redesigning lclark.edu

November 2007

Trillium’s “fixed” width

I swear my next post will be praising Trillium, but this post is to complain about the fixed width of the central content table in the regular layout templates.  The center section is supposed to be 608 pixels wide, which is also the size of the “photostrip” that sits atop it.  Small version of photostripAdd anything bigger than 608 pixels, however, and you will stretch the table beyond the width of the photostrip, giving the page a decidedly unprofessional look:Page too wideThe above image is from http://graduate.lclark.edu/dept/gseadmit/inforequest.html, but there are many other examples I have found.  Many were just a pixel of two too wide and I could quickly fix, though some (like the one above) relate to a form which cannot be edited easily.Another example is the English department at http://www.lclark.edu/dept/english/, which has a wonderful main image stretching the page.  The site would lose a lot of charm by reducing the image size.Really the solution is a more fluid layout in which pages can stretch (within reasonable limits) without breaking.

Filed Under

One person has made the whale happy; will you?(Go ahead, make a comment…)

Trillium - CSS - Tables

This is the first of series of posts I hope to be making over the next few weeks about what does/does not work in Trillium and therefore what L&C should/should not try to carry over to the new site…

Today I want to mention a major shortcoming:  Trillium produces webpages based on tables, not cascading style sheets.  The difference in flexibility and usability is documented
ad nauseam online and so not worth repeating here.  (Trillium was of course created when table layouts were all we were doing, but things have changed for the far better.)

While we do use style sheets with Trillium to control small things like background and link colors, they could be used to control so much more.  So I lobby a point which seems a no-brainer to me, but still must be mentioned: the new site must be based on style sheets not tables!

Filed Under

3 people have already made the whale happy; but who couldn’t be happier?(Go ahead, make a comment…)

Institutional Blogs

We recently received an email from Hanna Neuschwander from the Grad School regarding blogging:

“I’m interested in discussing the possibility of blogging, and how blogs could be incorporated through our website in the new redesign (much like the redesign blog itself, actually, but that an individual department could start up). My understanding is that currently, it would take a lot of work for you guys to set something that up. Is there a Trillium-like (decentralized) way that blog functionality could be incorporated for department sites? E.g., we’d like to set up an alumni book club for Grad School alumni (perhaps Morgan’s talked to you about this)? We think blogging would be the best way to do it. (We can’t do Moodle discussion groups because alumni don’t have active LC IDs/passwords.) Other possible uses — setting up event blogs for conferences that we host, with information and participatory commentary from attendees as the conference happens. Etc.”

And Noah responded:

“Blogs are on the way (maybe operational by next semester?), and are separate from the redesign, which means it will happen sooner. They are being setup and managed by IT, and are intended to address the exact situations you are bringing up.”

What I’ll add to this discussion is that we really don’t yet know how we’ll test and allocate the blogs. I expect Matt West (IT, sysadmin installing the software) may have some insight on this too. (Matt?)

Another issue is that we’ll need to write some use policies around this new service, since the institution should both protect itself (legally) from the freely expressed ideas of the blog authors, yet also include the ability to limit or restrict the service based on the standard cadre of non-protected speech among other unlawful acts.

Thoughts?

Filed Under

2 people have already made the whale happy; but who couldn’t be happier?(Go ahead, make a comment…)

A wild idea: using Firefox plugins

Something to think about:  Possibly doing some development as a Firefox plugin.
Over the weekend, I started a personal project writing a Firefox plugin.  It’s not very hard to write these, especially something that basically does:

  • Check if the currently loaded page matches some keyword,
  • Walk the HTML DOM, and make changes or insert CSS.

I think this has a lot of potential for cases where (1) there’s legacy code that’s notoriously hard to manage, and (2) internal users who can be advised to use the plugin for more functionality.

So for example, imagine that there are some things we’d want to fix with Trillium or the Stationery System, but are too hard or risky to do because of the source code.  The functionality could be done in a plugin.

Filed Under

3 people have already made the whale happy; but who couldn’t be happier?(Go ahead, make a comment…)

RSS Feeds

While they’ve always been available for this blog, I’ve just added links to the sidebar for the main blog RSS feed and the comments RSS feed and a whole bunch of subscription links. That way, you can add the feeds to your favorite news reader/aggregator.

For those of you that don’t know about RSS, it stands for Really Simple Syndication, and allows for easy sharing information. (Robb can provide more on the format if you’re interested.)

In case you need a different RSS format, here are all the feed links:

Filed Under

3 people have already made the whale happy; but who couldn’t be happier?(Go ahead, make a comment…)