Who You Calling A Jesse?

I have been doing a little cleaning up of this site and the layout. I have gone back to a white background and cleaned up the right column a lot. There you will find article listings from AideRSS and some other links. I tried to simplify it a bit and give it a new feel as I move to a different (but not much) role on the Special Projects team. Over the next little while I will clean it up even more and then see where things go.

Looking forward to this week and working with a bunch of new people!

Once again it is CSS naked day and I decided to shed the CSS for this blog for just one day. It is nice to have a look at my site with no CSS and see how it works. I think web folks often create a site and then tweak the CSS, maybe monkey with the XHTML, and its done. It is nice to go back to 1994 ;)

I do have one thought on naked day though. It should be the last day of April so that when these sites get dressed again we can show off our new clothes as part of the CSS Reboot.

Update: Returning things back to normal now. I changed the CSS a bit and dropped the sFIR.

Final reminder that BarCampWaterloo is tomorrow. Thanks to some great support for this BarCampWaterloo there is going to be plenty of snacks and refreshments with some pizza for lunch. Plenty of geek fuel to keep everyone happy and chatty. Look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow… if you didn’t sign up on the sight please do so and if you really don’t want to bother that is ok too, just helps with food planning ;)

As I make some attempt to find balance I will try and post less over the summer. You might have noticed the reduced frequencey lately and that was mostly due to being busy, not I am trying to catch my breath. A couple projects will keep going… UW Events Beta is now running on FCGI so it should be faster. Features are being added and once the production server gets an upgrade it will be out of beta and replace WebEvent.

The Daily Bulletin’s RSS feed should settle down as we stop messing with some automatiion of posting and the UW search app should be on to version 3 in a week or so. I will post from time to time but I thought it’s worth posting something about how it is summer time ;)

Oh and there will be a drop in web clinic on July 26nd. Come by the flex lab and we can chat CLF, CSS, Microformats, or whatever tickles your web fancy:

• Date: Wednesday, July 26th
• Time: 9am-noon (anytime)
• Where: Dana Porter Library 329 (LT3’s FLEX Lab)
• RSVP: by Monday, July 24th via this registration form

Have a good summer!

It has been a while testing out and developing this experiment. This site has evolved slightly but why does it exist?

My documentation

I have an RSS reader, I have 56 subscriptions as of today, but I have no place to collect the links. There are a couple sites online that would provide that service but I think it is important to share with the campus community in the context of campus university web development.

Plus this is a decent platform to share ideas and allow for feedback. If any of my ramblings inspire just one person, great.

Education

Universities are a place of learning. The majority of my day is spent reading stuff about web stuff so why not try and share my take with those who don’t have time? If you disagree there is a place to comment and have your opinion recorded. In fact I encourage disagreement… there is no way I am right all the time.

Through using this technology I learn more about PHP and the applications created for specific purposes. In this case it’s blogging software. It is my hope to open this up to a larger group of writers in the future.

Use of space

UW’s home of web development resources is web.uwaterloo.ca and for some time it was a place to store ideas. UW development page should be dedicated to tutorials, howto’s, and standards. This site is dedicated to collaboration, information sharing, and posting the more abstract issues surrounding web development at a university. Who knows, it could end up in a book some day ;)

I hope you enjoy this blog and participate in discussion. For the nit-pickers: this site does use the standard XHTML layout being proposed and utilizes a custom CSS to get this look. No real tricks as yet.

Just a few things to let you know about. First off, I know its been a bit light on information as to what these new web committees are up to. I will be updating everyone in September with presentations on the Committee’s and what we have been up to.

Tools for web folks

The final version of Contribute 3 will be available soon. I have been working a lot with Macromedia on the testing of the software and it really is a nice a piece of software. Take a look at the preview release, you will be impressed. There will be a presentation on Contribute 3 in September.

Another useful tool is Mozilla’s Firefox – which has grabbed a lot of headlines recently in tech news circles. You can download the latest here:

http://www.mozilla.org/

But what makes it more than a browser are the extensions:

http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/

One in particular I highly recommend for web folks is the Web Developer 0.8:

http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/

Read up on the site for more info – basically it allows you to view CSS, remove, highlight, validate, and a few other things to web pages right in the browser.

