New Year, New Assignments

aka WordPress Websites

As the new semester begins, Suloni told me about an exciting new project that I am a part of: WordPress development with Stacy! Over the first two weeks of school I have slowly been trained to use WordPress with a series of small assignments and 1-1 sessions with Stacy. The learning curve is not too high thanks to my past web experience. Slowly I’m starting to realize that even though WordPress makes a lot of things easier with its code and add-ons, everything is vastly more complicated and powerful too.

My first project was Notevenpast.org, a very flashy history website with blog posts and book reviews and links to other UT history sites. Stacy worked with them to improve the front-end to display their book reviews. He wanted me to do something similar to the blog posts tab. In short: display all the blog posts in a visually attractive way and create a way to easily sort through them. This project wasn’t too hard because the javascript that Stacy made was mostly reusable. However, it did give me a great perspective about where everything is located in WordPress (files, folders and the website) and also how all the elements interact. Below are the before and after pictures for the site.

Personal Dreamweaver lessons for TBH

As the summer was ending I was asked to meet with Steve Black and Susan Dial in order to give them personal Dreamweaver lessons. They really liked the guide that I made earlier this summer but needed some clarification on specific issues that they were having. It was kind of scary. I know that they are really dedicated to what they do and therefore I was going to have to give them my best in order for them to leave happy. The problem is that I’m no Dreamweaver expert myself, since I barely started using it when I wrote the guide. In the end the meeting went pretty good. I wasn’t able to help them fix all their issues, we needed some help from Stacy for the last one. However, I think they were really pleased with my help. I taught them everything I could from going through the guide again with them to fun keyboard shortcuts for them to improve their use of Dreamweaver.

Computer Support Interactives

For the last few weeks of summer I worked on making Canvasser interactives for the Computer Support department at the CLA. The whole gist is that basically 80% of calls to Computer Support are about the same few issues that are simple to fix. This is how someone came up with the idea to create simple one-stop guides to fix any of these issues. Aidan developed some flowcharts for the basic process that one needs to follow in order to order a new computer, connect to wifi, a printer or a network drive. From here, I developed a canvasser interactive for each issue, with 1 slide per step in the flowchart. The interactives also ask the user questions about their particular system and situation in order to better help them. It took a couple of weeks of work and a LOT of changes to the original interactives because of styling problems and new Canvasser functionality. Finally, with some help from other STAs, I was able to create working products to be used this semester. Below are some pictures, first the original design then the final product.

Fixing TBH Issues

Kudos to the people in charge of TBH because after we delivered our final version of the project they found like a hundred more issues for us to fix. Last week Ruben, Suloni, Tate and I spent our time fixing all of them to deliver one final super-polished version of the site. I even had to add an extra 6 hours this week so we could finish. I’m going to talk about the 3 issues that took me the longest to fix.

First of all is Trans Pecos Mountains and Basins. (https://dev.texasbeyondhistory.net/trans-p/prehistory/index.html) This one managed to elude Ruben’s Flash seeking algorithm and was still not made in Canvasser so I had to make it from scratch. I decided to add the labels so that it would be more clear what each button pointed to. This was the final version.

Second is the Sandals interactive. (https://dev.texasbeyondhistory.net/granado/sandals/index.html) This one was made but there was a tiny issue. When Dr. Dirt hops around the screen in the intro he would fly across the screen for a tiny second. This one was SO HARD to fix. It took me over an hour of going through each frame to find the specific moment where the error happened. I finally made Dr. Dirt hop and jump the regular way.

Third was Time Travel. (https://dev.texasbeyondhistory.net/kincaid/kids/timetravel.html) This one was remade but all the sounds were not working. Also we had modified the first frame and they wanted us to bring it back. We did but we made it way better. Tate drew a nice background for it and we added all the sounds to make it nice.

 

Connect the Dot Com

This week I also had to be a tester for a new Canvas Online Course that the Sanger Learning Center is developing. The course is targeted towards Freshmen so that they can be effective and successful at online classes. Although the course had some issues and areas for improvement I think it was a good learning experience. I found some new studying ideas and tips. I also learned about all the work it takes to make a good online class.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/07/17/23673-2/

This week I was tasked with creating a guide that we could send to the people in charge of TBH. It would basically explain the basics of Dreamweaver in order for them to be able to edit and maintain the site from now on. Dreamweaver is a new program for me so I was excited to learn and get to know how it worked in order to be able to explain it. The guide also needs to be comprehensive, taking the user from knowing nothing through installing the server, downloading files and being able to edit a page. I’ve had some trouble in the process but the guide is more than halfway done. Originally I planned to download all the files for TBH but after a whole night it didn’t even finish! I modified the process a little but I think I’m well on my way to having a pretty good guide.