My simple function for Array.indexOf doesn't actually cover the overloaded version in the JS 1.6 standard, which has an additional start parameter. Updated it to this:
if(!Array.indexOf){
Array.prototype.indexOf = function(obj, start){
for(var i=(start||0); i<this.length; i++){
if(this[i]==obj){
return i;
}
}
}
}
This is based on a tip here.
My turn on lates.
Met with Claire, France and Helena to arrange time on computers, plans for the work, etc. I have one task out of this: I need to write a simple description of the wildcard functionality in the search, for translation into French and inclusion on the Recherche page.
Met with S & L from GRS about the calendar feed display they want on their site. This is what they'd like to see:
To generate a feed which contains all the info we need, I have to use the Events calendar API, which has a rather arcane GET syntax. The default RSS 2.0 feed doesn't include all the info I need, but a URL like this will get what we want:
http://events.uvic.ca/rss/rss-feed.php?numdays=100&calendar=321
to which we need to add stuff like this:
&titleformat=<DATE>|<TIMES>|<TITLE>
which will put three pieces of info into the title field of the RSS XML, separated by pipes.
My plan is to use PHP5's SimpleXML code to parse out the RSS into PHP arrays, as modelled in this excellent article. I can tweak that to parse out the pipe-delimited bits from the title field. Then we just do some checking and sorting, and spit out the relevant items as XHTML with a JavaScript hideShow() function to make their bodies appear and disappear.
The one flaw in my plan right now is that PHP5 seems not to be working on Deer, at least when invoked through a .htaccess file, as recommended by Dave W and sysadmin. In fact, adding the suggested .htaccess file causes the whole site to disappear completely, in favour of a server error. They're working on that. Meanwhile, I should still be able to write the PHP code even if I can't test it.
The GRS site has been edited over quite a long period of time by the departmental secretary, using Contribute, but the site was never set up with Contribute content areas, so it's rather unkindly trashed a lot of the XHTML code. Elements are not closed, other elements have strange non-existent attributes, and many other minor issues had been introduced into the pages, in one or two cases causing pages to disappear in IE.
This took quite a while to fix; oXygen proved to be the best tool for the job, with the W3C validator to back it up. In the end, 34 files were fixed, and all files linked on the site now validate and display as expected.
This arose out of a meeting about the inclusion of events from the UVic events calendar on the site, using an RSS feed. Now the site is fixed, I'll go on to working on that (and I'll blogged on it in another post); meanwhile, GRS would like to discuss a site redesign, using PHP rather than depending so much on JavaScript, and using Contribute to constrain page editing appropriately. This is something we'll meet with them about when Clifton is back on board.
Scheduling labs for additional Linguistics lab request.
(Ling 261 - Sept. 27, Oct. 1/07 booking)
Sept. 7/07: Above request now cancelled - "temporary" lab
booking not convenient with students' timetables.
Administrative and operational tasks processed.
Conducted lab demos for Chinese 149, F01,F02,F03 classes.
CC sent metadata for two of the new files, so I updated the IMT XML files and passed the images on to Greg for cleaning up. When that's done, and he's created thumbnails, I'll move the XML files and the new images into the active folder, then create the Web View graphic using IMT, and post them on the server account for France to work on.
Stayed late on Wednesday (forgot to post it yesterday).