KELVIN SMITH LIBRARY

Entries in "Tech"

Mapping Your Blog@Case Directory on XP SP2

A big shout out to Jeremy Smith for locating the information on how to make Windows XP play nice with WebDAV. For those of you who have installed SP2 the solution lies in re-enabling basic authentication. Follow the trackback to Jeremy's post for details.

Mapping Your Blog@Case Directory on XP SP2

A big shout out to Jeremy Smith for locating the information on how to make Windows XP play nice with WebDAV. For those of you who have installed SP2 the solution lies in re-enabling basic authentication. Follow the trackback to Jeremy's post for details.

WebDAV Java GUI Client

As many of you in the Case Geekdom know, Windows is flakey when it comes to authorizations and client connections to WebDAV hosts. Thus, no native DAV connection to Blog@Case folders for you. If you've ever uploaded a file to your blogspace and wish to delete it, the only hope for you without a third party client, or access to a Mac/Linux box is to contact the Blog.Case administrators and beg them to delete the file for you.

Not acceptable.

So, this morning I went on a search for a Windows WebDAV client that would allow me to do some remedial fial management.

Thanks to the folks at U. Cal. Irvine ICS there is a Java based WebDAV client that gives you access. You can download the archive from their site.

Now you can delete that badly munged test image you uploaded while tweaking your templates.

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.

Lovin' the new hybrid

This last Saturday (05-Feb-05) we went to the dealer and picked up our new 2005 Escape Hybrid. These are few and far between in Ohio for a couple of reasons. 1) Ford just started releasing them to Ohio dealers this month and 2) in order to give preference to hot hybrid markets like California and Oregon each Ford dealer in Ohio is being allotted exactly 1 of these.

[EDIT]Pix now available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/47328264@N00/sets/116393/[/EDIT]

Ours is 'Titanium Green' and the only options we went for were the cargo cover and the 110 volt AC outlet. I've been driving this thing for nearly a week now and am getting something over 28.5 MPG. I say "something over" because they start the counter at 0 MPG and you have to drive enough to establish a significant history for that reading to be meaningful.

Continue reading "Lovin' the new hybrid"

Embedded code test #2

So, the PHP code I tried to include met with absolute failure. Here's the next test. The same task recoded in Javascript.

Continue reading "Embedded code test #2"

So, here's a fun little test

Just playing around here a little bit. Let's see what happens when you paste in a block of PHP code!

Continue reading "So, here's a fun little test"

Hammer Time

So, the announcement went out that Blog.Case.edu was available for beta work and I jumped in with both feet and a big stick. I've used Moveable Type before so I was already familiar with the admin interface, and the entire data model behind it. Here's what I found:

Continue reading "Hammer Time"

What's Missing from Blog.Case.edu:

Post via email.

I suspect this will be picked up in the first site software upgrade. That's a reasonable expectation since Six Apart, the company that owns Moveable Type, recently acquired LiveJournal.com and the software that runs LJ provides this feature.

Other features that may be added as a result of that acquisition would be posting via voice mail, and via a desktop client or browser extension.

We can only wait and see.