Update of Humanities Sites

I was asked to make a permanent URL for Humanities Week (2019). Although the request was too close to the event for this year, they did setup a permanent URL that redirects uvic.ca/humanitiesweek to hcmc.uvic.ca/humanitiesweek. This redirect is forever.

At AS's request, updated the People page on the Hums site to account for changes in personnel in the Dean's office.

Determined after a couple of hours of testing that a posting in the uvic events calendar contains the control character 0016 (synchronous idle). The constructor for the RSSReader in the hums site reads that in to a string and then attempts to parse the string into an XML structure. The parsing fails so the php process fails so the user sees an empty white page.

I added a line of code to the constructor which strips out all control characters (except carriage return and line feed) after the string is read in, but before it is parsed into XML. That seems to have solved the problem.

I wrote to Dave Wolowicz and suggested that the Rss output from the events calendar should be stripped of control characters that XML doesn't support before being shipped out to the client.

The current English department site is dependent on a content management system. The people in the department I've talked with find the system brittle and fragile, so are unwilling to make substantial modifications as they fear bringing the entire department site down. I haven't used the system myself.

They want a new section in their site dedicated to featuring specific course offerings. They are not confident they can add this to their current site. They have decided to create a word-press instance within their current account to accommodate the "featured courses" stuff while they are building their new cascade site.

So we temporarily have an unconventional situation of a proprietary website infrastructure which has a word-press instance stuffed into a folder in the middle of the site.

I made a backup of the site as it existed before adding the WP folder, just for safekeeping. I assisted MH (post-doc) in getting the WP instance set up and configured. In a couple of weeks of use, there have been no collisions or corruptions of the proprietary CMS or the WP instance, so it looks like this setup will survive until replaced by the Cascade site.

Met with the dean to go over content features he wants explicitly covered in each department site:
- value of humanities/field of study
- career possibilities
- 'how to apply' as clear and simple as possible
- community outreach/public events
Individual departments may include these features and access to them as they wish (navigational structure, feature buttons, tertiary).
These expectations are in addition to the standard ones of providing information primarily to students (potential and current), secondarily to others.

Treatment of required content (courses, programs, faculty, research areas, resources, etc.) is up to department, but expects to see either Grad Student / Undergrad Student or Future Student / Current Student as primaries with appropriate subprimaries (i.e. current/future or grad/undergrad respectively) below that.

KB of English has been designated the contact person for the migration of their website to Cascade. Current site is in a unique situation (documented in separate post).
Met with KB a couple of times to go over expectations and workflow. He used Economics as a model site. On my suggestion he also looked at other Humanities sites for possible treatments and to ensure he included in the design features the dean of humanities wants explicitly covered:
- value of humanities/field of study
- career possibilities
- 'how to apply' as clear and simple as possible
- community outreach/public events

He's submitted a spreadsheet which Judy and I reworked (added some subprimaries to make some of the secondary lists shorter, and more consistent with other humanities departments). KB looked the revised spreadsheet over and is now formally reviewing it with the English dept committee.

After discussion with Martin on managing requests to maintain current hispital site and on Judy on the status of the new Cascade site, met with Judy and DR to work out a plan. DR will limit requests to upgrade current site to minimum. Judy will copy and paste content from existing site into Cascade structure (which we've already built), for Dan to edit, and will note where content is missing or duplicated. DR will then provide missing content and resolve duplications (as needed). Judy and DR to sort out exactly who will do what kind of edits.

Judy migrated the biggest section (undergraduate) for DR to review while Judy is away the last two weeks of the calendar year.

I helped her with rewriting some of the relative links (some of which were relative to pwd and some of which were relative to root of site - neither of which of course were any good in the new environment). Also had to rewrite relative links to old exams, exercises etc. as absolute links as the new site will not be on the save server as the collection of exams, exercises, etc.