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.
Google Search Appliance Maintenance
To improve performance, the Google Search Appliance (http://search.tamu.edu/) will be re-indexed early Saturday morning (beginning around 2 am, then I’ll go back to bed). Search results will be unavailable for a short term and limited until the full index is recreated. Crawling, indexing, serving, and administrative access will resume within 15 minutes. Pages will be indexed in order of popularity, so searches will rapidly improve in quality. Last time we did this, our most popular searches were returning excellent results within half an hour. Complete functionality should be restored before most people wake up. This maintenance event will also be posted by CIS at http://enhancement.tamu.edu/
If you use a Google Search Appliance search box on your site (which you can and should), you might want to update your pages to use the public Google search while the index is rebuilding. But you probably get very few searches during those wee hours of the morning.
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.
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.)
New Maps Entry Portal
The campus map is probably the application for which we get the most public feedback. Some is good, some not so much. For a number of reasons there have always been several shortcomings with the site, and with the size of this university and the scope of what goes on here no such application can truly be considered comprehensive.
That’s why we’ll soon be launching a Maps Entry Portal to list and link to some of the maps that exist around campus showing more specific, targeted content. Please take a look at the new site at http://maps-test.tamu.edu and let us know what we’re leaving out. If you maintain or know of a map that is not included here and which you think might be of interest to the public, please pass it on to us. We’re the fist to admit that we don’t know everything there is to know about this campus.
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.
eduWeb – The Role of Writers
One of the purposes of the eduWeb conference was to bring together marketing and web people. One show of hands suggested that the audience was evenly split. I myself am fairly evenly split, having written both PHP code and annual reports – both coder and copywriter.
According to Sarah Stanek, Senior Writer at California State University East Bay, the underappreciated members of the web team are the writers. Writers need to be at the first web meeting, not the last. They need to become trusted as the content authority. The writer should be the managing editor on the Web team. Professional writers can offer four things: ability, authority, access, and accuracy.
How can experienced writers make a website better?
- They can encourage each member of the team to agree in advance on word count, voice, content lifespan.
- They can help to break log jams in the workflow. Stanek’s advice: ask for corrections and edits to the website, make them, acknowledge they’ve been made, then go live.
- For students, they can provide deadlines. For administrators, they can suggest topics to write about.
- They can help review blog posts before publishing, if necessary. “Boring is okay, long and boring is not,” says Stanek. Moderate comments quickly. Don’t be afraid to close comments either.
- They can write interview questions (but not the answers). Put ideas in their heads, then put cameras in their faces.
Under the influence of social media, some web strategists are calling for professionally-generated content (such as marketing copy) to be replaced by user-generated content (such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter) because “it sounds more authentic.” But Stanek sternly insists that professional writers do not sound inauthentic.
In fact, says Stanek, “student bloggers write about ten times more formally than I do.” At a major university, over-formality may be a more serious problem than students writing ungrammatically. But that’s a whole other issue: where do people get the idea that stilted writing makes them sound smarter? I think the University Writing Center has a 12-step program for that…
True, journalists who cut their teeth writing for newspapers and magazines need to adapt their style for the Web, but any professional knows how to adapt. Writers have had to deal with an electronically-oriented audience for a long time.
Besides, in the past forty years, people haven’t changed as much as all that, even if buzzwords have. “Blogging is not a meaningful verb,” Stanek says. “The word is writing.” Marshall McLuhan wrote, “The medium is the message,” in 1964. That is, simply because a story moves from a newsletter to the Web, the message changes. If only because the screen is harder on the eyes than paper, writing for the Web needs to be shorter and scannable.
A “pencast” of The Role of Writers session (audio synchronized with notes) is available.