Wayne State University

Web Communications Blog

Web Standards, Accessibility and Initiatives

Archive for the 'code' Category

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 [...]

Code Update: PHPSimpl 0.8.4

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

The newest version of PHPSimpl has been released and we have updated the code on the production web server. The release bring some much needed features to the framework and a few bug fixes.
We know this is not a widely used framework because we take an active role in its development and feature set. (We [...]

Redirection with ModRewrite and GET variables

Friday, January 4th, 2008

Yesterday I started working on the redirect in the .htaccess for the homepage. The quick links on the homepage are redirected using ModRewrite then pushed through a php file that logs the action. This lets us monitor their usage so we can make sure the best possible links are available in this drop down. Here’s [...]