HCMC Blogs

Publication to the dev site is now set up, and I published; this reveals two problems:

• The default page set up in French (and in History, although not in Women's Studies, for some reason) includes an image rotator in the banner; this makes the banner huge, and in any case the image rotator doesn't work properly in our Humanities banner because the images have a white background instead of being transparent. I've looked through all the places I can imagine where this might be controlled, and I can't find any difference between French and WS in this respect, although one has the image rotator and the other doesn't. Wrote to DW for help with this.
• CH has created folder names with spaces in them, which predictably fail on the published site. I've written to her so she can fix that.

Publication was quick and easy, though.

The library is running an instance of OCS, and IK set me up with an account for testing it, to see if it would suit our purposes for DHSI. I set up a couple of test conferences, but as far as I can see, it can't handle the sort of special-event-registration we want to handle; you can have different registration types, but you can't let people choose events and/or courses and register specifically for them. So it looks as though RegOnline is the best option, at the moment.

Went through the blog list revoking a few permissions that were out of date, and hiding a couple of blogs whose projects aren't currently active.

I've been looking at the URL Rewriting documentation, and writing some test libraries. I've also looked at Jamie's Francotoile work, and I'm learning from that, and deciding to do some things slightly differently from the way his site works. Things learned today:

• If you deploy in Tomcat using a WAR file, don't ever delete the WAR file; Tomcat deletes the app irrecoverably. Nothing valuable lost, but it could have been.
• Nothing outside of WEB-INF is actually required. The JNLP continues to function as long as it's configured in controller-config.xml (in WEB-INF).
• The approach of putting the application logic inside a collection called site is a good one; relative links in output to e.g. CSS files in subcollections "just work", but they're served as application/xml or whatever rather than text/css, so I think it's more productive to have a configuration in controller-config.xml which calls an XQuery for ANY path ending in .css; that way the correct response headers can be sent, and CSS files are accessible from anywhere in the site structure, without worrying about relative paths.
• For permissions, "update" doesn't really appear to mean "update" in the case of XQL files; to enable a guest to browse to an XQL file and see its output, it needs to have world "update". However, as long as world doesn't have update on the folder containing the XQL file, it's safe from modification by guest. This means you really can't be mixing data and logic.

BD sent over her instructions for working with PS or PS Elements, but I've worked out a little procedure for preparing these banner photos using the GIMP. These are the steps:

1. Choose your image.
2. Crop and scale the image so you have something which is 508 pixels wide, and about 196 pixels high, including the bits that are going to stick out.
3. Make sure you have an alpha channel in your picture — Layer / Transparency / Add Alpha Channel./ If it's greyed out, you already have one.
4. Select a rectangle which will comprise the rounded bounding box, out of which the sticky-out bits will stick.
5. Select / Rounded Rectangle..., then set it to 15% and hit Apply. Your box should become nicely rounded at the corners.
6. Select / Invert, to select the rest of the image, then hit Control + X to cut, and then File / Create / From Clipboard. This will move the cut bit of your image to the clipboard, where you can work with it in a minute.
7. On the original image, choose Select / Invert again, then Edit / Stroke Selection. Set the width to 1 pixel, and press OK. You should now have a rounded rectangle with a border around it.
8. Switch to the other image, and do whatever you need to do to isolate the sticky-out bits. One approach is to use the lasso tool to outline the bits; you could also carefully erase the background using an eraser.
9. When only the sticky-out bits remain, and the rest of the background is transparent, draw a selection rectangle around them and hit Control + C to copy to the clipboard.
10. Switch to the other image and press Control + V to paste the protrusions back into the image. Position them carefully over the image so that they cover the border line and line up with the main image correctly.
11. Layer / Anchor Layer, to fix the pasted bits in place.
12. Save as XCF, in case you need to edit later.
13. Export as JPG (no transparency), or preferably PNG, which will preserve your transparency.

Created a couple more external links buttons that weren't needed for previous sites (Campus Security contact info, and UVic Calendar), and put all five buttons together into a layout block called external-links. Then:

Administration / Configuration sets / Site Configuration / Edit, then add the block to 08-QUICKLINKS.

External links are now done for WS.

Leaving early. Came in early too, today.

Backing up my regular dbs, I noticed there are lots of unused ones, which may impact performance a bit. In consultation with GN, deleted a handful of obsolete, unused, and test databases from MySQL on TAPoR, including a Joomla, a Drupal, a Moodle and an empty B2Evo.