The service will be unavailable for an hour later this week.

Due to essential server maintenance, our Siteimprove Response service will be unavailable from 11:00 PM CDT on Wednesday, June 24 to 12:00 AM CDT on Thursday, June 25.  During this hour, we’ll be unable to monitor or alert on customer response checkpoints. However, just because we’re getting some shut eye doesn’t mean you’re in the dark: our new status page will report when the scheduled maintenance begins, and when the period concludes.

You can view the system status and sign up for alerts here.

New Features

A new website for Science and Mathematics at Middlebury is live. A lot of work from faculty and staff in these departments, as well as College Communications went into putting this together, especially from Jonathan Kemp and Wendy Shook. Check out the new video about teaching these subjects in the liberal arts.

When authoring a News story in the Middlebury Drupal site, there is now an additional checkbox at the bottom of the form to “Show Media Images”. If you check this, a row of 100×100 image thumbnails will appear below your story’s content. The thumbnails will be of the images that you included in your story’s body content as well as the top-right featured image. Each thumbnail will link to the full-size version of the image, so that it can be easily downloaded and shared.

Also new to News content in the Middlebury Drupal site is that the “Show Publish on date for attribution” checkbox will be checked by default. Since we don’t print content attributions, this won’t change the appearance of your content. However, this is required to be checked in order to automatically sort News content in reverse chronological order on the page. With this checked, you will no longer need to manually sort News content on the page.

Updates

• Drupal 6.36*
• Drupal cck 6.x-2.10*
• Drupal 7.38
• Drupal config_perms 7.x-2.1
• Drupal feeds 7.x-2.0-alpha9
• Drupal honeypot 7.x-1.18
• Drupal jquery_update 7.x-2.6
• WordPress Sketch Theme 1.1.1

* These updates apply only to the Middlebury and MIIS Course Hub.

Tweaks and Fixes

• A bug that was preventing the Metatag module’s form from working on the page settings form in Drupal has been resolved.
• The Google Analytics tracking code on the MIIS website has been replaced with a Google Tag Manager, which allows us to manage analytics and tracking without needing to make code changes to the site.
• The CAS login blocks will no longer have an empty header tag appear above them. This was removed to improve site accessibility support.
• The settings page for the WordPress Video Plugin will now appear again in WordPress’ administration interface. This was not appearing due to a deprecated version of the function that checks user permissions. The page contains a link to the plugin’s documentation.
• The height of the left column on department pages is once again correctly calculated to avoid the overlapping of the navigation and address regions.
• RSS feeds displayed in www.middlebury.edu and www.miis.edu via the “RSS Page” module will now refresh approximately every hour rather than every two hours.

Chemical trick speeds up 3D printing – With a trick of chemistry, researchers have sped up, and smoothed, the process of three-dimensional (3D) printing, producing objects in minutes instead of hours.

The new Middlebury Science and Mathematics feature page — where you can find science news, and events calendar, and department and resource information all in one place — is now live! Visit us at go.middlebury.edu/scimath or find us on the Academics page, under Science and Mathematics in the left hand menu.

New Features

The Newsroom site now has nicely designed social media buttons and individual news stories have similar share buttons. Hovering over the email button no longer automatically opens a pop-out window. You have to manually click the button.

You can now specify the text color and whether to show the title and byline in Drupal Vimeo embeds. See our updated documentation on Drupal Shortcodes for more information.

Updates

• WordPress Akismet 3.1.2
• WordPress OpenStreetMap 3.3.1
• WordPress WPtouch 3.7.9.1

Tweaks and Fixes

• The RSS feed of stories from the Newsroom had been broken since the Drupal 7 upgrade, but is now working again. The URL needed to be changed slightly, so you should re-subscribe.

Accessibility

We are beginning to make changes to the site to improve its accessibility according to the WCAG guidelines. In particular, this week:

• The label for the “Search Midd” form is no longer hidden using “display:none”. Instead it is now very narrow so that it won’t appear visually in a browser, but will be read on assistive devices.
• The labels for the email newsletter signup form on the Newsroom site now correctly correspond to their checkboxes.
• The links in the footer to the alumni sites that have labels like “Middlebury Language Schools” now have title attributes specifying that they are “For Alumni” to avoid confusion with links labelled “Middlebury Language Schools” elsewhere on the page.
• One instance of the <center> tag has been removed from the site.
• The “Skip to Main Content” links are now correctly linked to the main content element on the page.
• The headings for the “Quick Search” boxes, such as on the Offices & Services page are now being used as proper labels for the form element.
• The wordmark logos for Middlebury and its affiliate programs are now background images and there is actual text in the header elements on each of the pages, making it easier for them to be read by assistive devices.

This is just the beginning of many accessibility improvements we’ll be making, and working with you to make as well. To learn more about this topic, here is a Lynda.com session on Improving SEO Using Accessibility Techniques and you can view the accessibility issues with the Middlebury site in SiteImprove.