In the last two years, we have home spun 4 or 5 online surveys for our projects. It took a bit of elbow grease in PHP and mySQL to get a decent system, and we were successful in creating a usable form for our survey-ees and a reporting tool. But this year, the demand was […]
Phil Ringnalda provides a surgical view of the new MSN blog pages- beyond the wonderfully dense details, I loved this quote: The HTML is, of course, execrable. The one possible way they could have gotten some approving buzz from tech bloggers was to use extremely clean (X)HTML, but given the apparent total lack of a […]
Tom Hoffman, blogther (=”blog+author”, eh?) of Tuttle SVC wrote today about an interest in two-person interfaces:
What occurred to me is that there are lots of jobs in real life where you have two people collaboratively operating one machine or even one set of data on paper, but I can’t think of a single pc-based application, outside of games, where two people are working on two computers on a real-time collaborative task. SubEthaEdit, I suppose, but that’s a relatively simple case. I’m not talking about having a conversation; I’m thinking about some kind of serious data manipulation. More like a pilot/co-pilot relationship. Gunner and loader, that kind of thing. I’m not saying it is a problem, but it is kinda weird if you think about it.
I wanted to share something I worked on a few clicks back, but sadly, his blog lacks comments (?) so maybe someone who knows him can send this.
During my sabbatical in 2000, I spent two months at Northern Arizona University (in summer, Flagstaff is a heavenly escape from the Phoenix desert) working on some experimental multi-user web applications, using an early version of the Shockwave multi-user server (MUS). Maybe Tom would categorize these as “games”, but it was nostalgic to think about them, and rewarding to see that code from 2000 still runs (despite that macromedia no longer even mentions MUS).
Basically, the MUS is a desktop application running on a computer plugged into the net, and is set up to “broker” small messages sent back and forth from remote users using a graphic interface authored in Macromedia Director. This functionality is pretty much totally eclipsed by the server communication layers available to Flash developers, but this was done in the pre-Flash era.
But to get to the good stuff, I created two prototype web applications designed for teaching basic chemistry, and they are environments where more than one person, from different places on the net, can share the same virtual environment.
In the Ideal Gas Law application, the goal is to adjust the temperature, number of gas molecules, and the volume of a chamber to try and achieve a specified pressure (hey, we all remember PV=nRT?). The idea is that in the multiuser environment, if I decide to decrease the volume by moving in the right wall of the chamber, the changes I make are seen in near real time by Tom on his computer. And if he changes the temperature, I see the effect– because we are two people sharing the same interface:
There are people, likely those trying to make a buck off of RSS, who would like to measure how much “hit” there is from information syndicated as RSS Feeds, consumed, and hopefully clicked at. Checking your web server log for access of the RSS URL do not mean much, as they are continually hit by […]
As part of our support for some of our system-wide Arts programs, a few months back I agreed to build a web site and some online registration tools for the March 2004 American College Dance Festival (Southwest Regional) being hosted by our Scottsdale Community College. There are some 350 attendees from 31 different college dance programs.
This was a fun design project as I got to go full bore into using pure XHTML design, two sets of style sheets to mask out those pesky NetScape 4 users/abusees (plus a print style sheet), a one template PHP output template, random background images, use of fancy CSS for a navigation bar that looks like the kludgy JavaScript image swaps, but renders iin source as a good old, accessible friendly, <ul> list….
They did not give enough lead time to set up totally online registration, but we did take some weakly formatted materials, and have the attendees use MS Word protected “Form” documents to submit their registration details.
But the fun came this past 2 weeks in setting up a completely online system for the college representatives to sign their students up for the classes that are offered over 4 days. The first part was getting the class details (name, location, instructor, maximum registration). I had made an Excel spreadsheet with different sheets to match the database tables (especially as the class titles continue to change, student names were dropped, added) so that the conference folks could send me data, I could then import into the mySQL database. The fist tool was generating a schedule preview, with link to the instructor bios (also drawn from the database).
This was a messy pile of data to sort out- nearly 150 different classes, with different maximum numbers (room dependent), participants could select 1,2,3 class preferences for 14 time slots, and having to work around conflicting events such as rehearsals and adjudication (I have no idea what that is, but I had to type it a lot ;-). Oh, and there are these “Master Classes” where each college was allotted so many registration slots, AND, a person could take only one Master Class.
I was told that in years past, attendees had to stand in line at the conference registration to get their class requests, so if this work, it would take away that hassle, and provide the event planners more room to plan for the conference details.
The system has been open just a few days, and it appears that 26/31 colleges have already gotten their participants . registrations in. It is competitive as classes fill, so they were eager to log in and sign up. I cannot let you see, but have collected some screen shots.
This year marks a number of ten year anniversaries for the web site we created in December 1993 for my office, the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (MCLI). This ran on a humble Macintosh SE/30 sitting on a table in the hallway— the very first web server in our organization, running what was then the free MacHTTP server software.
As a former geologist, all of our machines in our office had domain names chosen after minerals or rocks, and the original URL for our server was http://hakatai.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ (which still works). For those unfortunate enough not to have trained in geology, we have an explanation for what “hakatai” means.
It was 10 years ago tomorrow (January 15) that we submitted our site to the NCSA What’s New Page— this was at that time the one and only place to go to check out new web sites that were sprouting up like wildflowers. Some consider this the original notion of a weblog, a chronologically organized set of descriptions of web content elsewhere. Anyhow, if you scroll down to January 15, 1994, you will find us.…
Finally got around to some revamps to a web slide show template I’ve been rolling for a few years, the “jClicker” (little “j” is for JavaScript). We do many many photos for our many events at work, and this has been a very handy way to organize photos into a slide show format. The main site includes a step-by-step construction guide.
Basically, all one has to do is to assemble your image files (any web format), write some captions and edit one text file to control the settings and define the order of the slide show. Previously, one had to actually write incrementing numbers for the lists (arrays) manage the image files, menus names, and captions, but a email from a user generated a beautiful idea– just have a running self-incrementing counter (javascript- “i++;) before each section that lists the next slides image file, menu name, and caption. Now deleting, adding, or re-arranging the slide order is a trivial cut and paste, whereas previously one who have to re-order all the data.
A key feature since the first version is that every slide page also pre-loads the next image for a smoother slide to slide flow.
It’s taken actually several weeks (off and on) to get a new web design up for our Faculty in Progress Program (FIPP). The old site was not horrible, but as this faculty recruitment program is in transition from an internal internship to one open nationally, and it was to be less tied to our center, there was an opportunity to do some new web stuff here.
We always need more search engines, eh? Here is Blloogz which has no “about screen” but apparently walks many blogs to fuel the search tool. Not being sure, if this cogdog was “bloogz-ed”, we added our URL to the crawl. Searches produces long lists, but page loads were a bit on the slow side, some […]
For the last two years, most of my web work has been deploying Cascading Style Sheets (one CSS styles several hundred web pages across our main Zeldman and Meyers to take the leap. Eventually.
This site I have been working on is still under wraps for the last bits of development, but I recently undertook what has turned out to be my first pure XHTML, no tables for layout, validate-able, web standards site.
The American College Dance Festival is a regional dance festival being hosted by one of our colleges. I took it on as part of our Fine Arts projects, originally to develop the online registration system (which turned out to be too complex to do in a short time frame). But here are some things that got tossed into the new site….
