Cascade

Final fixes and tidying up nearly complete. Spent some time fixing the odd typo, demonstrating how to add news and archive it and how to create and link to anchors. All that remains to be done is to replace two photos, and to add some "back to top" links on long pages. Asked LG if we could launch by the end of the week.

Met with MM and ran through the process for moving to Cascade. Followed up with sample documents. They will do a basic navplan, and we'll take it from there, hoping to get provisioned before the October Cascade workshop.

GN and I met with JS and LG -- JS is handing over to LG for a year, so LG will be our contact on Cascade projects.

The Pacific Asia site work is now under way, and MK dropped by for help with some Cascade issues. The GUI for Cascade editing is pretty under-functional in non-IE browsers, so we always end up messing with the code in the end for things like tables. Gave her a copy of all the photos from the current PA site, to save downloading them one by one.

Created all the pages and navigation structure based on the approved navplan. Over to EG-W for the content.

Saw a broken link error that's been in the History site report for a couple of weeks now, so I fixed it.

Entered today all primaries, secondaries and some sub-secondaries on the site.
Remainder of site in progress.

Sent email to BB, SB (GRS) cc'd SA advising what has been done to date.
BB, SB both attending Cascade training session next week.

Built the complete P&A site structure down to the bottom level pages, and organized the navigation. Remaining to be done: additional-marketing and external-links.

With SA, synthesized all the various changes and suggestions into a single document, then met with the folks from P & A and finalized them all. SA has merged them back into the final spreadsheet, and we're ready to get to work. I created the primary folders.

Posting time spent with LSPW figuring out how to port the old colloquium materials over to the Cascade site.

Met with PAB and JT to discuss moving Beck to Cascade. The decision is to wait until PAB's PhD is finished, at the end of the year.

Broken link reports came in with many links on Hist still broken from before, so I went through them and fixed any that are genuine (many are not -- Xenu seems to report lots of links which are perfectly OK). Reported reasons and changes to TG. Also checked out some odd items on the otherwise-empty WOST report which seem to be for the CFUV site, not from WOST at all. Reported that to CB, who fixed it.

ST solved a long-standing issue in the Xenu broken link report for the French site. Apparently when a number of pages were originally created, they were made by copy/pasting from the existing site. That site had links to a Contact page, which were then deleted -- except that what was deleted was only the text, not the anchor tag, so the links were still there, invisible. Deleted them all, except for one reported by ST on a page which no longer seems to exist (french/current-students/graduate/colloquium/index.php). Wrote to LSPW to find out what happened to that page.

Cascade (HCMC site)

Attended Cascade drop-in session:

Issues:
- banner color (color will be implemented later today by communications staff)

- home-home: issue has already been reported by others; will be addressed by communications later; (HCMC -correct as is for now).

Reviewed:
- "page mirroring"
- content details

GRS - website

Prepared GRS website navigation structure spreadsheet; forwarded it BB for review.
Prepared GRS project document in readiness to forward to communications when navigation structure confirmed.

Sent email with attachment to BB to review navigation structure.
(cc'd SA)

HCMC website - Cascade

Making progress with the HCMC website. Basically have the site
now structured and am inserting content. However, a couple of issues
still to be sorted out e.g. color in banner; "home" primary displaying
a little different than expected. Will address at drop-in session.

Update to new site:

Content:
- inserting content from old site to new site sections

Blocks:
- created new blocks (assets); inserted in contact information (hours)

External links:
- created and applied

Projects:
- received updated list from SA; inserted in new site

Index pages:
- created for staff information; individual pages

Layout:
-reordered primaries

Tertiary:
- applied

Next steps:

-"Welcome" text for landing page required (SA)
-"Conference" information TBA
- attend drop-in session for further instruction

Finished working through the 11-page History feedback report, sorting into stuff I just implemented myself, stuff that's urgent for TG to do, and stuff that needs discussion in the department.

Last week, I determined that the presence of a link tag with an empty @href attribute was causing the Xenu Link Sleuth to report a non-existent broken link on every page of the WS site. We narrowed this down to an error in the assets/blocks/layout/site-scripts block, which had been left with a placeholder "thesite" instead of the actual path.

Trying to correct this myself failed; it seemed to "take", but then it appeared that nothing had been saved and the audit trail showed that the file had not been edited. Reported this, and DW called; he made the change, but bequeathed the tip that when saving you should uncheck the "Tidy HTML" checkbox. I tried this on History, which also has the same problem; the result was success, but with a minor side-effect: suddenly the History site acquired the "Food" header appropriate to Food Services. I wasn't exactly sure where this had come from, but just in case, I commented out the entire content of the site-styles.css file (which is unnecessary anyway), and republished the site. It now seems to be working correctly.

Worked through the first half of the History feedback, doing a lot of the stuff myself and sending categorized bits to TG as well.

• All sites are now live, and aliases are in place and working.
• There are 11 pages of feedback reports to go through for History. I've worked through two pages, making some changes, writing instructions for others (so TG knows how to do various things), and categorized others as requiring dept consideration. I need to work through the remaining 9 pages.
• The broken link report from WS is itself broken, probably caused by a mysterious empty stylesheet link that is inserted by the site-scripts block. CB is investigating; if nothing emerges, I'll contact DW. I think the problem is caused by the XSLT that processes the site-scripts block; which converts a link to a local CSS file (which I don't think we even need) into a link tag with an empty href attribute.
• I found and fixed another bug reported by TG on the History site, which was only apparent in Internet Explorer. Someone had added lots of empty h3 tags in an effort to make one table appear below another one (they were showing side by side), and this (as usual) freaked out IE. Removed the empty tags, and added a style attribute with a clear property to make the tables display correctly.

Both WS and History have decided they want to go live, so I've asked JC to make it so.

Made 20-odd structural changes to the History site, based on the department's response to the IA's review. Everything desired is now accomplished, except that it proves impossible in Cascade to specify a tooltip for a menu item which is different from the menu caption itself. This means we can't gloss acronyms in the menu with their expansions. Still waiting to hear from the dept how they would like to proceed on this issue (expand captions, or leave acronyms unexpanded).

Feedback from IA on the History site came in the form of a completely reworked structure in the dreaded spreadsheet format. Spent the afternoon going through the proposed structure, comparing it to the old, and creating a list of action items for each of the proposed changes, along with a putative rationale for the change, and notes on implications and implementation. Some changes make sense, others don't, and some are simply puzzling. The dept folks will look at the spreadsheet and my action list and make decisions on all the changes; it's not yet decided whether we'll implement structural changes prior to launch, or whether it's a bit late in the day for this, and it needs to be a separate project undertaken after launch. Meanwhile, TG is working on the content notes. More feedback will come in through JC in due course.

TG reported that some users were complaining about over-large fonts on part of a page on the History test site. I finally figured out that only IE has the problem, and it was caused by an empty <h2> tag which had been left in the field by mistake.

JS sent the feedback from the WS site. I implemented the more complicated bits, wrote a couple of notes for HR, and sent it on to her; most is content-related or stylistic, so not my concern. It should be done in a week or so.

Did some tech support for TG on the History site, including trying to figure out why we're getting some broken link messages on from publishing particular pages; the links pointed at are not in fact broken, so there seems to be a bug at work. For now we'll just ignore them.