‘Fixes’ Category
Google Meets Access Issues
We’ve had reports from a handful of users that some Google Meets are suddenly requiring the meeting organizer to grant access to other participants. While we are not entirely sure why some meetings have been affected this way, we do believe it is the result of the “Quick Access” feature being turned off for that […]
Improved Search Suggestions
Our top complaint this year has been with the lackluster search suggestions on the website. People said it would only give incorrect spellings of names. People complained that the feature was more of a hindrance than a help. Well, it turns out that people were right. The search suggestions were not working as intended. While […]
Real First Names on Profiles and Search Results
We have some very creative minds on campus, but this creativity has recently caused some confusion for faculty and staff when using the people search (online Gribly). A search for students would often result in a haphazard mix of real first names, genuine nicknames (e.g. Bill for William, Jenny for Jennifer), and a sprinkling of […]
Fixing broken PNG uploads with MediaWiki
Our Technology Services wiki is powered by MediaWiki—the same software that powers Wikipedia. So far, most things have worked relatively well for us. Even a few upgrades have gone pretty smoothly. The problem However, when we moved to a new server last week, we were stuck with a puzzling problem. Any images in PNG format […]
Faculty Schedules Improved
We recently fixed and improved on our Faculty Schedules pages. Somehow, the CSS file for the site was deleted during the 2005-2006 school year, making the page harder to read and use. We’ve added new CSS and javascript to the site, including a box on the right that keeps track of people you’ve selected to […]
Robots in the Wiki
We made some minor adjustments to our installation of MediaWiki to prevent robots such as Googlebot from indexing irrelevant pages like article edit pages and history pages. Essentially, we prepended a “/w/” to all non-article pages and then used mod_rewrite to remove the /w/ so the pages still work normally. The robots.txt file then prohibits […]
Gustavus Homepage Concept
Our homepage was one of the final pieces of the Gustavus Website that needed to be updated to the look-and-feel we introduced in December. We have been hard at work to create a concept that incorporates global trends, reflects our new design paradigms, addresses known information architecture issues, improves the accessibility and usability of the […]
Daylight Savings Time
Since the time change for the end of daylight savings last month, our iCalendar files on the college calendar have been using the wrong time. This was caused by our usage of a constant timezone modifier for adding to event start times and end times. As a result, whenever someone had added an event to […]
Updated Regular Expression for E-Mail
We discovered a small bug in our old regular expression for checking valid e-mail addresses. When a user tried to use an address with capital letters on a form, it failed to match the regular expression. We updated the regular expression to account for capital letters anywhere in the e-mail address. ^[_a-zA-Z0-9-]+(.[_a-zA-Z0-9-]+)*@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+(.[a-zA-Z0-9-]+)*.(([a-zA-Z]{2,3})|([Aa][Ee][Rr][Oo]|[Aa][Rr][Pp][Aa]|[Cc][Oo][Oo][Pp]|[Ii][Nn][Ff][Oo]|[Mm][Uu][Ss][Ee][Uu][Mm]|[Nn][Aa][Mm][Ee]))$ This new expression […]
News 2.1.1
News 2.1.1 is now live. We identified and fixed a small CSS bug from News 2.1.0 that showed up under IE on my Windows XP machine. The problem was that the links in the menubar had not been given a specific width. The idea behind this technique was that they would automatically stretch to the […]