Who You Calling A Jesse?

My past few months have been complicated by issues that every new parent has had to deal with at some point. It all centres around daycare… They aren’t new to more experienced parents but they are new to me, so I post.

A certain local daycare that is on or very near campus finally called us up the other day after two years on the waiting list to say they have an infant spot in September for what will be our 19 month old son. Their recommendation was to stick him in the more expensive spot with cribs, supervision, and day plans, etc. What they don’t know is that our little ‘infant’ can tackle a four year old already. I don’t think he would do well in an institutional style daycare with kids younger than him… but who knows. We won’t find out as he isn’t going.

Currently he is in a home care environment with a an amazing family. He gets to play with all older kids that don’t really care he can’t speak a language they know yet. It is not ideal in that there is no back up if she is ill but in my mind it is a lot better experience. However, finding someone you trust is a lot harder. Finding someone at all in Waterloo is pretty hard.

Then there is paying for it. Generally Waterloo salaries are at a professional level with both parents working (when there are two parents). Even so, the cost is close to a mortgage payment if you find a spot. Do any regional employers help out employees with that? Sure you get some back in taxes but that first year is hard.

Even with daycare, kids get sick (a lot) and you don’t work

Then there is the issue of the bugs these kids share. It doesn’t matter what you do, the moment kids start interacting in groups they start sharing bugs.

The Baby started daycare in January of this year, by the end of the month he had his first cold. Four weeks of coughing later with fevers that would last a day or two then go away for a few days, he clearly had something more going on.

A whole rant on the good and bad service you get out of Ontario’s health care system could fill this void but lets just sum it with: three rounds of antibiotics, a few visits to emerg, and many days off of work later was topped off this weekend with the messiest of all viruses that had two newb parents celebrating solid poo in the nappy.

On a positive note we did get a week and a half away with no medical drama. Funny enough, the baby wasn’t in daycare for 5 days leading up to leaving on that trip… Having to live through virus spreading period of daycare has left me scrambling for time to do anything.

My wife and I are lucky though. We work at the University of Waterloo where generally you can take time to deal with things like a sick baby. What do other people do? Take vacation?

What could be fixed?

Not sure. I have a suspicion that larger employers in town do not do a whole lot to help out the young professional family starting out in the world but I could be wrong. University of Waterloo does nothing to help its staff or faculty get spots in daycare or afford them. It does try to encourage an environment that does give you time to deal with family issues though and that is worth something.

I think the ideal would be to make daycare a taxable benefit from the employer coupled with the ‘family focused’ environment for staff that allows them the time to at least ‘adjust’ working hours so that issues can more easily be dealt with. Burning precious vacation days only punishes young staff by taking away their only opportunity to actually get away. I certainly feel like I get the time but every month I wish I didn’t have to pay so much to have someone watch my kid so I can earn money so I can spend it to fuel the local, provincial, and national economy. Never mind the future tax payer.

“Suck it up, we had it worse” are normal comments I receive if I moan about this. I know the cost and availability is far worse in Toronto as well so I am thankful to be in Waterloo but it still isn’t great here either.

Our ‘plan b’ is to actually go with a live in nanny when the next one arrives. Its far less money than two times daycare costs!

I have moved my blog over from Textdrive to Joyent. Probably the most difficult part was the Joyent wiki. It has a load of useful, well written information that is easy to follow. But if you don’t watch what is in the URL you might be reading help files for the wrong hosting. Not a big deal unless you are bad at reading instructions like me.

I did stay with Simplelog even though it hasn’t been updated in over a year. It suits my needs and I just don’t want to bother converting over to WordPress or back to textpattern.

Not an overly difficult task for a windy/rainy long weekend Sunday.

January first is upon us and after what was a hectic Christmas break I can sit down and reflect on the year that was 2007 and what might come technology wise for 2008. All this happened in my life:

• I became a Dad on January 19th
• finished my course load on my Msc
• changed jobs
• cities I visited outside of Ontario: Las Vegas, London, Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds, Harrogate, York, Liverpool, Wigan, Deddington, Buffalo, Quebec City, Montreal
• Drove 30 000 km (or so) and I live 2 km from work
• instigated 4 BarCampWaterloo’s and one StartupCampWaterloo meeting a load of really interesting people at all of them

…and that is what I remember. Last year I set some goals for myself and had a few comments on technology. If I wouldn’t have changed jobs all those could have been met (I think) but I didn’t foresee that I have an opportunity to work with an extremely talented team on an impossible project with technology I hadn’t ever worked with. That fuels my excitement for 2008.

