Library & Information Services » Bryan Carson http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis We Bring Knowledge to You Fri, 17 May 2013 20:06:23 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 Weekly Web Development Round-up November 4, 2011 http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/11/04/weekly-web-development-round-up-november-10-21-2011/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/11/04/weekly-web-development-round-up-november-10-21-2011/#comments Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:00:53 +0000 Bryan Carson http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=27167 Continue reading →]]> To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

Drupal

We’ve been able to successfully import content from the College Archives into Drupal using the Feeds OAI-PMH module which connects to CONTENTdm and pulls in all of the record metadata in the Dublin Core fields. This allows us to display views of information from the archives in Drupal, like a list of lectures in the Digital Lecture Archive.

Mobile/Portal

  • The Events calendar on the Current Students site now includes events from both the Featured Events and Student Events calendars. Thanks to our colleague Kristina in Events Management for putting together this combined calendar.
  • We’ve added a Weather module which include a five day forecast from WeatherUnderground.com based on data from our on-campus weather station. The Weather module also includes photos from our MiddCams.
  • The Featured News module (renamed from “MiddPoints”) now includes posts from MiddNotes and MiddPoints.
  • Thanks to user feedback the mobile/portal directory now includes office hours in the result details.
  • We’ve added an icon to link to WebMail from the mobile site’s homepage.
  • We’ve added a Giving icon to the mobile site’s homepage.

GO
Bug fixes to GO so that checking to see if there is a duplicate admin takes into account the institution of the code (MIIS or Midd).

]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/11/04/weekly-web-development-round-up-november-10-21-2011/feed/ 0 Weekly Web Development Round-up October 10-21, 2011 http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/21/weekly-web-development-round-up-october-10-21-2011/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/21/weekly-web-development-round-up-october-10-21-2011/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2011 21:00:28 +0000 Bryan Carson http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26964 Continue reading →]]> To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

Main site and mobile site speed improvements

Our main website and mobile website make fabulous use of data feeds from blogs, calendars, Twitter, and other sources to provide up-to-date news and information to users of the sites. Some pages in the main site have as many as 3 feeds in the carousel at the bottom of the page and another 2 feeds in sidebars. The mobile site displays 7 feeds on its home page for desktop users.

Unfortunately displaying all of these feeds on the site was causing performance problems for users when those feeds needed to be refreshed.  Even if the blog system returns each feed in under a second, that time adds up and was making users wait for 10 seconds or more for some pages to load.

We are happy to announce that we have now resolved this issue by piping all of our data-feed access through a system we call FetchProxy. FetchProxy sits between Drupal and the source of the data feeds and keeps a fresh copy of the feed always available so that Drupal never has to sit and wait for feeds. Pages that once took more than 10 seconds to load, now load in 1-2 seconds. You can read more about FetchProxy on Github.

Campus Map

We’ve updated the interface for our Campus Map with the help of designers in College Communications. New features include a list of locations with quick icons to help you find special locations, a search interface, an improved photo gallery, and more special filters which allow you to scope the locations on the map. For instance, you can get a map of all the locations on campus with Wireless.

MiddMedia

A permalink is now available for each file in MiddMedia. You can access it for a particular video you click the “Embed Code & URLs” next to any video you are browsing in MiddMedia and click on the “Click here to view and/or download this file.”. Alternately you can construct this URL like this “http://middmedia.middlebury.edu/middmedia/view/dir/[the directory where the file is located]/file/[the name of the file with its extension]

Example: http://middmedia.middlebury.edu/middmedia/view/dir/lafrance/file/go.mp4

This is useful if you want to reference your video without embedding it elsewhere.

]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/21/weekly-web-development-round-up-october-10-21-2011/feed/ 0 Weekly Web Development Round-up October 3-7, 2011 http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/07/weekly-web-development-round-up-october-3-7-2011/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/07/weekly-web-development-round-up-october-3-7-2011/#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2011 21:00:02 +0000 Bryan Carson http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26917 Continue reading →]]> To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

Web Portal

M.middlebury.edu, home to our mobile portal and web portal has recently seen an update to the web portal customization options. This includes the ability to customize portal panels in the left and right columns independently. Panels can now be chosen from the full list of currently available modules. You still have the option to toggle default modules off and rearrange modules. This goes for the modules that appear in the navigation and the ones that appear as panels on the home page.

MiddLab

Working papers published by the Economics department are now automatically added as projects in MiddLab. We’ll be adding other feeds to MiddLab in the near future.

MiddSTART

The MiddSTART site got a minor facelift. You can now view the MiddSTART Success Stories and special categories of projects, like Scholarships.

