co-op students (which was fun). Well back at it… just had to collect some links and thoughts ;)

It is official, we are running a quick and dirty usability study! Details can be found in the sign-up pages but basically we are looking for students, staff, and faculty to spend a half hour with some folks from LT3, Graphics, Faculty of Science, and CPA. For that half hour you will recieve a $10 voucher for your WATCARD. More detail will be posted in the coming days but since the first testing is to start on April 7, 2005 – we need to start getting people signed up now!

In case you missed it – go to the usability page in web.uwaterloo.ca for more information.

The last link is a site I always go through to a ton of information. What a great collection of stuff!

• Meaning of Semantics By Molly Holzschlag
• Bad Terminology Can’t Hurt That Much, Can It?
• Understanding usability
• Form Usability
• User testing backlash
• CSS for handhelds – css-discuss
• Nifty Corners indeed.
• The collection of web resources from UMD – web.uwaterloo.ca couldn’t begin to touch this reference site.

This will likely be added to over the day. For starters here are some cool links I dug up this week and need to remember:

• You might have noticed some long overdue changes on the results page of UW Google searches. How does it work for you? After reading an oldie but goodie article on Evolution trumps Usability Guidelines I am thinking there is a lot of work ahead.
• One of the things CSS designers face is redundancy vs. dependency.
• Joe Clark explains How to quote somebody else’s work without infringing copyright in Canada – all students would benefit from reading this.
• Setting yearly business goals or how about setting just goals for your job over the year?
• Good bye IE 5 – the first of many. Of course why would you still be using IE 5.x to begin with?

Last term I heard about this Ruby on Rails platform through some comments on Drew’s blog. So I took a look. At the time the site was pretty rough, just in development I imagine. But the documentation was impressive. I got my co-op student at the time to compare Ruby on Rails with PHP for work term report (I will share it with his permission once the report is finished) which contained nothing but praise for it from his 3rd year CS perspecitive. The word of mouth even has hit Slashdot recently with the appearance Rolling with Ruby on Rails.

I almost wish I heard about this sooner for a PHP app we are working on for my office… Although it is never wise to build a critical app on ‘cutting edge’ technology. But what fun is playin it safe? ;) I will be looking at it over the next few months when time allows… pretty cool indeed.

December is upon us and that means shopping for lots of us. Long lines, tired credit cards, and crazy parking lots await you… unless of course you shop online. When you shop online you get exposed to a different navigation structure almost every-time you go to a new site. Not much different than when you visit the brick and mortar store except figuring out a brick and mortar store layout is a lot easier than an online store in most cases. Why is that (no answer here, just wondering)?

There is a good conversation over on Drew’s site in regards to supermarket usability. But imagine if you did everything online? That would make things interesting. After spending that much time online it must become easier to figure out online stores.

Perhaps an explanation or at least an understanding can be found reading Mike Rundle’s On User Experience: Part 1. In that article are so good thoughts on user interaction, ergonomics, etc. Looking forward to part 2. Careful not to use the phrase beyond Usability though. Of course you really can’t adequately judge a good interface until you spend some time with it.

Now off to play in the snow ;)

It has been a busy week, it’s 7:32pm (ok so I posted it Friday but it was written Thursday) and I am writing in this thing. But that is the price to be paid for going away for a week (more on that in another post). Enjoy this weeks collection.

• Microsoft’s worst nightmare delves into a little history of Firefox and it’s potential to be that platform independant environment Microsoft so fears. This brings up an interesting idea – could someone make a Firefox extension that can connect to myWaterloo, QUEST, and JobMine? It’s likely possible.
• E-Government: No website is better than a bad one and that about says it all.
• Creativity vs. Standard Layouts dives into a rant about people saying a web design is not original cause it ‘looks like .’ Sorry folks but things look like blogs but blogs took their look from evolution. Jacob Neilson could have his usable web yet ;)
• Ivan will teach you a lesson. Just check it out, secrets of good design.
• Wicked cool tables. Could even say hella cool ;)
• Common PHP mistakes. Oh ya.
• A prof is looking at repetitive strain here on campus. Now I can attest to the strain of a bad chair…
• More for that web production maturing theme. Really though, it makes sense.
• Intro to databases. Digital-web is just a great place. Wondering what this My Sequal is?
• Finally – What is a web standard? Good question. I used the analogy today of: It is a guideline to not sleep in the bush (woods, forest) with food in your pockets or a bear might eat you, web standards are those type of guidelines. They just make sense… and they could stop a bear from eating you.

Now on to cleaning this office out of things that might leave a funkey surprise come next Friday.

This blog along with a few other sites are on a testing server that is supported by IST. The idea is one LAMP box for development and testing with another for production. This idea works well but a recent outage has me thinking…

Here are some questions going through my mind:

• The testing server is used for both development of web pages and testing of new web technologies – what happens when they don’t mix well? The development of web pages has to stop because some technology has taken down the server.
• What is the priority to get the development server fixed? In the case of pole (the server this is on at the moment), it was down all of Sunday and early today because of configuration issues. If I planned on working Sunday (hope that day never comes) it would be down and so would my day of development.
• What technologies should be tested, would we want something like PHP 5 on there when we are developing PHP applications? I could imagine a few problems if we developed an application in PHP 5 but the produciton server was only running 4.
• When do we move something from testing to production? This blog is just an experiment, should it go over to production?

A sys admin might have a different set of questions or problems but the down time has me thinking. My first thought would be to have UML for the technologies but we would still have to have better co-ordination. For the moment it appears a lot of people could potentionally have a hand is messing up the development box. Better communication might be needed as to who is doing what and when. For now things are great, no real compliants. Just the recent outage has me thinking.