For this year my goals are just as simple as last year:

• Finish my msc (I have to by April)
• Focus on user experience and UI development
• Spend every moment possible with my son

As far as web technology goes. I thought last year that Spry sucked and AJAX might be more accessible by year end. I think as the year went on Spry got better and folks like Derek figured out some best practices for more accessible AJAX experiences.

This year I think the big technology fight will be between Flash and Silverlight. Microsoft has to figure out how to convince Flash developers why they should forget all they have learned and change technology while Adobe needs to figure out how not to step in it and be seen as an arrogant company that doesn’t deserve the loyalty Macromedia had built. The buzz and reaction over the whole user tracking thing or updates is going to piss people off. How dare customers get upset? Indeed.

Microsoft’s UI with Silverlight trump card might be Sharepoint. This beast of a CMS is (I think) the most extensive and customizable business class CMS out there. It is the best of a really bad bunch and Silverlight could make it suck less from a UI perspective. We shall see.

Should be an interesting year ;)

It has been 23 days since my last update! Wow does time fly. Figure I should update what has been going on in my little corner of the campus and of course mention for those that care, I finally got my blog up an running with Simplelog. Still monkeying around with the server settings and the template (it is the default template at the moment) but you can subscribe to that feed for things.

So the new job. Working with nine co-ops in a new space with a new job is pretty challenging. The co-ops are great, it is the change in all things but my main employer that is slowing me down a bit. That and the teething eight month old that sleeps in the nursery attached to my bedroom. There should be some really good things to post in the coming weeks so it should be interesting. As an added bonus I am now getting my head around MS Studio and Expression stuff—in a few months I will know with confidence which is better, Dreamweaver or Expression Web. Going into it I think it will be tie because you would use them in different situations. But anyway…

The other part of my spare time has been pulling together BarCampWaterloo5 for September 29th (a Saturday) from 11am-5pm in the Accelerator Centre. Yes Impact is the same day. The difference with BarCampWaterloo is that you can participate, the agenda is set by those in attendance, the goal is to share, learn, have fun, and you don’t need a suit. Oh, and its free.

After BarCampWaterloo is a StartupCampWaterloo on October 23rd at 6pm. This is going to be a little more like DemoCamp but focused on starting your own thing. The plans are still coming together for that one but I hope to have it all sorted out by BarCampWaterloo.

Not much else to report.

As I effectively wrap up my position as the ‘keeper of the home page’ here at UW I can’t help but reflect on a few projects I would have liked to have started as well as those that I am in the middle of and would have liked to have finished. I will leave you to guess which ones were started, just being planned, or only far off ideas. Here is the list in no particular order:

1. redesign the UW home page for a more external audience focus
2. create specialist internal sites for the faculty, staff, and students
3. get UW Chatter off the ground as a web communication hub
4. see MMNP achieve its vision
5. identify what content people actually use in the UW web space, figure out what is missing
6. enhance the UW Search application; integrate mapping, more detailed information on people searches, better tagging of keywords, study search patterns, provide people with quick links to popular searches
7. apply microformats where possible
8. integrate a testing, development, and production server environments with a slick web GUI that integrates with Subversion and Capistrano
9. document things
10. podcasting, my goodness its easy, there should be more audio/video/etc
11. accessibility of campus sites through testing, education, and community
12. usability study swat team

On to the next thing! It will be interesting to look back at the above list and see what I think 6, 12, 18 months from now. Some things may come true, others may be less important.

The biggest challenge I see higher education web folks facing (it’s not just UW) is the ability to clearly define their target audiences and then build to suit. There is far too much ownership of the public facing web by internal audiences—not sure if that is the cause or the result of the lacking identity. Perhaps that is what makes higher education sites unique?

I wish the best of luck to Communications and Public Affairs as continue to tell the story of Waterloo to the world. For the next person in my role the best bit of advice I can give you: do not take this stuff personally and join the uwebd community. Great people.

This blog now switches it’s focus to that of a ‘Web Technology Specialist’ or I move over to my own blog that I never use. I will think about that this week, promise.

A very annoying lesson was learned today: if you have Contribute Publishing Server (CPS) controlling your site settings and you are sharing connection information with the users on the site (sometimes a good thing, most times not) and you change the server password of the shared connection you will be locked out of the site altogether. To fix it and retain the users on your site you have to do the following:

• change back to the original password
• change the user directory settings so each user must have their own connection information, enter yours as directed
• change the password on your server connection
• go back into Contribute and change the user directory settings back to the sharing option, re-enter information, done

If I am not sharing the connection, why does Contribute not just prompt me for a new password given I am the administrator and the keeper of said connection? Works fine if I am not sharing so I can only guess once you share all people become equal under the connection settings.