]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/10/07/weekly-web-development-round-up-october-3-7-2011/feed/ 0 Weekly Web Development Round-up September 19-23, 2011 http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/23/weekly-web-development-round-up-september-19-23-2011/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/23/weekly-web-development-round-up-september-19-23-2011/#comments Fri, 23 Sep 2011 20:35:43 +0000 Bryan Carson http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26850 Continue reading →]]> To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

Site Performance

We don’t have many new features to announce this week, other than the previously announced addition of Photo Rosters to the Course Hub. Instead, we’d like to let you know about a few improvements we’ve recently made to overall site performance. We recognize that editing the site has been very slow since early in August and got worse with the start of classes. When we upgraded database servers over the summer a caching optimization that we’d made to the previous server wasn’t transferred to the new one. This optimization has been re-applied and the server should now perform better.

We’ve also made several improvements to our application code that will increase performance. We noticed that the calendars from 25Live were giving a unique code to every visitor. This made it impossible for our server to use the cached version of the page that is normally sent to non-editors after they’d viewed a calendar on our site. That unique code is no longer set. Additionally, all RSS feeds on the site are now cached for three hours, so that feeds like the Home Page Stories, which normally take 10-15 seconds to generate can be delivered in a few milliseconds instead – this in turn improves performance on our mobile site. Don’t worry though, whenever a new story is created we drop the cached version of the feed and create a new one so you’re always seeing the freshest content, just like we do with the Athletics site whenever the scoreboard is updated.

There was also a short interruption of service in the Course Hub yesterday. We’ve discovered the cause and corrected the issue so that it will not occur again.

Dining Menu Feeds

We’ve had this feature in place since the beginning of the semester, but haven’t told you about it. You can now get the Dining Menu as an RSS or iCal feed. iCal is a calendar data format that you can use to subscribe to the Dining Menus in Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, the Mac OS X iCal application, and many other calendaring applications.

The two feeds can be found at:

If you’re only interested in a particular Dining Hall, you can limit the results by adding “today” and either “Proctor”, “Ross”, “Atwater”, “Grille”, or “Language Tables”:

If you’re only interested in a particular meal, you can further limit the results using “breakfast”, “lunch”, and “dinner”:

If you like to plan ahead, you can use “tomorrow” instead of “today” and if you’re a nostalgic type you can even use “yesterday”. Particular dates in the form YYYY-MM-DD:

MIIS Website

We’ve applied a new design to the Fronteir Market Scouts and Executive Education program sites.

Middlebury Website

Want to keep up-to-date on the latest working papers from the Economics department? We now have an RSS feed for their working papers series.

MiddLab

Two new projects this week:

]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/23/weekly-web-development-round-up-september-19-23-2011/feed/ 0 Weekly Web Development Round-up September 11-16, 2011 http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/16/weekly-web-development-round-up-september-11-16-2011/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/16/weekly-web-development-round-up-september-11-16-2011/#comments Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:00:25 +0000 Bryan Carson http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26730 Continue reading →]]> To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

The pages for Current Students and Faculty & Staff have been changed to use the Kurogo framework that we’re also using for the mobile website. These offer two “presets” of information that we think is relevant to those visitors, replacing pages that were previously little more than lists of links. This is particularly important for the Current Students page which in the last year received 50.13% (91,912 of 183,363) of its visits from off campus, likely from prospective students curious about what life is like for current students. A version of the page for Parents is being developed.

MiddLab

  • The MiddLab homepage has been redesigned so that we can feature a whole category of projects at once, instead of just a single project. On the left you’ll see a cross reference of all the other categories that relate to these projects.
  • There is a new Course Blogs page that lists any of the publicly accessible blogs that have been assigned to courses in the Course Hub. We’ll expand this to include other types of public course resources in the future. If your course’s blog doesn’t appear here, it’s either private to the course or the instructor hasn’t added it to the Course Hub.
  • MiddLab posts now contain Open Graph markup so that when they’re shared on Facebook or Google+ relevant pieces of content are also shared, like a thumbnail from the post. You can also follow MiddLab on Twitter or check out MiddLab’s Facebook page.

Drupal

  • Lists of non-image File Uploads now work better. The document type graphic is placed to the left of the title, the title is linked directly to the document rather than the node, and caption text describing the document can now be added. Try it out by uploading a PDF to one of your pages.
  • Dates in emails created by Webform are now in MM/DD/YYYY format instead of YYYY-MM-DD format.
  • We’ve improved the performance of the Office & Services page. If you’re missing the big lists of links that the Current Students and Faculty & Staff pages offered, try the faster Offices & Services page.
]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/16/weekly-web-development-round-up-september-11-16-2011/feed/ 0 Weekly Web Development Round-up September 5 – 9, 2011 http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/09/weekly-web-development-round-up-september-5-9-2011/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/09/weekly-web-development-round-up-september-5-9-2011/#comments Fri, 09 Sep 2011 21:00:15 +0000 Bryan Carson http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26600 Continue reading →]]> To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

Dining Menu Application

The dining menus application has received a major overhaul. Menu navigation has been streamlined and is now more intutive.

To check out the new dining menus application here: http://go.middlebury.edu/menus.

