Update of Humanities Sites

Clifton and I met James Young to get his input on desired features in new phil site:
- add a prominent link to graduate programs on the home page or side nav bar
- add contact info for dept chair, graduate advisor and undergraduate advisor on contact page (Liz can provide details)
- remove the FAQ
- change the word "news" to "events" in the top navigation bar
- for the faculty section:
- have a page listing the faculty members, divided in sections for "regular faculty", "emeritus", "sessional", and "grad students"
- each entry includes name, contact info and a link to that person's page on the phil site
- each person's page includes areas of interest, courses taught, photo (if available), cv or link to cv (if available), etc.

Met with Clifton to see what he's done on the new French site in the past couple of weeks. Majority of the layout work is done - there are still some issues around the graphical presentation of the banner (ripped paper effects and faded pieces of texts in background).

Clifton has written code to allow Agenda to output using the university's standard time blocks, every half hour and dynamically with special boxes for the zz courses. All seems to be working. Need to take this to the philosophy and history departments to see what they think of each of the two new outputs.

Today I had a meeting with Catherine Caws and her colleagues. We took some time to review the design I presented to them earlier in the week and they identified areas that they would like to further develop and things that they wished to change. The main changes is that they want rounded divs, the torn paper effect on the bottom of the banner as well as the top and colour changes.

I spent the last day and a half working on agenda to make yet another time table display format. The first two time table formats were based on tabular vertical orientation while this time I redesigned it to use divs as well as a horizontal orientation. This new format now correctly displays start and end times based for unique zz courses.

I also added a heavier font weight to the zz courses in the first two time table formats so that zz courses that may be in an incorrect place can be easily identified.

The only issue I was having towards the end of the day was with printing. And I'm sure that can be fixed easily. For next week I plan to focus on the French department website and update Stewart of the progress I made with Agenda and tie up any loose ends there or with the philosophy website.

Towards the end of yesterday, I attempted to re-implement the agenda time table by using Stewart's idea of having the time table display in 30 minute intervals. So, yesterday was able to remove all of the time blocks and add in each 30 minute time segment.

This morning I was able to re-add the time blocks correctly, review the new code and perform some gui testing and printing. The 30 minute time intervals stretch the printed version of the time table horizontally outside of legal size paper boundaries. It does fit quite nicely on two legal size papers; however, it does look a bit odd so stretched out.

After talking the layout over with Mike he suggested that if the orientation of the calendar was rotated 90 degrees and separated by day it could be easier to read and fit better on the legal size paper. If this type of calendar was implemented, instead of using a tables, divs could be used to place calendar items in the right order and in the right time location. I am going to do some testing and see how easy it would be to create this design.

I added a drop down menu on the offerings list page that allows the user to select whether or not they wish to print only approved courses or all course offerings available for the calendar session.

Yesterday I worked on creating a torn paper effect using Photoshop for the French website banner. I was able to create one but an issue arose with the banner width. The French department requested a banner that was the width of the browser but the banner I created was of a fixed width. The issue that arose was that stretching the banner distorted the image and creating a tiled background using css did not work either because the alignment of the torn paper was off.

Greg suggested that I tear some paper and scan it in to create a banner that was abnormally wide and then place css style text on top of it. I found that doing it this was easier. After scanning it in and editing the image in photoshop, for the requested colours, I was able to implement the banner. This morning I was able to place the text/links requested in the banner and after doing so I emailed Catherine Caws so that she could look over the template and let me know what the French Department thinks. So, I will be waiting for a reply before I continue with the development of the French Department site. After adding some more documentation to the css file I will be moving back to Agenda web application to continue with my tasks there.

(Also, Greg delivered a mac/usb ergonomics keyboard for me to use which I am doing so right now.)

I was having difficulty managing/maintaining my time sheets for this summer (I was using a text file, one for each week, to document my hours). I was having trouble keeping track of the running totals and I noticed a mistake (probably due to duplicating a text file to edit it for the next week). So, this morning I spent some time converting the text files into a Google spreadsheet document that automatically tabulates the running totals. I will be adding Stewart, as a collaborator, to the spreadsheet when he returns from vacation.

I spent this morning arranging a gui for the new French department website. I implemented the/a basic design (the template right now has areas for the banner, menu, content and footer areas). After putting up the template I also was able to create a fully functional menu with horizontal fly out sub menus and tested it for IE6 and Firefox compliance. (The page is using xhtml 1.1 and it validates wonderfully so far.)

I have been spending some time trying to replicate a banner similar to the one that the department liked at zen garden: http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=200/200.css. So, I am learning how to do that torn paper affect with Photoshop at the moment. There are different ways of doing it but the one I see that will replicate it the best is with using layer masks.

In my last post I ran into a blog issue with the following link http://www.litterature.uqam.ca/index.asp. For some reason, this blog would not allow me to post that link in an tag. Greg took a lot at the issue and could not understand it either.