UIC

Slides from the presentation I gave today. A couple people came up afterwards and said it had inspired them to go off and try it themselves.

Talk I'll be giving in April at the UIC IT Professionals Forum :

Turning Dates to Places on UIC's Recruitment Calendar - Mapping with Drupal

Location mapping presents a world of possibilities particularly when wedded with a powerful content management system. We will discuss some of the possibilities particularly in relation to UIC's Recruitment Calendar. This calendar takes advantage of the relatively simple Leaflet mapping library together with the highly configurable Drupal CMS. This dynamic combination allows for staff input of all content, location mapping at different levels (city, state, world) and other advantages such as a built-in reporting mechanism.

Bout of Nice Weather!

I'm kind of pooped having spent a fun morning at Dominican University with the "Chicagoland Drupal in Libraries" group. I then hustled back to UIC (thanks Gwen for the lift!) where I had the usual list of web editing chores. I also had enough time to upload this baby:

http://admissions.uic.edu

This marks the final phase of a redesign that I've been working on since the beginning of the year -- spurred on by two requirements:

1. fresh new look
2. gots to work on mobile

Happily, 'responsive web design' came along right at the time I was tackling this project. (What's 'responsive design' you ask? When looking at the above page, slowly make the window more narrow. Then go back out. That's responsive design.)

Anyway, I still had to do the 'landing pages'. This one, the Admissions page, is the first of four.

But back to my itinerary: At around 5:15pm, I left UIC and headed over to DePaul for a couple of hours of 'Fun @ the Reference Desk'. It was a relatively quiet night. In Summer, Reference closes an hour earlier (i.e. at 8pm instead of 9pm) so I made it back home before 9pm.

In any case, as I said, long day -- productive just the same.

Saw the demo for 'Adobe Creative Suite 6' -- Adobe's software lineup which is about to receive an upgrade. Interesting how the topics tended to reflect developments in the online world: tablet computers, 'cloud' computing and (for Dreamweaver at least) 'responsive' design. Some things were better thought out than others. $300/yr for cloud-based software and document storage seems a bit high. Also, I'm not sure why Photoshop has to do video.

Anyway, interesting presentation nonetheless.

At the UIC Digital Accessibility Expo. http://dae.uic.edu/

The 2012 UIC IT Professionals Forum is in two weeks at the UIC Forum (Roosevelt & Halsted). My particular contribution will be appearing on a panel for the following session:

"Which Web Content Management System Should I Choose?"

Many different Web content management systems (WCMS) are in use within the U of I system. They all have both advantages and disadvantages. Come see a panel of Web developers show us the features and deficiencies in the WCMSs their departments use, so you can choose the best one for your department.

I figure I'll talk about the history of Drupal in general, how we've implemented it at UIC's Academic & Enrollment Services, the support we've gotten (mostly pretty good) from Campus IT, plus all the crazy content types we handle: 'Final Exam Locations' for the Office of Classroom Scheduling, 'School Record Types by Country' for Grad Admissions, Registration 'tickets' for the UIC Summer College Program, etc.

(I can't think of one project I've done that consisted of plain-vanilla webpages. Maybe that's why I'm using Drupal.)

UPDATE: Following up on the final thought above... My central theme will be:

"If it's going to be a complicated mess -- best to do it with Drupal!"

UPDATE (4/5/2012): Just finished the panel discussion on CMS's. All we got was 45 measly minutes! I talked mostly about Drupal and how we've implemented it for various projects. That was one half. The other half was giving people tips on what to look for -- and things to avoid -- when shopping for CMS's in general. We could easily have gone for an hour and a half. Nice turn out, just the same.

Okay, so here are the slides from my presentation on Responsive Web Design that I gave today at the UIC Webmasters Brownbag. It's not the longest thing in the world -- I was only supposed to talk for 30 minutes but ended up going the whole hour. The group was great -- very engaged and asking a whole lot of good questions.

Yippie! The students are back!

This is where it all started -- as anyone who took the year abroad program organized by UIC's French Dept. under the directorship of the incredible Prof. June Moracevich ('Madame') will tell you. Most left after the first year. I stayed for ten.

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