Wayne State University

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Web Communications Blog

We build user centered Web sites from the ground up.

Archive for the 'code' Category

WCAG 2.0 is official, now what?

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

Ten years after WCAG 1.0 was published WCAG 2.0 is official, so what do we do now? Its time to look inside and start updating.
WCAG 2.0 applies broadly to more advanced technologies; is easier to use and understand; and is more precisely testable with automated testing and human evaluation.
W3C WAI recommends using WCAG 2.0, instead [...]

[Guest Post] Tracking Flash Interaction with Google Analytics

Monday, November 24th, 2008

Over at .eduGuru they are searching for a new blogger. They took applications and had everyone write a guest post, they then let the community decide who the next blogger should be.
I was one of the applicants and wrote my post on Tracking Flash Interaction with Google Analytics. The goal was to not only give [...]

hCalendar microformat support in the events calendar

Monday, November 10th, 2008

In our continuous effort to support microformats, we are proud to announce expanded hCalendar support on the Wayne State University Events Calendar.
If you are not familiar with microformats the goal is to use plain HTML and embed through classes and Semantic HTML information about the content. Similar to XML to describe content but in plain [...]

Create a quick html form connected to a database

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Having a small staff and enormous amounts of work everything we can do to speed up tasks we take advantage of. We are asked all the time to create html forms for sites, its the only way to get users information, from RSVP’s to request information. Recreating forms is time consuming especially since most feed [...]

Using JavaScript to find links within plain text

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Today I was working on adding the Wayne State University Twitter feed to our website. It’s not a terribly difficult task since Twitter has some auto-generated code (javascript and HTML) for adding your public time line to a website. We, however, wanted more. Twitter’s auto-generated code offers a pretty basic setup, no frills at all. [...]

Javascript on window close event

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

It’s been pretty busy around here lately so I haven’t had much of a chance to write a blog post. Among other things, I’ve been working with Help Center Live, a live chat web application. The live chat application will hopefully find its way onto the Registrar’s site which is getting a new look [...]

Bulk HTML emails and their impact

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

We have been asked more and more to create HTML emails, they look attractive and do allow for more visual exposure for the sender. The problem is security, email clients (most) by default do not display images unless they are attached to the email. This becomes a problem when sending out ~40,000 emails and its [...]

Don’t fork the web, IE8 meta switch may get ugly

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

If you don’t already have your head around the recent articles regarding IE8 and its three rendering modes you should, it is going to be a fact of life soon.
Basically it comes down to IE rendering pages in three modes, the “old mode”, the IE7 half standards mode and IE8 full standards mode. It makes [...]

Microformats now on all web page footers

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

We have just expanded our vcard microformated university address from the university homepage to all pages in the universities Content Management System. The list can be found here, it doesn’t include all the pages by far but it is a crucial step to integrate microformats into all pages at the university. Not only the vcard [...]

Wayne State goes Twittering

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

Branching out past the confines of our university homepage means working with public API’s and services. We started yesterday with Twitter, the first of many social and external sites we will be pushing information.
We choose twitter mainly because of its simplicity. The idea of having a full blown facebook application with no street credit seemed [...]