Locking the admin out is still dumb. You shouldn’t have to connect to the web server to admin the site if you have a CPS controlling it all. No idea why I hadn’t noticed before. I have only a few sites that share but it sure was a waste of time thinking of a way to get around it.

Forget the Starbucks popping up all over and the yuppiefied uptown core of the city, if you are looking for signs that Waterloo has a potential to really take off in the world of innovate web application development aideRSS is one of them. This site is just cool and relatively simple in its concept from what I can tell. It takes all your RSS feeds, ranks them based on the community reaction to the post, and gives you an optimized feed option so you only see what is worth reading in the eyes of the larger community. It seems to be a little like Technorati (or maybe a lot) but focused on your specific RSS feeds not just your blog.

The Techcrunch community seems to have a lot of positive things to say about it as well. I really hope these guys can make it out to the next BarCampWaterloo.

Like everyone else I am deeply saddened by what happened yesterday at Virginia Tech. From the shootings yesterday to the memorial today there has been a lot of second guessing VT’s communications. I have no idea what they might have got wrong but I would like to point out something they got right—their web site.

I first noticed yesterday they had stripped down their site and placed their official statements on there. That is what you would expect but I also noticed a podcast of a statement from the President of the University. Then a bit later a whole new design appeared. The page is 100% dedicated to getting important information out while expressing the feeling on the campus as a whole. They are using podcasts as the primary method of getting the word out with a counselling being discussed and a link over to a page that has even more updates and an archive.

Yesterday it appeared they might have had to move servers as the load increased with the media coverage. At the very least they optimized the site.

I am going to use this post to collect online reaction to the tragedy and how technology played a role or could play a better role:

• Cole Camplese has some thoughts about how technology can help in crisis situations like this.
• The Chronicle questioning the time of the email sent – requires you be on a campus that subscribes to the Chronicle.
• Timeline of how the VT home page changed over the day

The space is booked, posters are made, and we have a couple sponsors lined up already. The fourth BarCampWaterloo will hopefully be our biggest yet! There already a few people signed up, Simon and I are hoping to see us break that 50 mark this time. We know you folks are out there…

I will demo CPA’s latest Ruby on Rails creation which should be up and running by then. This project is part of the larger MMNP initiative and I hope folks around here will love it.

“A moderated forum for members of the University of Waterloo community to discuss post-secondary affairs and campus issues” is now live. It is a sort of letters to the editor meets a blog thing and will hopefully be the place where some good opinions are posted (good or bad) from students, staff, and faculty. It is hardly an earth shattering web application but it does mark a positive move on the part of the university and I am glad to have had some role to play in that.

Last term we started building an application that would act as a letters to the editor replacement for the old campus newspaper the Gazette. We got a working app done fairly quickly but it sat around for a while as people had other things on the go (the 50th Anniversary build up put off a lot of projects). We sat down a few weeks ago and pulled together the final parts and now it has the support of the top admin at the university.

It is a Ruby on Rails app that was started last term by Sasha Papo. Catherine finished it off nicely but we know there might be a few odd things going on. If you notice anything, let me know. Big thanks to the co-op students who worked on it.

Update: yes I forgot to link to UW Opinion, I fixed that ;)

Very interesting news out of Toronto that the public school board is looking at banning mobile phones for a number of legitimate reasons. I do agree with the a lot of the rationale but you can hardly blame students for their inappropriate use of the technology. How often have you been interrupted in the theatre? In a meeting? While eating at a fancy restaurant? Adults aren’t exactly setting a good example.

Perhaps it is how the article is written (I don’t see a pro-active approach mentioned, more just a knee-jerk ban) but I think it would be neat if the school board took the approach of requiring those caught using the phones at inappropriate times to attend a special class that will talk about how to use technology responsibly. They could do the same for those caught bullying or harassing other students on facebook or other sites.

By banning the mobile the school board is missing an opportunity to use the technology in the learning environment. If they required students phone numbers they could send them SMS for a whole host of things, provide other content and applications, maybe even negotiate a better package deal for their students. All the students in the public school board would have some serious buying power to influence change in the steeply priced service provider market.

That is the sort of the thing we are looking at here at Waterloo, maybe we should make a little more noise about what we are doing as an example in embracing technology instead of shutting it off.

The first of January always seems to require a post or two about the past year and what to expect in the upcoming one. So here is mine ;) Looking at my post from last January I kept my predictions and goals pretty simple.

