Technology Services

Category: Web Services

  • Faculty Schedules Improved

    —

    by

    rrud

    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

    —

    by

    jlencion

    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…

  • Virtual High Fives: Gusties Love World of Warcraft

    —

    by

    jlencion

    According to a report published by Map World of Warcraft the other day, Gustavus ranks 296 out of 1,109 colleges and universities for World of Warcraft usage. Some of our peer institutions are ranked as follows: University of St. Thomas: 536 St. Olaf College: 570 Luther College: 748 Big virtual high fives go to our…

  • Wahlstrom Demolition Video

    —

    by

    rrud

    Built in 1947, Wahlstrom Hall was named for a former president of the college, the Rev. Matthias Wahlstrom. Wahlstrom had a unique floor plan, with 191 single rooms arranged into 32 sections. While this beautiful landmark on the Gustavus Campus was beloved by many, issues with building codes and safety forced its closing. Many had…

  • Cool new “Give feedback” and “Send this page” forms

    —

    by

    jlencion

    Thanks to all of the hard work of Jeremy Carlson and the wonderful moo.fx, we recently upgraded the “Give feedback” and “Send this page” forms (linked at the tops of every page) from popups to be nicer in-page forms. No More Popups We have never liked popups and are glad to be rid of them.…

  • Gustavus Homepage Concept

    —

    by

    jlencion

    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…

  • Rate this page

    —

    by

    jlencion

    We rolled out a new feature of the Gustavus Template today that allows users to quickly and easily rate every page in the Gustavus Template using the globally recognizable five-stars system. We hope that as people begin to rate the pages they visit, we will be able to improve the bad and highlight the good.…

  • Visitor Snapshot

    —

    by

    jlencion

    Thanks to Shaun Inman’s Mint, we are able to see an extremely current and accurate snapshot of who is visiting our website. I checked out some of the user agent statistics that we collect and was pleasantly surprised with some of the figures. Firefox is In While Firefox is a relatively new browser compared to…

  • Design and Readability

    —

    by

    jlencion

    fadtastic has two great new articles up about design and readability. The first, Who to Design For? by Steven Teskey, discusses whether designs should focus on users or designers. He writes, “It all comes down to personal philosophy, but I’d like to possibly open some doors on this issue, that you might not have thought…

  • Gustavus Template Advanced Techniques

    —

    by

    jlencion

    If you are a web developer at heart and happen to be using the Gustavus Template Container for your Gustavus web pages, today is your lucky day. Harness a little more of the power the Gustavus Template offers by reading up on our new Advanced Techniques. There, you will be able to learn some of…