Communication and information

If you haven’t noticed or been there in a while, I have updated http://web.uwaterloo.ca into a slightly different format. It now includes the RSS feed from my little developers blog:

http://web.uwaterloo.ca/blog/

I post information on what I have been up to, bugs, links, and ramblings. Another space within the UW web that has some information for everyone is WatITb, from Yvan Rodrigues:

“I would like to invite all web developers and designers to join WatITb, the collaborative web board for UW IT/IS staff.

As the board grows, there will be more discussion on XHTML, CSS, ECMAscript etc.

The address is http://watitb.uwaterloo.ca “

If Yvan can get a RSS feed out of that, I will include it on web.uwaterloo well ;)

At end off this link rich email (in web page form), I would like to say have a great rest of the summer. I am off to jolly ole England next week until Labour Day. If you have any web questions, you can email me, I might respond but I can’t promise anything…

Just a note: when you publish URL’s in your publications try not to publish the entire file name down to the extension. Why? If you decide or are forced to change the extension to make a dynamic page or take advantage of PHP, the page is no good.

Example:

http://web.uwaterloo.ca/index.html (bad)

http://web.uwaterloo.ca/ (good)

Another problem could arise from Dreamweaver itself. A lot of people have not fixed their install to create .html pages and are instead creating pages with the .htm on the end.

This is a friendly reminder to be careful when you publish web related things. Of course there is a way to fix it if you already have published a URL that you have changed by accident, just ask ;)

Well thank goodness for 802.11b otherwise Phili would not be fun. I like storms, just not today.

One thing you notice about airport people when you get stuck there for hours and hours and hours is that everyone is friendly. I learned about 3 different manufacturing companies, how US customs lost track of 2 transport trucks that tripped radioactive alarms in Detroit, spy planes that got shot up a lot, and even ran into Jesse Jackson. What an odd trip.

Notes from the conference will appear by next week.

Day 1 of the conference has been interesting. The weather is relatively nasty – humid and rain – but the food is good and the coffee was flowing this morning.

The morning consisted of the following:
-Marketing & IT: Working Together Successfully
-Party on the Web: How to Make Your Online Community Work
-The 100 College Web Sites Survey
-The Puzzle of Technology: Closing

Ok.. another thing… so I remember. If I ever need port forwarding to send email with Entourage:

sudo ssh -L 25:admmail:25 jrodgers@admmail.uwaterloo.ca

Fun stuff.

I think I am going to start up this blog with this conference that has me up at 6am on a sunday. So here goes, first entry on something not copied from web.uwaterloo.

Where I am I going? Web Communications and Strategies Conference in Salisbury Maryland. I am presenting on the four corners but there are many more really interesting presentations I hope to check out.

So I am off to the aiport. Leave a comment if you stumble accross here. I wonder if anyone reads this?

So this is the first blog that I have actually started to write. What is it for? This site is to be a collection of posts that are sent to the UW-web creators and UW-web tech maillists as well as some documentation of research and notes from around the web.

Some things I have to figure out – comments on or off? what to post? CSS – customize?

What is this running? Check the site credits at the bottom. I will add more to this later.

For those wondering, yes a new collage is on its way for the home page.
It just got delayed for the R+T Park site which is now up:

http://rtpark.uwaterloo.ca

People who have web sites that have lots of forms of their pages, Defensive
Design for the Web by 37signals is a must read. It goes through error messages,
checkers, and how forms should behave. There are other general issues covered
but the book really is about good practices with forms. It is published by
New Riders and the bookstore should have a copy or two if you want to check
it out.

Just stumbling around some sites, I came across this:

http://validator.w3.org/checklink

The W3 has a link checker! It is a great little tool for checking your site
and going how ever many layers down you would like.

Notes from presentations this month

• LAMP (Linux Apache mySQL PHP) server and what we are doing with
  it.

  • Presentation on LAMP (PPT)
  • Currently we have a test site up with a RSS
    feed for news releases.

• Notes from Web
  Site Usability and Accessibility for Government. It was in
  DC 1304 at 10am on January 13th 2004.

  • If you would like the notes from
    the presentation please email Jesse Rodgers, x3874.
  • The usability.gov Research
    based approach to usability and accessibility book is going to be
    made available.
• Notes from January 30th presentation
  on SJU’s new website (PPT)

If you have any requests for topics, please comment