I can’t say I actually met all those goals – organizing myself better is something I still need to do – but CPA’s content is coming around, podcasts are finally starting to appear across campus (Faculty of Arts will have 7 profs podcasting in the Winter 2007 term), and the search has been improved. On December 22nd some new code appeared behind the home page, code that would allow for an elastic width or a zoom layout, and mobile version is a work in progress.

For 2007 I dare not try and predict the overall movement of the web but I do see two technology trends that will certainly influence what I do for this year:

• Mobile phones will start to be used for more than just phoning people in Canada. Even with the poor state of data services in North America I think we will see larger demand for mobile friendly web services (but not all content, just for specific tasks).
• Ajax will develop into something more commonly accessible although I do think the adaptive technology developers need to do their thing as well. Adobe could have done something cool with Spry like make a really cool Flash/JavaScript hybrid framework—but they haven’t. I still think Flash could be part of the solution for accessible Ajax-like apps, just not sure how.

What are my goals for 2007?

• Learn as much as I can about Ruby on Rails
• Make UW Events a top notch event system that integrates nicely with popular API’s and Oracle Calendar (used by staff on campus)
• Customizable UW home page
• Make Kiwi a simple and effective single sign-on tool for web apps
• …finish my Masters, think about more grad work

Simple enough? We shall see. Looking forward to the next year, I am sure it will be one heck of an interesting one.

Where to start? We worked a lot with Ruby on Rails, podcasts, events, and mobile devices. It has been a pretty good term for trying new things. This term I had the pleasure of working with Sasha Papo who is a computer engineering student here at the University of Waterloo. He was the first to prove to me that Ruby on Rails is the right platform for a work environment where you have multiple programmers working independently on the same web app (and we started using Capistrano along with Subversion for version control). In the winter term Catherine Mittelholtz, a co-op software engineer, will let me know for sure if Ruby on Rails works for the long term ;)

What did we actually do then?

1. UW Opinion – A simple blog with community contribution the focus but it must be approved by an editor. Notifications and Kiwi authentication were the cool features here. This isn’t live yet.
2. UW Podcast – CPA needed a place to start putting the rapidly growing collection of podcasts that go beyond lectures and such. We could use UW Blogs as the back end but having had time to sort it out yet.
3. CPA home page – we redid the CPA home page to feature more of the content that CPA puts out there but don’t feature on the UW home page or in another micro-site that CPA maintains.
4. UW Events tweaks – There have been a few things fixed but we also worked on some features such as user profiles, personal calendars, and notifications. It isn’t running smoothly yet but should be in January.
5. UW home page tweak – The code for the UW home page has been updated so things float, flash gallery is 5px wider and new, and the page has tightened up its grid structure. The CSS is still messy but its valid and some classes have added some semantics for the final term project…
6. UW home page mobile – With the new code in the home page we have added an auto redirect for mobiles. This new version has a number of links that just point to a script that parses out the content on the page by section. That is still being worked on and its open to suggestions. If you want some stuff added let me know and I will see what I can do.

For the first bit of 2007 I hope to go back and add in some features and get a couple apps into RubyForge. There is also a pretty cool project starting in January that I am a part of. A few emails have gone out inviting some students in residence to participate and over the next term I will blog lots more about it.

It feels like MAX was two weeks ago, not a month. December is coming quick and there is far too much to do… two big time wasters for me at the moment are Twitter and the Blackberry Pearl. Used in combination with Google Talk and productivity comes to a crawl. A post will come later on the Pearl. The first impression of its web browser makes this web person shake his head—why can’t a good browsing experience come to really good handhelds?

Other things on the whiteboard include:

• a UW home page update that will offer a lot more links and content for people (due Jan 2nd 2007)
• a total take down of the 50th site and some polish for the launch
• personal profiles and calendars in UW events along with some bug fixes (out in two weeks)
• BarCampWaterloo
• WatITis presentation: UW on Rails
• Something else… something cool ;)

Lets see how much of this I get done in a month… I should just leave Thunderbird off for the month.

Thanks to the efforts of Simon Woodside we have a location and date for the next BarCampWaterloo – Tuesday December 5th at 5:30pm in the Accelerator Centre. This BarCamp will follow more of a DemoCamp format so come prepared to demo your software/web/tech project and leave the slides at home. It is open to everyone (you don’t have to be a Waterloo student), just be sure to sign up on the wiki. This is the evening before the campus IT conference, WatITis, but it isn’t connected. I think attendees of WatITis might enjoy BarCampWaterloo ;)

Either Sasha or I will demo the new features that will be built into UW Events and I hope to get a lot of really good feedback from everyone there.

