Future Projects
Project Status
We’re stuck in the middle of several large projects. Since posting that “we’re now moving from stage 4 to stage 5 of projext X” doesn’t make for the most interesting of reading, blog posts might become a little sparse for a while. Don’t let that discourage you, know that we’re busy, just that we’re stuck inside of larger projects.
We are continuing to make progress on the mobile site. It is going a bit slow because we want to get it right and make sure that you have a good experience no matter which device you use. We are also working on recreating the TAMU News site. It will become much more dynamic and hopefully have more content that interests a broader range of people. We have already rolled out the Aggie Clips (sorry, only available on campus) portion, and hope to have the rest by the end of the holidays.
We are talking to GIS about a new version of the campus map. They have unimaginable data sources and the technology to build a map that will really rock. We will be cooperating with them, making sure the features and interface match what users expect. We are also taking up their idea of panaramas to start thinking about how campus virtual tours might work.
There are a few other things that we have going on that we will release shortly. In the meantime, we’ll try to make up for any lack of blog posts by being more diligent with our tweets. They might be more mundane, but they’ll also give a better insight into what we do on a day-to-day basis.
Welcome (Back) to Aggieland
After a being gone a week for the HighEdWeb09 conference, John and I returned to the office today to wade through the issues that have popped up and start reviewing our thoughts from the conference.
While there was plenty of great information in the conference tracks, the bulk of the value to me came from interaction with other schools, seeing how they deal with many of the same issues we deal with, and comparing how successful our methodologies are in comparison. Overall I think we’re in pretty good shape. We obviously don’t compare to the nation’s elite, but that’s only a matter of funding and support. Several conversations confirmed that we’re on the right track with our projects, so look for us to continue fighting to do things right.
We do have some infrastructural projects to take care of, but look for us soon to give you an idea of where we’re looking at going.
Another New Webmaster: Bob Timm
Howdy!
My name is Robert (Bob) Timm, Texas Aggie Class of 2010. I joined the Aggie Web Development Team today with the goal of providing the campus with a mobile version of the TAMU homepage. Not limited to just iPhones, but every mobile browser on every mobile phone. My experience extends from a couple years of web development and a phone app company I started this year, Roboconn Mobile Development. I look forward to providing this campus with some unique tools that have never been available to anyone before. So stay updated, changes are right around the corner!
Bob Timm
Back on Track for Fall
After being on vacation for what felt like an eternity, all of us are now back in the office and ready to move forward with an exciting lineup for the fall semester. (As an aside, while I say all of us, in truth Ben Floyd has left the group for greener pastures. We are pleased to have Jeff Carouth as our new programmer and are sure he will do great things here. I’ll leave his introduction to him in a followup post.)
The last month saw us have to shift priorities a bit to focus on the presidential search, but that should be behind us now and we can get back to our original focus. Our immediate project is the university News & Information suite of sites. This will include several sites including TAMU News, Aggie Clips (on-campus access only,) Experts List, news archives, and others.
The developers in Lincoln have been adding a lot of great features to the calendar code, so we will be making an upgrade of that at some point as well. As Michael mentioned the other day, the calendar has become quite popular on campus and we hope to add features that will make it even more useful to our campus users.
At the same time as all of this, we are also going to be implementing some hardware changes. We will be moving away from 1-off rack servers for each service and concentrating things on a few larger machines running the services in virtualized environments. There will be some growing pains as we move the services to these new machines, but we hope in the end to provide a more stable and easier maintained server setup.
Stone Soup
Over the weekend I read The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. One of its early chapters uses a story commonly known in eastern Europe to illustrate a point
The three soldiers returning home from war were hungry. When they saw the village ahead their spirits lifted—they were sure the villagers would give them a meal. But when they got there, they found the doors locked and the windows closed. After many years of war, the villagers were short of food, and hoarded what they had.
Undeterred, the soldiers boiled a pot of water and carefully placed three stones into it. The amazed villagers came out to watch.
“This is stone soup,” the soldiers explained. “Is that all you put in it?” asked the villagers. “Absolutely—although some say it tastes even better with a few carrots….” A villager ran off, returning in no time with a basket of carrots from his hoard.
