STA Blog

Rodrigo Villarreal

Rodrigo Villarreal

Updates on French Site

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Updates on French Site

During one of my last shifts before Thanksgiving break I spent some time updating the promotional site for French Online. This was basically a complete content overhaul but keeping the same template as before, to match the other language promotional sites. While working on it we also found some small issues with the site. The responsiveness definitely needed some since text would get really small when opening the site on a mobile phone. Also, there were some dead links and content redundancy. The biggest issue was that there was so much contrast between the white background of the page and the dark pictures on the site. Thankfully, Valerie took some time to edit the pictures and make them look more lively. It didn’t take too long to fix it and I think it turned out great.

French and Latin Promotional sites

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Project: French and Latin Promotional Sites
Client /Prof: Mike Heidenreich
Completion status: Started October 10th 2019
Staff guidance: None
STA team members: Thuy
Description/plans: Code-up two simple websites to promote online Latin and French classes (like the one I did for Russian a couple of months ago)
To be completed: A couple of weeks

Updates on WP Maintenance

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Updates on WP Maintenance

I’m still working on the WP scripts with Stacy. Since the last time I posted I finished the add-user script to be able to add a specific user to a batch of WordPress sites.

After finishing up that script I noticed that some of the arguments that these commands are going to need will be similar. For example, the user will always need to specify a site or group of sites to run the command on. This is why I decided to create a “parent” script that will act as a middleman for all commands. You can run that script and give it the command you want to run and on what pages as an argument. It will then do some preprocessing work and then call some other script using PHP’s ‘include’ or ‘require’ keyword. This is a much more organized way of coding everything up since it will save me the work of writing the same code for different scripts.

Last time I met with Stacy he also told me to make a script to initialize and deploy a new website from scratch. This basically involves installing the latest version of WordPress, setting up Git, creating some common users, and setting the LAITS preferred website and database configurations. It sounds more complicated than the other scripts that he asked me to ask. I will start working on it later later this week and the next.

 

WP Maintenance

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WP Maintenance

This semester I’ll be working closer to Stacy and helping him manage all the WordPress websites that we have (there’s about 90 of them!). Many of these projects are pretty old and Stacy rarely has the time to go back and look at them after they launch, which leads to several problems. The main problem is that the themes and plugins used by websites are constantly being updated, but our sites keep using the old versions of them. Also, simply updating all of the themes and plugins can be risky because it might mess up the website in some way, so there needs to be a way to make sure the site is still working after an update. Users management for the sites is also an issue. Some of the administrators for the sites are not even working at LAITS anymore! Also, for projects that require professors and staff to be made into users, there could be a way to make them in a batch instead of one by one. Finally, Stacy also wants to make sure that the sites are fully responsive and error-less.

The first step to work on this project was to get familiar with WordPress CLI, this stands for command line interphase. Basically, for every action you can do on the WordPress website there’s a matching command you can run on the terminal. This means it’s possible to automate these using code. I’m starting to write PHP scripts which call commands on the CLI and make it possible to do many actions at once. The first step to take is to make myself an admin for all sites.

Also, I’m working on a spreadsheet to keep track of the work being done on these sites and any errors that come up. This will also make it easy to delegate some of the work to other STAs in the future, such as checking all sites for responsiveness.

Here’s some pictures of the stuff I’ve been doing.

The Rise of Everyday Design

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The Rise of Everyday Design

I had never been to the Harry Ransom center before going to this exhibition. In the past, their promotional materials for other events had gained my interest, but due to one thing or another I had never attended. The building looks huge on the outside, so I expected a full-size museum exhibition inside. What I found was much more humble. The Everyday Design exhibition was 2 rooms wide and located in the ground floor of the building. When I initially saw it I was a little disappointed, but overall the quality of the event made up for its size. I was especially drawn to the various books covers and flyers they had. As someone who works with computers all-day everyday, it is hard to imagine that all the fonts I look at everyday were at one point created by someone using no more than a pen and paper. It was fun going around and looking at all these hand-drawn letters and how the designers put so much attention to detail in order to create a unique typography to match the themes. In a way, it’s also sad to think that their art is obscured by how easy it is to find a great font nowadays. In any case, I enjoyed spending time at the exhibition. In the future, if I find out about new events by the HRC, I might be more inclined to attend.

I’ll leave all the pictures that I took of my experience below.

 

Also, as a bonus, I’ll leave a picture of the Frank Lloyd Wright part of the exhibition. One day I will get a house as nice as this one.