Just about packed and ready to go. I will arrive in Las Vegas at around 10:30pm local time. This will be my third MAX in a row and my expectations are pretty high this year. With the merger in the past I am really interested to see what tools and tricks the software teams have up their sleaves. Given I work in an office that does both print and web publications/applications (natural fit really) I really would like to see how the print friendly Adobe stuff is going to work with the web focused Macromedia stuff. Hopefully I will leave MAX with a good idea of what CS3 might mean for my office.

Sure professional development is great and that is 99% of the reason why I am going, but there is something I should keep in mind while I am there. I go there as staff member of University of Waterloo which means I go there ready to introduce people to our campus every chance I get. Why? Well who knows who might be looking for a Co-op student to work for them or a place they could sponsor some research. Maybe run into an Alumni or two. Its not like I am going there to sell anything to make those relationships (it isn’t my job now is it?) but I will talk up the campus any chance I get that is appropriate.

Every time someone from UW (student, staff, faculty) goes someplace they leave an impression on people as to what UW is like. UW and the region is a great place full of great people. That is something that is on my mind as I get on a plane for what promises to be a great week in the desert ;)

Looks like Adobe is looking for a UW student to fill the role of Adobe Ambassador. It sounds like a similar role as the old Macromedia User Group organizers. I don’t think there was ever a MMUG (now Adobe User Group) in Waterloo, actually there are very few in Canada. If you are interested go check out the blog link and the contact information is at the bottom of the page. If you end up with the position, drop me an email ;)

I know other companies offer something similar to students… Pretty sure this is the first time Adobe has done it here.

In about two weeks the area web folks will have the oppertunity to see Joe Clark along with a whole host of other great presenters (Derek Featherstone – UW Alumni – for one) at the Power of IDEAS conference here at UW. For on-campus people it is a free event but please register. For off-campus there is a very small $50 charge that will get you a great lunch and access to all the presentations during the day. From the site:

On August 15th, discover The Power of IDEAS at the University of Waterloo, a conference that explores how Innovative Design and Delivery Engenders Access and Academic Success.

New technologies and alternative strategies can enhance teaching and learning. This conference will provide an environment for:

• exchanging ideas in key areas of research,
• teaching methodologies,
• learning strategies and
• applications of technology.

Sessions include topics based on sound pedagogy, factors that affect performance outcomes for persons with disabilities, meta-cognitive learning styles, and technology applications that promote learning outcomes for all. Vendor exhibits will provide opportunities for viewing adaptive hardware and software designed to invigorate the senses and enhance learning, teaching, and research.

Just in case any of those UW web folks are working on blogging this summer… Mitch has created a plug-in for WordPress that allows it to autheticate users against our Kiwi application which means you can autheticate users with UWdir and not need to manage a whole set of passwords somewhere else.

Does that mean I am switching to WordPress? No. It means we have yet another cool use for Kiwi that is helping it prove itself as a really cool potential service. If you are working with WordPress on campus and want to know more about it, send me an email. We will document it soon.

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!

In my sleep deprived state an idea has been brewing for weeks. It’s not new but it is trendy… does anyone around here think a BarCamp in Waterloo would be well attended? I have been asking around about a venue on campus and trying to feel out folks I know, but what about those I don’t that lurk around this blog. What do you folks think? Topics could cover (because I know people are working on them around here):

• Developing web apps with students for the community
• WordPress, Textpattern, Drupal? I just want a blog… what are you using and why?
• Various projects by students like say Nirbi (created by a student who is working for me this term).

Loads more come to mind. There must be things going in the larger Waterloo Region as well… maybe a Barcamp is what we need to meet each other?

What a nice way to spend a Friday afternoon with my new Macbook Pro… It appears Adobe CS2 has some issues installing on OS X.4.6 and for me it was a bit worse than not installing. My pretty new Macbook Pro just decided it wouldn’t respond anymore. The mouse is fine, it moves the cursor around, but I have nothing to click on. I have no idea the cause but many fingers point to the recent Quicktime security update if you follow that thread I linked to.

The workaround is to restore OS X back to ‘out-of-the-box’ set up and NOT run the system update until AFTER you have installed CS2. That seemed to do the trick for me.

The irony is that XP pro runs nicely thanks to Bootcamp. I even installed anti-virus software and Studio 8. After spending close to a week with XP on a Macbook Pro I am oddly impressed with its speed and how it feels. Just with it wouldn’t screw up the date/time settings when going back and forth between the two OS’s. The fix is simple, set auto update date/time in both but sometimes I don’t have a net connection. Ah well.