A couple of minutes later, the villagers again asked “Is that it?”
“Well,” said the soldiers, “a couple of potatoes give it body.” Off ran another villager.
Over the next hour, the soldiers listed more ingredients that would enhance the soup: beef, leeks, salt, and herbs. Each time a different villager would run off to raid their personal stores.
Eventually they had produced a large pot of steaming soup. The soldiers removed the stones, and they sat down with the entire village to enjoy the first square meal any of them had eaten in months.
The soldiers here act as a catalyst, bringing the village together so they can jointly produce something that they couldn’t have done by themselves—a synergistic result. Eventually everyone wins.
How we handle IT on this campus really struck home while reading this story. We all know how decentralized things are, and we all face the prospects of reinventing the wheel because we all need many of the same projects. Yet we continue to do so because we can’t, or won’t work together. Like the townspeople in the story we keep our resources to ourselves rather than combining them together toward a larger purpose, even one that we can draw benefit from.
Since John and I have been here we’ve tried to begin the building of a quality university web presence, and we have lots more left on our plate to implement. But we can’t do it all, we have a staff of four and that’s barely enough to keep our heads above water. What we do have, though, are the stones to throw into the pot in order to get the soup started. Through collaboration we can do much more together than any of us could ever accomplish ourselves. Over the next few months we’ll be rolling out a few projects and will likely mention how “it would be much better if only we had…” I hope we can all enjoy the feast when that time comes.
Ready to promote your website?
Too often webmasters try to promote their websites prematurely. In the long term, the best way to make your website more popular is to make it more usable, more comprehensive, more interesting. But when you’re convinced that you’re saying something that needs to be said, it’s time to start tooting your horn. › Continue reading
Controlling non-human website visitors with robots.txt
Webmasters have been using the Robots Exclusion Protocol for years to tell crawlers and spiders what to index and not index. It’s actually not an official standard. Still, the top three search engines have recently agreed to support some new improvements to the protocol, so you should use it. It will work on our Google Search Appliance too. A robots.txt can keep spiders from crawling parts of your site that you don’t want to include in search engines. › Continue reading
Web Development Tools and Local Validators
Nick DeNardis over at .eduGuru recently wrote a post on web development tools. These browser plugins and websites help developers with issues pertaining to website validation, link checking, accessibility, page performance and more. He listed the W3C Markup Validator (aka HTML Validator), but did not list the W3C CSS Validator or the Feed Validator. He did list some browser plugins that will do similiar validation.
I’d like to add one thing to his list for universities in general – running a local copy of the W3C validation services is very valuable. We already run a local copy of the Markup Validator and will very shortly have local copies of the CSS validator and Feed Validator running as well. Having a local copy really helps when validating sites that are still behind the firewall and not accessible via URL to the W3C copy.
You can also set Firefox to use the local copies of the validators as well which will usually lead to faster validation results. It is a good idea for any web developer to take a look at Nick’s list and play with some of the tools you haven’t seen before.
Meta descriptions – the search engine result you write yourself
Unlike your page title, your meta-description tag won’t force search engines to use certain words to describe your Web page, but it lets you make a strong suggestion. If they don’t use the meta-description, Google “snippets” often include a section from your page with relevant search terms. But often they may use the meta-description as a standalone snippet. And you write that yourself – how cool is that? › Continue reading
New for 2009
We have a few new blog-related updates that we plan on making this year, hopefully to make this site more useful to you.
First, John has set up some magic that will let each of us in the office sent Twitter tweets directly to the blog. We’ll be using these to pass along short bits of information that don’t really warrant a full article. Things like “check out this article about XYZ” or “We’re working on Project-X today.” We intend this as a way of both sharing information that we come across and also giving you a better idea of what’s going on in our own office.
Also new this year, and already posted in the Related Links section, is a delicious feed. We’ll be using this, again, to share articles that we find, to give hints of future projects we might have on tap, see what we think is important, and to generally give you and idea of our thought process. It’s still pretty short right now — we intend to start fresh with the new year and not pre-populate it with links we already have — but it will be growing regularly.