Monica Martinez-Gallagher
Multimedia Technologist, Portland Community College

Monica was supposed to present yesterday. Unfortunatly she was stuck in Albany, so we switched her  to this morning. I feel a little bad for her. Not only because she was stranded, but also because the Tuesday morning sessions are a little sparse (I, for instance, ws out till 2am and barely made it in this morning).

So, I ended up rolling in to her presentation a little late. When I entered she was already showing a video demonstation.

Looks like the Oregon Community Colleges Island is up running and funded for at least the next year ($55,000).

• Recommends reading the starfish and the spider.
• Join second life educator’s list (SLED)
• Join RezEd on Ning
• Search for education events on Second life.

Or, What Happens When Your User-Agent Isn’t A Browser?
Jason Woodward | Assistant Director of IT, Administrative Computing, Cornell University

Uses wireshark to show what headers look like.

What is REST?

• Representational State Transfer
• Actions are performed independently of other actions.
• Do something to a resource and tell me if it worked.
• Demonstrates with a homemade restful program.
  • Sends info - just says 200OK (no extra data needed)
  • Gets info - it comes back. How it is stored is irrelevant.

The presentation is good, but way more technical then I ever could have expected. This is defanatly the most TPR session that I have been to in the TPR track.

Building Web Apps That Work Anywhere and Everywhere
Jason Pitoniak | Educational Technology Specialist, Rochester Institute of Technology

I had to sneak in a little late and the only seat left was near the front. Sorry everyone.

Code like it is 1999

• Use plain old X(HTML)
• Follow current standards
• make sure it works for everyone

Use progressive enhancement

• if JavaScript is available add enhancements.
• Form examples. Make sure that they can enter a date even if the JS calendar widget fails.

He uses jQuery and YUI libraries.

He says that document.ready can change the page fast enough that accessibility devices will read the final content.

WAI-ARIA: attemps to solve 2biggest issues when creating accessible JS.

• Helps notify device when the DOM is changed
• Gives better markup to objects (I am not sure what this means)
• Operating systems define “atomic widgets” (labels, fields, tabs, etc…) ARIA works to interperate the widgets.
  • He gives a good example about tabs. Normally a screen reader would only see a list.
  • Add “role” attribute to define widget (long list available)States
• States- define current status of an object.
  • example: aria-checked=”true”
  • stated very by role.
• Live region - section that are likely to change
  • polite , assertive, rude define the importance of interrupting what the screenreader is currently doing.

ARIA looks like the key to  notification in AJAX. Currently only supported in FF.

FireVox is a screen reader plugin for firefox! Cool!

Using Vox, Jason showed several examples that are available on the mozillia site.

Unfortunately, his computer seemed to be posessed and kept skiping around. There were also some mic issues and his laser pointer died. Regardless, it was a great presentation and infortmation that I was really curious about.

During lunch I went around and downloaded all of the recordings.

The ones that were captured, sound great - unforunatly there may have been problems with a few of the sessions. I won’t know until there is more time to take a closer listen.

UsaeKevin Bischof | Web Producer, Xavier University
Kat Hollowell | Web Designer, Xavier University

Web team is located in the “information resources” department. They find that this is working really well. hey now have 9 employees and 3 student interns.

They designate A, B and C level projects. Currently have dozens of prpjects (I didn’t get the exact number of each level)

Kevin recommends a load balancer (uses a great slide of an overloaded ship).

They are also a coldfusion shop

Recommend an analytics package.

165 active content manages (Campus sweet  CMS)

• Send out monthly news letters to these people.
• The even set up an event (58 attendees)
• gave out “webmaster” awards to those who took a class.

Used to take call to get projects started. Now they have request forms.

Published a web style guide. Typography, color, ect…

They are very proud of their 404 page:

• tell user why
• give some nav
• give a search option
• but… keep it simple
• He shows a lot of examples

The 404 page they created  has a button for the user to roport the broken page. This is a little confusing to me. Why not use serverlogs to automagically track the broken links? Or, give the user a chance to explain what they were looking for.

Someone in the crowd suggect an auomatic link checker. Each night it spiders the sites and then sends email to the content managers! Nice!

Also can send email if a site hasn’t been updated in 6months.

Using AJAX to Bring in Content on the Fly
Richard Orelup: Programming Czar, Valparaiso University

I was running around and entered a little late. But, it looks like he is still giving some background on ajax.

Can get a flash like interface  without plugins

• don’t need extra plugins
• good for programers who don’t understand timelines
• works well on the iPhone!

Negatives:

• Some devices don’t support javascript
• Some only  partially support it (even worse).

Graceful degradation is needed to make sure that all users can still use you site. Also important for robots.

“With great power come great responsibility” - If we can do anything, what should we do. Will users get confused or lost? Example - often ajax overrides the back button. This can really confuse users.

Pick a framework.

• They are using YUI - the framework from Yahoo.
• It passes off alot of responsibility to the framework creator.
• Lets you quickly jump in. Many examples will save you time.
• Make complex things really simple.

They use the animation scripts a lot.

Issues?

• Can make simple things more complex
• Some frameworks are good for particular things.
• Add to load time.
• Remember to test in all (as many as possible) browsers. The all have different versions of JavaScript Engines.

Selenium - plugin to script tests. Good for fast testing.

I didn’t stay out late with everyone at the tower club, but was still up past midnight going over my slides. Then it was up at 6am to get over and set up the recorders in each presentation room.

Most of the setups were straight forward. One of the rooms however (the ballroom) did not have audio out, so we could not hook the recorder up directly to the room. We will see how well it does.

It took forever, but we got into Springfield around 11:30am.

Luis, Karen, Randall and Jake all had workshops starting at 1pm - so Traci and I dropped them at the hotel and we took the minivan back to Avis at the airport.

The plan was to take the shuttle back that was being provided by the conference. Unfortunately, there was no sign of the shuttle. After an hour, I had met some other attendees, but there was no ride to be found. We called the hotel, but they offered little help.

During the next hour, we made several calls talked to all of the other shuttles that passed by. Surprise, surprise, the shuttle had been circling, but was labeled “limousine service”. It turns out that there were signs at the airport and on the shuttles during the Saturday rush, but they had not been put back up on Sunday. Doh.

When I finally got the the University, I let the commitee know and they quickly sent someone out to reslove the issue.

The new vehicle showed up after midnight.

I took the next driving shift and got us about 100miles into Kansas. Luis took the following shift, so I curled up in the back to get some rest.

Now it is light out and we are only hours from the destination.

So the flight was canceled after hours of delays…

No more flights out of Denver.

Next possible flight option wouldn’t get to Springfield till late Sunday evening. Who knew that the Denver airport shuts down at 6pm on a Saturday?

We decided that it would be better to drive. At 12+ hours it might be grueling. But really, it is the only option at this point.

Hours later, with 3 new friends: Randall, Jake and Traci (two of whom are are attending the conference) - we had rented a van and were on the road.

Even with GPS, we initially took some wrong turns (through tolls), but quickly got back on coarse.

Then…

An hour outside of Denver, the check engine light started blinking and the the engine started stuttering.

Now were stuck at a Denny’s waiting for a tow.