Back to doing real work… This Macbook pro will definately speed up my workflow and finally offer a proper Windows environment for testing—although it is a much better environment than most Windows users have ;)

Just a quick note about TODCon 8 – it was very cool. It is a small conference but probably one of the best if you use a lot of Adobe (Macromedia) products. You get to go to a nice place, meet some interesting people, relax, learn some things, and get some free books! Looking back at the past few days I think I have a changed impression of Coldfusion, Spry, and potential of extensions from companies like InterAKT and Webassist. A big thank you to Ray for everything.

My presentation slides should be up later this week. I hope to see all those that attended TODCon 8 next year in Vegas for TODCon 9! Although it would be really cool if there was a TODCruise, wouldn’t it Bogdan? ;)

Last night I ventured into Toronto to the Queen Mother to meet up with Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) and the Webstandards.to group. Joe Clark had arranged the evening of great Thai food and conversation. I am terrible with names so I am not going to try and name all the folks that were there but it was a pleasure meeting them all.

The conversation was of the typical standards geek kind – conferences, city’s visited, cool sites, etc. Matt’s new Blackberry was the focus of much attention as was everyone else’s cell phones. I hadn’t seen, only heard of, the new Google Maps implementation on the Blackberry. That is very cool.

Matt hinted at something being announced between WordPress and Textpattern (what I use on this blog) today and something has appeared. Looks like WordPress and Textpattern have merged. Wordpattern? Is this an April fools joke? Hrm.

Overall a very cool night with really good company. Glad I made the drive in…

Looks like I am off to TODCON 8 in Orlando for the long weekend in May. I will be presenting on two topics: Building sites in Dreameaver for Contribute and Leveraging Web 2.0 in Higher Education. Both are currently scheduled for the Sunday. The first topic is pretty much what we do around here. The second presentation used that ‘buzz word’ we all love—but should cover some cool things that are relatively simple to implement.

The line up for TODCON 8 is pretty good – Derek Featherstone,Vicki Berry,Scott Fegette,Stephanie Sullivan, and Tom Green are just some of the presenters.

Presentations and such will be posted here once they are done.

Once in a while the Google search API decides to act up. No idea why but it does. There is a thread on the Google API list that suggests this is unusual but UW isn’t the only place that is having problems. I am sorry to those who are inconvenienced buy the search acting up, we have made a couple changes to make it easier:

• better error message with a link to the google/UW search (always works and it is doesn’t make you search again)
• caching of search results makes short term outages unnoticeable—but we will need to extend caching times to more than 24 hours I think
• version 3.0 of the search will have the ability to detect the error, give you a note about it, and give you Yahoo! API results instead—how that works with the UI is still a good question ;) I might make the search a sourceforge project as well… so anyone can add to it, but I am not sure what do about the API key yet.

In the meantime version 2.7 should be out for testing soon, it uses the UW LDAP search for people rather than UWDir—UWDir is annoying at times. Makes partial matches a lot easier as well.

Again my apologies for any problems…

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.

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.

There are a couple advent calendar type publications popping up this month. The first on the block was Drew’s 24ways.org (24 ways to impress your friends) which is just been fun to follow for the past 12 days. But I think last nights post is one people here really should read: Transitional vs. Strict Mark-up. I have been considering switching all CPA’s pages doctype’s to strict, there is a good reason to do it ;)

Then there is the 12days advent by Dustin Diaz. His site is just great to follow all the time but now he has himself on a nightly publication cycle. Today’s post is pretty funny.

If I find any more advent type web posting schedules I will post them here.

December 6th (tomorrow) will see the third annual WatITis (What-IT-is not Wah-Ti-Tis but I prefer the latter) conference on campus. You can check out the history of the conference if you are wondering what it is and how it started. Basically it started with Ian Howard who then went off on a Geekcorps tour of Africa and Martin Timmerman (still in IST). Bob Hicks and Vic Neglia have carried the co-director position both last year and this year.

All IT staff on campus gather to attend presentations, talk about stuff, and have a good day learning some new things. I am involved in two presentations again this year: Paradox of Accessibility and Usability as well as Applying Usability to the UW Webspace. In the first one I look at the great paradox of web development in a higher education setting with the focus being on accessibility and usability. Good fun.

The second is where the original UW web usability project group will discuss our first study back in April and how our work will help the rest of campus. The whole idea is have a good discussion on usability testing and the issues surrounding usability.

Both will be online by the end of the week. As a test I will be working on a few podcasts of presentations as well. Hopefully I will have more than just the keynote and the two presentations I am involved in, but we will see how much IT folks like being recorded ;)

If you are using OS X.4, have Spotlight on, and see odd number files in your web directories while using Dreamweaver 8 you need to hide your local web files from Spotlight. Simply:

• Open Spotlight from System Preferences
• Go to Privacy tab
• Add the folder of your local site to the list

Problem solved. Now all you need to do is clean up the odd files all over the place. What is going on with Spotlight that causes this? I don’t know but I was told to hide Spotlight and the problem goes away. At a guess, Spotlight is caching a copy of a opened file and that somehow conflicts with DW 8’s way of caching files.

