Wherein we write down some stuff that we know.
From time to time we in WEBD poke and prod at some development stuff. We look at new technologies and new techniques that we feel might be able to enhance the campus web presence or the help our end-users in some manner. Today, we launched a “beta” of a new Campus Search page that we’ve been working on which was inspired by the folks at CSU, Humboldt. Go test drive our new search page today and let us know what you think.
I love how Mail.app thinks the new ProofPoint Junk Mail Digest is itself “Junk Mail”
Click thumbnail for full-size
This is hardly new information, but it’s clear that it bears repeating. Every finals week we see a surge in the number of Google hits for our posts with “Finals Week” in the title and header tags. Unfortunately we don’t have the information people are looking for. We did go back and update our posts with links to the information we assumed they were looking for, which is the schedule for when finals are held.
Semantic markup is a key component of accessible content, but it’s also critical for SEO. The more accessible you make your content, the more likely you are to have better search hits for your content.
It is just me or did anyone else notice that iGoogle (aka Google Personalized Homepage) is now using YUI Grids ? Talk about validating the direction you’ve choosen for adapting a framework: both Yahoo and Google are now using the YUI Grids framework. Mega Cool.
A very subtle change occurred on campus today. No, it wasn’t the mysterious JunkMail Digests that appeared in our inbox, rather a step forward toward a better future.
At the request of Public Affairs, we updated the Public Facilities page. With the ATI we’ve been cleaning up some of the pages on the campus web server as we go just to make sure we’re covering our basis. I noticed that the Public Facilities page was using a University template that appeared to be from the late 1990’s.
So, I cleaned-up the page and made it accessible and valid HTML, etc. In addition, I tossed the content into one of our “beta” templates that’s built upon the YUI Reset/Fonts/Grids foundation.
We hope that this foundation will eventually be made available to other web contributors on campus. Right now, we’re still finding corner cases and looking for ways to abstract CSS into components for more of an ala carte option. Read the rest of this entry »
Lately this phrase has been getting a lot of use. It’s hard to bring up problems with “best practices” as the reaction might be framed as if you were advocating “worst practices.” That being said…
What defines “best?” In a recent ALA article, “Educate Your Stakeholders!” they actually give a very good definition.
Best practices are the set of development conventions used by professionals who create content and services for the World Wide Web. (emphasis mine)
Notice that in this scenario it is “conventions” and not a list of specific developer tools or languages, save ECMAScript, which in reality is the only client-side language you can rely on these days.
Do “best practices” developed somewhere else apply locally? This is where you parents might ask you the infamous “jump off a bridge” question. Are you evaluating these practices before putting them into place?
I don’t have a problem with best practices, far from it. I just don’t like ideas getting a free pass from scrutiny because somebody stuck a golden label on them. I like to think that our department has instituted a number of practices that are closer to best than worst. Typically they came to be out of necessity, like with source code management. When you have two people working on one code-base, you need SCM.
Best practices are at the beginning of the “getting better” process, not the end.
Yesterday we flipped the switch on our web server migration project. We migrated the campus web server from SunONE to Apache. We had a number of issues to deal with. The big ones were:
For the first one, there was some sysadmin magic done with the user/group creation on the new system. This allowed the uid to change, but file and group ownerships to survive the migration. But because the uid was changing we also had to redirect ~ directories from old to new.
The second caused a lot of little problems. Binaries that people had hard coded into scripts were not where they were expected to be. Linux has a lot of stuff in /bin that Solaris has in /usr/bin, like ls. I know, who would hard code the location to ls? People do. A few strategically placed symbolic links solved the majority of these issues.
The one thing that we didn’t account for was the difference in the sshd server key. That caused a lot of problems for the help desk at first. Things have calmed down now and overall the migration went pretty well. Users can now authenticate with the LDAP username and password (which is nice). We now have the ability to start thinking about what kind of services Apache will allow us to offer to our users.
The Magic 8 Ball says “Outlook Good.”
I got word today that one both of my two proposals were accepted. Here are the executive summaries:
So you’ve deployed uPortal, CAS, Confluence, and JIRA. You’ve conquered Maven and your entire life is represented in XML configuration files. You’ve got Java application deployment down to a science. Now some guy from Denmark comes along and says you’ve got it all wrong. The nerve!
We treaded lightly into the world of Rails but over the past year we have learned a lot of valuable lessons that can be applied to web development in general.
- Convention over configuration in the right measure
- Deployment needs to be easy
- Deployment needs to integrate with your SCM
Rails has benefitted from a tremendous hype cycle, but a lot of the benefits are real and can translate to other frameworks.
As technology workers and managers we often have more things to do than we have time, so we are constantly on the lookout for time savers. They say that time is money and we all know that to make money you have to spend money. A similar concept applies to time in that you have to spend time to save time. We’ll look at how JIRA helps you do this, but also focus on how to implement JIRA to make sure it’s a success.
Specific topics will include:
- Who should get a JIRA project
- Setting realistic expectations
- How usage will differ between types of users
- Using JIRA to Get Things Done
Our fellow web developer Tony Dunn has written up two post that deserve your attention.
Enjoy.
For those who missed it or were unable to attend, You can view the slides from Accessibility Evaluation of Next Generation Web Applications.
I was glad to see that someone used S5 and gave a link to the slides. The best tidbit that I took away from this session was that WebAIM’s Wave 4.0 (when released) will be a great tool for testing applications for different accessibility checks without having to send data over the network. This is a big advantage to those application using AJAX technologies or sites that are password protection or on a secure network. I’m anxiously awaiting the public beta version.
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