Drupal

  • We are going to offer an alternative to the “Juice Bar” feature that’s used on some sites, like Economics, Studio Art, and International Studies. The new feature will work like the image gallery on the Museum of Art site and will only require editors to produce images for the feature, instead of messing around with the “Juice Bar’s” clunky editing form. Here is a mockup of how this might look on the Economics site.
  • There are two new features for Webforms
    • When downloading a report to Excel, you can now choose to only download the last N number of submissions, or submissions from a particular date range, or only the new submissions that have come in since the last time you downloaded a report to Excel.
    • You can now make a form field “private”. This will hide the field on the form and only people who have access to edit the form will be able to fill it out. This is useful for “department use only” fields.
  • We now check both the file extension and MIME type of file uploads, which should resolve issues with Firefox users being unable to upload files due to having a corrupt mimeTypes.rdf file.
  • Modules updated: webform, views_random_seed

GO

A QR code is now accessible for each GO shortcut via the info page for each shortcut. Just click the (i) icon next to any shortcut in the Gotionary and click the “Display QR code” link.

MiddLab

Four posts this week contain interviews with Middlebury Faculty, Staff, and Students.

]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/09/weekly-web-development-round-up-september-5-9-2011/feed/ 0 Weekly Web Development Round-up August 29 – September 2, 2011 http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/02/weekly-web-development-round-up-august-29-september-2-2011/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/02/weekly-web-development-round-up-august-29-september-2-2011/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 21:00:44 +0000 Bryan Carson http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26413 Continue reading →]]> To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

  • Moodle is now live and in ready for use for the fall semester. Sign up for a training session or request a course site.
  • You can now log into WordPress (sites.middlebury.edu) when viewing it on a mobile device.
  • m is on the way…. ….more to come next week. ;-)
]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/09/02/weekly-web-development-round-up-august-29-september-2-2011/feed/ 0 Weekly Web Development Round-up August 22-26, 2011 http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/08/26/weekly-web-development-round-up-august-22-26-2011/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/08/26/weekly-web-development-round-up-august-22-26-2011/#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 21:00:21 +0000 Bryan Carson http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26411 Continue reading →]]> To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

  • Fixed a bug in the SubjectsPlus interface.
  • Began the migration process to the new ProQuest Platform
  • Did quite a bit of Drupal support.
  • Fixed error in go/groups that prevented changing the group manager in IE 7.
  • Fixed an error in the Course Hub which prevented uploading syllabi in IE 7.

 

 

]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/08/26/weekly-web-development-round-up-august-22-26-2011/feed/ 0 Weekly Web Development Round-up August 15-19, 2011 http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/08/19/weekly-web-development-round-up-august-15-19-2011/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/08/19/weekly-web-development-round-up-august-15-19-2011/#comments Fri, 19 Aug 2011 21:00:15 +0000 Bryan Carson http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26409 Continue reading →]]> To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

Drupal

  • We switched from using an autocomplete field for choosing images in News stories to using a pop-up browser window some months ago. If you long for the days of using the autocomplete field, you can turn this back on by visiting your profile page in Drupal, clicking “Edit” in the Edit Console, selecting Interface Settings in the Edit Console and checking the “Use Autocomplete to Select Images” checkbox. This will eventually apply to choosing images for Profiles and Stories as well.
  • Links and images in Drupal News RSS feeds have been fixed to use an absolute URL which includes http://www.middlebury.edu. This should fix broken images in the content of news posts in the RSS feed.
  • The contents of the “media” field, which is usually an image or embedded video, have been added to the MIIS News RSS feed.
  • The MIIS site has a new theme, which will soon be used for their Executive Education Program and Center for the Blue Economy that features an image slider and drop-down navigation.
  • The Promotional Calendar content type, used to display calendars from 25Live, is now available on the MIIS site.
  • There is now a link to the Middlebury Museum of Art in the Quick Links section of the Middlebury site footer.
  • The RSS feeds for homepage stories on the Middlebury site now sort the featured stories (those that Communications has chosen to open automatically when you visit the homepage) to the top of the feed.
  • Module updates: webform, gravatar, views_random_seed
]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/08/19/weekly-web-development-round-up-august-15-19-2011/feed/ 0 Weekly Web Development Round-up August 8-12, 2011 http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/08/12/weekly-web-development-round-up-august-8-12-2011/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/08/12/weekly-web-development-round-up-august-8-12-2011/#comments Fri, 12 Aug 2011 21:00:25 +0000 Bryan Carson http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=26370 Continue reading →]]> To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

Do you love the stories on the Middlebury home page, but aren’t sure how to find new ones when they are added? You can now subscribe to an RSS feed of the stories. You can also subscribe to feeds of stories from each of the specific sections:

Drupal

  • The “Download Contact Information” link on profiles is no longer displayed if the person’s record is hidden in the Directory. Since the records were hidden, the downloaded contact information was blank, making this feature not useful for those individuals.
  • Names in the Online Donor Roll containing parts like “de la” are now alphabetized correctly.
  • The current list of colors used in the home page “equalizer” bars can now be retrieved programmatically at http://www.middlebury.edu/middlebury_story/colors.

Segue

  • The “Institution Users” group now contains Breadloaf and MIIS.

WordPress

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