STA Blog

Daniela Caballero

Farewell!

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Farewell Post

Gracias y adios

As the title says, this is my farewell post 🙁 I will no longer be an STA during the upcoming fall semester due to a heavy course load. During this last week I will be wrapping up the 2 website migration I was working on and write some notes for the next STA to take on the project. That being said, I am extremely honored for the opportunity to have been a Web Dev and Design STA for the Spring 2023 semester. When I first joined, I was not truly aware of how big of an impact LAITS (both full time and student employees) have on UT. I am in awe of how huge some of the projects the other STAs were working on were like the UTFC Textbook, Carrie’s Precursors, Thang’s Master of Economics site (and all of the others projects too!). You guys are extremely talented! Luisa, Thang, Adrian, Marissa, Carrie, Leilani, Lorena, and Isaiah, I wish you all the best!

 

I’d also like to give a big thanks to Valerie, Maddy, Stacy, Chris, and Marianne.

 

To STA Managers: Valerie and Maddy thank you so much for always being there and helping me get started as an STA. When I first joined, everything seemed daunting but both of you made the process of joining the team very enjoyable! You both made the Dev Lab a wonderful and cozy workplace and you were both always there to answers all my questions and provide feedback 🙂 .  Thank you, especially for helping me with my STA Presentation, when I say I couldn’t have done it with out ya’ll I really mean it. I think I would have had a stroke on the stage.

 

To LAITS Web Development Team: Stacy, Chris and Marianne thank you for working with me on the LAITS Web Dev team. I learned so much through out this past semester from all of you. Thank you to Stacy and Chris for introducing me and guiding me through multiple projects throughout the semester. Thank you to Marianne for answering my questions and giving me feedback!

 

Moving Forward

This summer I will be interning at Texas Instruments (the one that makes the calculators) in Dallas. I will be running software tests on embedded processors. This is a more electrical engineer-y job than you would expect someone working on the front end of websites would do but I am very excited nonetheless! Looking forward I plan on continuing to work and learn more in the software field with a focus on Software Design and Data Science in the Electrical and Computer Engineering program here at UT. I also plan on building my portfolio by creating apps and software tools in the near future. I do not have a portfolio (yet!) but you will be able to see any of my future projects on my Github.

 

With that being said, you can reach me on LinkedIn if you want to know more about any of the projects I’ve worked on, if you are interested in embedded processors I guess, or if you just want to say hi!

Thank you LAITS and STA Team for everything and goodbye! <3

 

 

 

 

Week 15

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Week 15

Web Migrations Done?

Continuing on what I have been working on for the past few weeks, I wrapped up on two migrations of psychology labs. These are results:

 

Buss Lab

 

Church-Lang Lab

 

Notice how I didn’t say these were the final results, because they are actually not. The purpose of these web migrations are to offer the client a new website template with the previous content already on so that they don’t have to go through the hassle of moving everything themselves. This wonderful base template that Marianne created allows for the clients to make changes and edits easily! However, since this template is the same for both websites, I took some of the designs and logos of the previous sites and added them into the new template.

 

Below are some of the assets cleaned up from the websites. Using my limited design skills, I used a combination of Figma and Procreate to obtain these. The Church-Lang assets were created by taking separating the two elements (head and rainbow thing). I used a white pen brush on Procreate to remove the overlap with the colorful brush design element. For the rainbow brush design, I removed the very leftmost part of it and re-drew the stroke with a brush switching colors to gradually get a green to gray gradient. For the molecule(?) design, I used ellipses and rectangle boxes to recreate it.

 

I though the Buss Lab Logo would be the most challenging to recreate (for me) since I could not access the elements of the template in the original Buss Lab website. So I took a screenshot of the logo and opened it in Procreate. I add a transparent layer on top of it and began tracing the bird with a gray pen. Lastly, I free drew the grass surrounding the bird.

Church-Lang Lab Logo + additional assets

 

 

before

before

after

Buss Lab Logo

before

after

Week 14

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Week 14

Project: More Psych Lab Migrations!