If you haven’t noticed I have been working on the new search for the UW home page. Areeb (Co-op from last term) did a great job getting things to the beta stage and he has a post that documents his fun with the API coming up soon. But what else is on the ‘to-do’ for the near future:

• Session for co-ops working on web pages at UW this Friday, MC 2009 @ 11:30am. We will talk XHTML, CSS, JS, Ruby, coffee, and other fun stuff.
• Finished search for the home page and other CPA sites – nearly there. 2.0b2 will appear tomorrow.
• API for the keyword search so you too can use the keyword db (thinking about the UWhub search).
• Submission of keyword changes is fixed for IE, will appear tomorrow.
• PHP/XML parser for UW sites that want to read our upcoming news streams
• XML streams of news classified by faculty, research, all…
• Accessibility presentation for the Friday morning seminar
• What’s new in Dreamweaver 8 in November
• WATITIS – Paradox of accessibility and usability: perceptions and reality, December

By no means an exhaustive list (couple conferences and such) but I think covers things that folks that read thing might be interested in. Think this is good enough for one term? ;)

September 1st has come and gone (what happened to August?) along with the co-op students working on UW web pages. There are no definite numbers of sites that have converted to the CLF but a quick browse around the UW web space and you certainly notice that most site have switched. It would not have been possible if it wasn’t for all the co-op students that worked at UW over the spring term. I had a great time working with them all.

My favorite site so far, Department of Fine Arts in the Faculty of Arts. The colours, banner, interactive features, calendar, just really nice. They really took the skeleton design of the CLF and brought it to life. Nice work. Only one little problem – the doctype is a bit off and the site doesn’t validate but that isn’t the end of the world ;)

Are there any students working this term? I haven’t heard from any yet, send me an email if you are a co-op student working on UW web pages this term. I do have one working for me this term – Vincent Marta. He should have a few posts on here over the fall term.

I have spent way too much time ignoring our main web communications resource page (web.uwaterloo.ca) and that is about to change. How will these two sites work together you ask? The rough plan goes like this… Web.uwaterloo is a resource site for general best practices – it will remain as such. FAQ’s, tutorials, articles, and such will go there.

What I need from the readers of this blog is what things in regards to UW web pages do you need documented (comment below)?

Why not just use the blog? A blog format just doesn’t cut it for things like that. This blog will remain a blog, full of links and hopefully more colourful commentary. For discussion I would like to point to the Watitb forum – but there doesn’t appear to be much interest in that. We shall see ;)

Ideas are always welcome.

There is plenty of talk about browsers. With IE 7 coming out in beta this summer and Firefox buzz things are pretty interesting. For the Firefox vs IE debate though, here is the change over the past month at UW:

• UW home page March 2005:
  
  • 97% Windows, 1.3% Mac.
  • 89.7% MS IE, 6.2% Firefox
• UW home page April 2005:
  
  • 96.1% Windows, 1.5% Mac.
  • 88.1% MS IE, 7% Firefox

With over 150 000 unique visitors a month, IE users have dropped 1.6% this month with the Firefox users up 0.8%. Lets wait and see what happens in May.

Note: I do not have accurate browser stats before March 2005 for the UW home page.

We (IST sys admins and I) were trying out webDAV on two Linux boxes I use for web development. What is cool about webDAV is that I can mount the drives on my desktop and hopefully use Subversion to protect my files from me. Problem is that X.3 (Panther) doesn’t support https webDAV connections, well it looks like X.4 (Tiger) does! Along with a lot of new and improved built in stuff that will make it more of a pleasure to use my #1 tool.

Yet another community announcement. Please if you are using PHP/mySQL or ASP/Access or anything that requires a connection to something web related: Do not use your UWdir password. If you have, change it.

Does that mean PHP/mySQL is not secure? No. But you are sharing those PHP files with people in your area, do you want them to have your UWdir password?

Seems Netscape 8 is in Beta now. There is another mention on the WASP site as well as just above it a mention on how Firefox works. What I think is interesting is that Netscape 8 is trying to get the best of both worlds – IE and Moz rendering. As the WASP buzz mentions it has been done before but not by a familiar brand name like Netscape ;) Ok just please don’t break the CLF basic layout!

We have recently just changed how we (CPA) read our log files for various web sites. This is useful for a number of reasons but the one I am most interested in at the moment is browsers. This is just a preliminary look, next week or so I will post a more detailed report on web stats as the sample should be big enough to be sure.

