Technology Services

Author: jlencion

  • New Colors

    New Colors

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    jlencion

    The Gustavus website just got a new paint job. Gold and blue were chosen to better highlight our school colors (black and gold) and emphasize our Swedish heritage. With our sesquicentennial approaching, it seemed like perfect timing. This update also brings a small but nice additional feature for those of you running Webkit-based browsers (like…

  • Blog Post Thumbnails in Search Results

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    jlencion

    Good news for Gustavus bloggers, we have taken another step toward making our search engine work a little bit better–blog post thumbnails will now appear next to search results just like profile photos.

  • Profile Photos in Search Results

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    jlencion

    Wading through search results can be tough when everything looks the same. It takes time to read through the results to find what you are looking for. Zeroing in on search results about a person at Gustavus just got a bit easier–we’ve added profile photos to our search results.

  • Lazy AuxBox Makes Pages Load 22% Faster, Generate 75% Quicker

    Lazy AuxBox Makes Pages Load 22% Faster, Generate 75% Quicker

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    jlencion

    Many pages on the Gustavus website feature a section of auxiliary content that we like to call the AuxBox–the blue part at the bottom of the page that typically has events, news, and profiles. While we really like having this content on our pages, we noticed it took a fair amount longer for our server…

  • Tweet and Like Blog Posts and Calendar Items

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    jlencion

    Sharing your favorite Gustavus website content with your friends just got a lot easier. Today we added Twitter tweet buttons and Facebook like buttons to blog posts and calendar items.

  • Our New Mobile Website

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    jlencion

    Nobody had even heard of a smartphone when we first got the Internet at my house. Many websites were still designed with a web safe color palette of 216 colors and tiled backgrounds were the cool, new kid on the block. A MIDI and a scrolling marquee gave you street–or at least Internet–cred. In those…

  • Shorter is Still Better

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    jlencion

    In our eternal quest to optimize the Gustavus website, we removed the “academics” part of URLs.

  • Delivering a Faster Website

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    jlencion

    One of the most important parts of user experience on the web is how fast the pages actually load. We have been optimizing the Gustavus website for speed and have achieved some promising results.

  • Customized Calendar Event Listing on the Homepage

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    jlencion

    Have you ever lost something and became frustrated at how long it took you to find it? Finding information on the web can be a disappointing experience if the information is disorganized or presented poorly. We are always trying to help people find what they are looking for on our website as quickly as possible.