 

Project: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab Website

Client/Prof: Department of Psychology

Started on: April, 2023

Completion status: Complete

Staff guidance: Stacy Vlasits, Marianne

Description/plans: Move more content from the current existing lab website to an updated theme.

 

Thought that the Chruch-Lang lab was the last website I was going to migrate? Well you thought wrong. There are multiple psych websites that still need to be migrated since a lot of them are using outdated templates and logos. The David Buss lab, is the next site that I will be migrating and there are many more psych lab sites! All of these sites are part of a multi-site on Word Press.  A multisite is a cluster of websites under the same dashboard that are managed/maintained by the same people. So at the moment I am a superadmin for all of these psychology lab sites T-T.

This is what the current David Buss lab website looks like:

You can take a look at it here.

 

I am going to move all the content of this site into the template that I previously posted about that Marianne made once again. The workflow for this task is to make a clone of the new template and just save/copy all the photos, elements, and content from the previous website into it. This is fairly simple in hindsight but sites can have a ton of content and moving everything over can actually be quite tedious. After the first migration I did last week, this one was much simpler. Because of WP’s very block modular layout across most of its themes, I could copy and paste block elements instead of have to photo each photo or paragraph one by one in the website. Another thing is making sure all the component look good and respond well in the new template.

 

Two of the pages I spent the most time on were the Books  and Graduate Students (Current lab members) pages. This was mostly because I have to download the images and resize them so that the layout of the page would look cleaner and so that all elements would have the same dimensions.

 

The home page is also a challenge since I’m attempting to replicate the look of it in the original website while also making it responsive.

 

This is one of the first ways I layout the cover image and the books out. I thought it was sort of awkward looking, all the books were different sizes and they did align with the cover image. To top it off the cover image was just oddly large and while it have have fit that mid-2000s vibe in the original, it’s not cutting it in 2023.

 

This is what I decided on (picture below). I cropped the height of the cover image and made it wider and also cropped/resized all the books images so that they would be the same dimensions. I used a lot of containers to accomplish this, all the the slot where the books are in are containers. Check it out here

Week 13

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Week 13

Hello! this week I wrapped up on the Psych Lab Website. This is what the content looks like on the new template.

 

Home Page

 

Lab Members

 

 

Research, Publication, Current Projects

I combined the Research and Publications tab into subsections and gave Current Projects section in the Research page of the original website its own page.

 

 

 

 

Location

The location page was renamed to Contact Information.

 

 

Volunteer

 

News & Events

 

 

The new template also includes a footer and an updated logo for the department of psychology!

Week 12

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Week 12

Project: Psych Lab Website Migration

Project: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab Website

Client/Prof: Department of Psychology

Started on: March 29, 2023

Completion status: In progress

Staff guidance: Stacy Vlasits, Marianne

Description/plans: Move the content from the current existing lab website to an updated theme.

In this project I will help move the content from the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab websites to a new theme that Marianne created.

This week I am continuing on the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab website my main task as of the moment is to move all the images on the current website to the new template. Take a look at all these images https://labs.la.utexas.edu/church-lang/lab-events/. My current workflow it to save all these images to my STA folder in the LAITS server first and then place each one of them in the new template.

 

 

 

Week 11

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Week 11

 

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

 

Project: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab Website

Client/Prof: Department of Psychology

Started on: March 29, 2023

Completion status: In progress

Staff guidance: Stacy Vlasits, Marianne

Description/plans: Move the content from the current existing lab website to an updated theme.

In this project I will help move the content from the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab websites to a new theme that Marianne created.

 

 

This is the theme of the current website and it has been the same for the past ten years! See, the LAITS logo used here is also old.

 

 

 

This is the new theme that Marianne created. It has the update Department of Psychology logo

 

 

As I was doing this migration I realized that the menu on the original website is different than the one for the sample website so I created more sections on the header in the template.

 

One styling issue that I am currently stuck on is whether to create a completely new section for some content that could be a subsection of an already existing section in the new template or just add the heading.

 

I tested to see how the look of having all the headings as they are in the original website would look like along with’s Marianne’s theme.