Note: Moz based browsers means all browsers based on the Mozilla Projects work – Netscape 6+, Mozilla, and Firefox. In the table I combined Netscape and Mozilla but not Firefox.

So far (and please excuse the quality of this table, textpattern isn’t great for this it seems):

Site	Windows	Mac	Linux	Browsers	IE	Firefox	Moz/Netscape
Web.uwaterloo	89%	6.6%	1.5%	_	75.1%	13.9%	5.6%
Quest	96.3%	2%	0.7%	_	85.7%	9.2%	3.4%
CPA	91.3%	4.6%	2.4%	_	79.2%	11.7%	4.6%
Bulletin	90.1%	5.1%	1.7%	_	72.2%	14.9%	8.8%
UW home	97.1%	1.2%	0.8%	_	89.2%	6.6%	2.4%

At first glance it looks really odd but it does suggest Firefox is making its way into the UW web user groups. The home page has 97.1% windows users but only 89.2% IE (stats folks help me out here – windows users with Firefox is?) with similar trends on all web sites. The surprising one to me is the Daily Bulletin, just over 24% of users of this popular site (3156 unique visits yesterday) are using Moz based browsers even though the DB has issues displaying in Moz based browsers sometimes. Quest too is a bit of surprise with 12.6% of Moz based browsers at least checking out the front end.

To put a little perspective on it, the info server reports this month so far that 86.55% are IE, 11.88% netscape (analyzer that looks at all of info doesn’t know about Moz based browsers so netscape means all Moz based browsers). In April 2004 it reports 91.66% IE, 6.76% netscape. I do believe most staff computers have IE only now as well.

In my more in depth look I will have more detailed user numbers and such with more web sites, just wanted to post a bit now to have something to compare with in a week or so.

I was pointed to this article today entitled Thinking Differently About Site Mapping and Navigation. When I think about it, the philosophy behind the navigation structure over three years ago was very similar. Generally the home page is not a heiarchy of important content as it tries to be audience specific. We try to anticipate where people would like to go and what they might be interested in along the way. If all else fails they can search our keyword database or google.

Near the end of the article is a list of what you can do to address the users needs. What we do well?

• links within the content
• meta data in regards to page titles and relevant content

We do OK:

• related item grouping and linking – from the left navigation on the home page we do have this but it not something adopted UW-wide

Need to work on:

• a homepage that acts less like a landing page – the inherant nature of the UW home page design almost encourages the landing page ideal although I would say we have tried to fix that with the modernized template design in beta.

Not too sure about and needed to look up:

• folksonomies
• personalized tazonomies
• faceted classification and corresponding navigation

What a great article on site mapping and navigation. The last three things are new terms to me. Learn something new every day ;)

There is a pretty cool little howto on the Web Developer extension
for Firefox on macmerc.com. It has some nice pictures that give you an idea of what is going on…and now, Firefox supports Jaws. Now those with limited sight can enjoy an awsome browser.

The Friday link collection is a little late (or early). In this install there are some great rants, tips, bugs, and other stuff. Enjoy.

• A rant about the state of blogging.
• Headline writing for the web is important.
• Common browser bugs – really worth a read.
• Global white space reset. – I am re-writing the CSS for the UW template I have been working on and I found this just in time.
• @media 2005: Web Standards & Accessibility – one can only hope.
• Podsites
• Subversion client for OS X – this is so I don’t lose the link ;)

Finally, up untill now the few bloggers that have been fired in the US from their real jobs for what they have posted on their personal blog sites but someone that works at a bookstore in the UK? The article says it all. Good read.

Two things have dominated this week: swearing at IE and CSS. As for IE, it is comical that MS folks think fixing it will break the web. Now IE caused me no end of grief but that is cause I didn’t check out the CSS crib sheet. What was getting me down was a silly little whitespace and unordered lists thing that IE does. Argh.

Oh and are you a developer, user, or consumer? Why aren’t you all?

A very interesting thing happened to a Disney store web site in the UK – it got redesigned to conform to web standards and accessibility. In a five part series on his blog, the web dude who did it goes through the Anatomy of a mouse. Well worth a read.

It has been a short week and I really haven’t time to read a whole lot but here are a few things I haven’t read yet but I plan too:

• Resolution dependant layout
• CSS Crib Sheet
• Why you don’t need a usability lab
• Three things I learned about screen reader users
• iPod users go into the closet – but i think it’s more because the earbuds suck.

This weekend is the Ski and Snowboard show in Toronto at Exhibition place. Time to think about the snow!