KELVIN SMITH LIBRARY

Entries for March 2005

Branded Template Progress

Major progress made today. There are still some issues to be addressed to be truly brand compliant.

Among the problems to be addressed is the fact that the page is liquid and expands to fill 100% of the screen width. Although not stated specifically in any of the documentation I have been able to find (list below), according to a conversation I had this morning with a person over in Marketing and Communications, Case web branding is specified to fit within 800px, and not 100% of screen width.

Also, the blog description appears below the blog name in the masthead. This issue is addressed and will be corrected in one of my next builds.

So, policy documentation has holes and is somewhat by word of mouth from the people who were in those meetings. Unfortunately, many of the people who were in those meetings have now left the university.

One of the problems with branding on this campus is that, to my knowledge, nobody has been designated to have the responsibility of brand enforcement, or the authority to take that role. Any individual who may take up that role on their own does so without any stated backing or support from the university and takes on all the risks encompassed by that fact.

Continue reading "Branded Template Progress"

Masthead Accomplished

Step one in the quest for a Case branded blog template completed. I have a temporary template defined that now has a reasonable Case branded header. The branded version of this page can be viewed at http://blog.case.edu/dkh2/branded. That's about enough on this project for this morning.

Case Branding the Blog

I've heard it said enough times now by my colleagues here in KSL so I think it's time to assemble a template that makes my blog look like a KSL page. It shouldn't be too hard to do since I've already done so much work building Case brand compliant templates for the library.

For the benefit of all of you non-KSL bloggers this should be really easy to modify for your own departmental use.

I'll post in this blog with updates, and instructions for viewing the branded version of the template when I have made some progress.

Moving Right Along

Had some fun doing the handyman thing at home this weekend. We invited the inlaws over for Saturday afternoon so my father-in-law could bring his propane torch and we could play with fire. The project was to remove the old acrylic kitchen sink and replace the entire assembly... sink, faucet, drain assembly, etc... with a nice new stainless steel sink. The torch was required because I saw no reason to not add accessible shut-off valves.

Step-by-step:

Continue reading "Moving Right Along"

Blog Neglect

I've been terribly neglectful of this thing. I'm surprized the blogging police haven't found me and had me punished in some evil way. I guess that's what I get for letting my life get out of hand for a couple of weeks.

The hybrid will reach the 2000 mile mark sometime in the next week to 10. It's at about 1780 now and with me putting about 50 miles a day on it I won't have to do any extra driving for that to happen. I'm now averaging a fairly consistant 31 MPG combined city + highway.

It was good to hear this morning that someone in AAA is moving to pressure Congress to pressure the EPA to update their process for calculating fuel economy. The current system predates the catalytic converter and is woefully inaccurate. More on that later.