Calendar
Mobile Calendar
After about a week playing with the style sheets and previewing it on every phone I could get my hands on, I think we are finally ready for a version-1 release of the mobile view of the Campus Calendar.
Kudos go out to the UNL developers who saw a need for this and made it so easy to integrate into our setup. Both this version and the standard version point to the same database, so you’ll be getting the same content, just in an easier to use small screen view.
As an aside, styling for the mobile device is very different than developing for the desktop. There is next to no browser continuity, and even different browsers on the same device will show things differently. We are going to use this as the start of a larger foray into the mobile world, so it will show to some degree what to expect. We will be taking the 320×240 screen size as our default to make sure we are compatible with older Blackberry devices, but will at the same time try to make it look good on iPhones, Storms, and other high-end devices. We are just getting our feet wet in this arena, so if you see something we could improve on feel free to give us a yell.
Calendar Maintenance Completed
As I mentioned yesterday in the announce mailing list (calendar-announce@listserv.tamu.edu, subscribe if you are interested in receiving announcements that don’t make it onto the blog) we identified the bug affecting logins shortly after noon and finished maintenance on the calendar soon thereafter. While we regret that users couldn’t log in, the change to the new hardware plus the code updates should make the calendar more stable in the long run.
We also learned a few things in the process… both about skinning the calendar and about how it is already being used on campus. For example, we found that there are a lot of people embedding various calendar views onto their own web pages via the widget interface. Frankly I hadn’t expected such a widespread us of them. We will therefore be particularly careful that whatever we do in the future doesn’t affect them. Also, we need to provide you the means to override the default colors and styles so that you can make them blend into your pages instead of simply reflecting tthe style of the central calendar. This should be a relatively easy process involving the addition of a custom style sheet on your end. Give us a little time and we’ll provide a template with all the classes and ids that will let you make the changes easily.
Also, the new UNL code comes with a mobile view. One of our big initiatives for the fall is going to be to provide a mobile interface to a lot of the campus applications, and this seems like a perfect start. Right now the mobile calendar is functional but not styled, so look for a release announcement probably sometime next week.
Calendar Maintenance – Thursday
Our maintenance window for the campus calendar has moved to Thursday morning. Again, we hope the system will experience minimal downtime, but please be aware that a worst case scenario could leave the site unavailable for the early morning.
Calendar Maintenance Aborted
An issue came up that prevented us from carring our our maintenance and migration of the calendar this morning. We will reschedule and announce a new maintenance time as soon as we can. We apologize for any problems this has created.
Calendar code update, hardware migration
We are scheduled to move the campus calendar onto our virtualized server environment tomorrow morning. Hopefully there will be minimal downtime, but be aware that the site may be down as we make the switch. We will also be updating the code to the latest version from UNL, so once we make the switch we should be good to go for the foreseeable future.
New Calendar Feature
For those who haven’t visited lately, we have added a new feature to the campus calendar — a weekly view. This is something that several folks have been asking about for quite a while, and we’re pleased to now be able to offer it as a resource.
Other upcoming features include a facebook ap that Donald St. Martin in the College Engineering is working on, as well as a mobile version that we indend to roll out for phone/mobile device users.
Upcoming Calendar Updates
The developers at UNL have done a good job of adding some new features to the calendar code, and we have gotten a bit behind. We are therefore going to need to schedule a maintenance outage on the calendar while we upgrade to the new code. I have already upgraded the test server and the process should be short and simple, but we will still schedule it for a weekend or evening to avoid peak usage. We plan to move the site to new hardware during the same maintenance window so specific times will be based on when that becomes ready. Once we have a time and date it will be announced and sent to CIS for publication on their problem/enhancement websites.
One nice new feature will be the addition of featured calendars. This allows us to not only feature specific events but also entire departmental calendars. We intend to use this feature to hilight calendars what are particularly relavent during certain times of the year. So at the beginning of the semester we might feature the Academic Calendar, while toward the end we will feature the Final Exam Schedule. Another example of good use would be calendars that have events scattered throughout the year but which have a critical target date when most season tickets are sold. Featured calendars will be those that have large numbers of events that are of interest to significant numbers of people. We are open to requests, so use this criteria as an incentive to start getting your events entered into the calendar.
University calendar: 350 events and counting
The university calendar at http://calendar.tamu.edu/ reached two milestones this morning: at 11 am it included exactly 200 upcoming events (already spanning the whole school year) and exactly 150 archived events (and that’s only since June). Activities that I never heard of before are now being featured on the Texas A&M home page, TAMUmobile, the Howdy portal, Google searches, and in many more places – soon to include Facebook. › Continue reading
Calendar Maintenance, Downtime
The calendar.tamu.edu server is scheduled for hardware maintenance Saturday. Sys admins plan to use the early morning period to minimize the outage, which should last no longer than 15-20 minutes.
Calendar Maintenance
Yesterday we completed a bit of maintenance on the Campus Calendar to bring our code back in line with the latest updates from UNL. Most of this was back-end functionality changes, but if you do see something that is acting differently please let us know and we’ll make sure it wasn’t a migration issue.