Miscellaneous
The return of bonfire (.tamu.edu)
Bonfire Remembrance and Memorial site goes live
Just a quick note to say that we just launched a new Bonfire Remembrance site at bonfire.tamu.edu. The site takes the old Bonfire site that was launched shortly after the collapse in 1999 to keep people updated and then left as a kind of online remembrance and merges it with the Bonfire Memorial site that we inherited. In both cases, time and broken links had caught up with both sites.
But with the 10th anniversary of the collapse and the 100th year of Bonfire, the activities and need for a better web presence was needed. But for this to happen as quickly as possible, we needed help. And we got some great help.
Big shout outs to David Swanson and the folks at the MSC who offered up the old bonfire.tamu.edu URL, and Shawn and the DoIT folks who helped us get a site up in Drupal. The Bonfire Remembrance Committee provided me text for pages and Bryan and Trent in our Division knew where the right photos were.
Now that the site is live and in the DoIT system, it can be maintained much easier by folks on the Traditions Council, the MSC, the Bonfire Remembrance Committee (since most if not all of those groups have access to/already use DoIT’s Drupal instance).
Ultimately, this isn’t really about the site but the fact that so many people pitched in to help. These are the kinds of projects I always enjoy , and again my thanks to everyone who offered time, support, insight and assistance.
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.
WordPress Lessons Learned
I got a problem ticket yesterday saying that the RSS feeds for this and all of our other blogs had quit working, the error stating that the XML was invalid because there was a blank line at the top of the file where the xml declaration was expected to be. A Google search showed that this same problem ws affecting lots of bloggers out there, but there did not seem to be one bug consistently causing the same problem for everyone.
Finally I tracked it down to an upgrade I made a few weeks ago. As we are updating our hardware architecture we are also upgrading things like access control and password policy. I had therefore moved the WordPress database login information into a file outside the web root and called the information as variables rather than hard-coded strings. Unfortunately this php include file had a line break after the final closing ?> and because of the multiple include calls WordPress makes before it ever prints a line, this space got stuck at the top of the RSS feed and invalidated it. So lesson to be learned — when modifying WordPress files be very careful about hitting that “enter” key.
(Note, because we publish through Feedburner, which is not real time, you may still be getting the error on the feed. This should resolve itself as Feedburner refreshes itself.)
Aggie Clips
As mentioned a few days ago, we are working on the TAMU News suite of sites this Fall. The first of these sites to be rolled out is the Aggie Clips. This is a service provided to campus communicators and administrators to give them a taste of how Texas A&M is being portrayed in news outlets around the country and the world. (Note that this site is limited to viewing from on campus or remote connections to the TAMU domain.)
We migrated this site, which was originally separate html files for each article (over 25,000 of them at one point) before we put the files into a database last year, into WordPress as a way of keeping them organized. One nice discovery that we made was that WordPress now suports CAS logins. I know there are a lot of WordPress blogs around campus, and unfortunately the standard installation doesn’t come with secure logins, so we pass this tip along in hopes that more people start to use it. Installation was quite easy, with only the CAS client needing slight modifications to handle our unique response payload.
Introducing Jeff Carouth
Howdy! Today is my second day with the amazing Aggie Webmasters team and I am very excited to join this passionate group of dedicated developers and creatives to enhance the presence of Texas A&M University on the web. A few weeks ago my colleague, Ben Floyd, told me know he found a spot on another campus team and suggested that I consider joining this team. I did not need any further recommendation. Before moving into this position I had the pleasure of working with the personnel in the Division of Research and Graduate Studies.
After reading Ben’s introductory post I realize that we share the same goals. In this position I hope to foster a desire to collaborate across campus; to share ideas, projects, and the occasional troubles; and to continue promoting Texas A&M as a leader in university web presence. I invite each and every one of you to have a conversation with me and see where we can take this great University.
My interests are in developing on open source platforms such as the prevalent LAMP stack. I find that the community behind these technologies pushes even the novice developer to continually improve methodologies and that is what drives me to innovation when a task seems difficult. That said, I do not believe that any tool is the right one for every problem and I do not hesitate to learn new tools if they are better suited for the task at hand.
Outside of my role as a web application developer I am an author, an amateur photographer, a cyclist, and a, hopefully, soon-to-be husband. I look forward to being an active and productive member of the Aggie community and hope that you will welcome me. Gig ‘Em!
The Modern PHP Workflow
eduWEB – Presentation Slides
I should have mentioned yesterday, slides for most of the conference presentations are posted free for viewing on slideshare.net
So if you have plenty of time check out the whole presentations instead of relying in Michael’s and my summaries.
Friday (now Monday) freebies
For those of you who work in graphic design or with graphic designers, a couple of resources came across my screen that I think might be of interest and/or use.
The first is by way of wanna-be-Chik-Fil-A-Cow, Wally Wellborn, over in OAR who clued me in to an archive post from Deb Richardson regarding Firefox 3 color support. So for those of us who struggle with the browser not rendering as richly as Photoshop, there’s a way in Firefox to do it.
According to Wally, editing the about:config page is pretty easy and it livens up the color quite a bit.
The other resource is a help for when you get a mockup or a graphic and you have no clue to what font it is that is being used. Identifont takes 550+ font publishers, almost 150 font vendors representing over 7,000 fonts and helps you figure out which font it is that’s being used. You can look at samples, or use their Q&A system to identify. Pretty handy for finding the exact font or one that’s pretty close.
Aggie Plates goes online
New Aggie Plate design
As you’ll probably see from the front page spotlight or the headline in the News section today, new Aggie Plates are available via TxDOT and Texas A&M. The Aggie Plates site was launched to be a landing page for people interested in A&M plates (which helps fund scholarships) and give them easy links to ordering online and/or printing order information.
Please excuse our mess…
For those of you who might have visited the blog earlier this morning, you caught us in the middle of an upgrade that didn’t go as smoothly as expected. But we’re back now, and better than ever. We have made a few tweaks and added a few plugins. The changes are subtle but should help us create a better service for the camups community.
TouchNet uPay Development Gotchas Article
Earlier this week I sat with Chris Weldon to try and troubleshoot some problems with the AggiePay replacement system – TouchNet uPay. He is developing one of the first applications that will use the system, and we found a few interesting bugs/gotchas that developers who will be communicating with the system might want to know about.
The first is that the uPay landing screen for submitting payment information uses some javascript to submit a form once your website posts to it. The javascript basically calls the function document.getElementById(”indexForm”).submit() to submit the form. However, if you send in a POST variable named “submit” (as in a submit button on your own site), you will get an error that document.getElementById(”indexForm”).submit is not a function. That’s correct, because it is actually a DOM element once the site renders out the values in the form it is trying to submit. When posting to uPay, don’t send in input fields w/ the name “submit”.
The second issue was specifically with PHP and md5 hashing. To make sure your data hasn’t been tampered with when you submit it to uPay, you first create a token from the values in the transaction, md5 hash the result, and then base64 encode the hash so it doesn’t get mangled in transit. Typically an md5 hash is a series of hex values. However, in PHP, the md5() function returns a string, and so base64 encoding it actually returns an incorrect value. In order to produce the right base64 value, you must first convert the md5() return value back into a hex variable with the pack() function. Then you can base64 encode the correct hex md5 hash.
You can find a much more detailed explanation of the issues in Chris’ blog post about TouchNet uPay Problems.