STA Blog

STA Work Blog

STAs: Student Technology Assistants

Who We Are
LAITS: IT and Facilities Director, Joe TenBarge initiated the Student Technology Assistant program in 2004. STAs are UT students who work on a variety of projects in collaboration with UT faculty and LAITS staff members. STAs assist College of Liberal Arts faculty members and administrative staff with print and web design. From building presentations, to creating audio/visual works, and producing online classes in the LAITS film studios, STAs are instrumental in helping COLA faculty realize their vision for multimedia projects that enhance their teaching and the students learning experience. By the end of their student careers, STAs have portfolios which demonstrate their accrued technical and design skills.

Prospective STAs:

Creative and technically inclined students are appointed as STAs for one year, with the possibility of being rehired as long as they study at the university. Applicants for the program are hired before both long semesters. Interested students may look for postings on Hire-A-Longhorn when positions are available. Positions will have Student Technology Assistant (illustrator or web designer) in the title of the job post.

Faculty and Staff:

Faculty & Staff with questions about services, please contact us.

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/laits/contacts.php

  • Audio Services: Michael C Heidenreich, Director of Studio Operations & STA Program Coordinator
  • Video Services: Kelly Webster, Video Production Supervisor, Video STA Supervisor
  • Graphic Design & Web Design Services: Suloni Robertson, Art Director / Design & Coding STA Supervisor

2-25-19

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Computer Support for COLA Web Editor

I’m continuing to help update information about how to use the new COLA web editor, which has a very different interface from the old database. We need instructions targeted at university staff and faculty for the main UT computer support pages and instructions targeted at LAITS-only staff who have admin permissions in the web editor. The latter instructions will go into a WordPress site for STAs to use in the future that will be a guide/compendium.

Littlefield Lecture Posters

I’ve also been working on some poster designs for a lecture sponsored by the Department of History. To expedite the process Suloni gave me a .psd used for last year’s lecture to use as a template (featuring an author + book), and I just exchanged the images and changed the text and colors. I’m also going to work on some original designs today, which I will post here soon.

Advanced Cascade Tutorial

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Advanced Cascade Tutorial

Suloni asked me to create an “Advanced Cascade Tutorial” on the Knowledge Base since I’ve been doing a lot of Cascade stuff recently. She asked me to start with a tutorial on creating tables! You can check out the tutorial here, but here’s some screenshots.

Final Details in Podcast site

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Today, I finish some preview details for both the speaker and episode search site, limiting the summary at 250 characters.

Episode summary
Speaker summary

I also worked in the design for the theater philosophy site.

https://xd.adobe.com/view/607ff071-e8a9-4514-476e-fc620ed76202-164e/

Modifications in Search

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Today I made some usability modifications to the podcast site, and I was able to fix the retrieval of the speakers.

All speakers display and ordered by last name
Podcast/episodes in order by number
Date of episode is now date of upload, before date recorded
Speaker panel in ascendent order by last name, in format: Last name, name

Photoshop Lesson

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Photoshop QUEEN

Today I sat in on a PhotoShop lesson that Chloe, Tate, and Jac were putting on for the Mellon scholars. I have zero (0) experience with PhotoShop so this little class was great for me to dip my toes into design! Here’s my finished product!!!

Glossary Page

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IH – Glossary Page

This week I spent some time getting the full Glossary page to work in the Immigration History site. I will show a picture-by-picture story about how I did it.

The whole thing started with a blank Glossary page and a lot of backend work. Stacy helped me use RESTful api to get all the info from the WordPress page and turn it into a JS object called glossary_page.

I could loop through these in order to print all the terms and definitions we have, but a real glossary needs to be in alphabetical order. Javascript’s native sorting allowed me to get them in the right order.

After this I ran into another problem. Since some of these words have parent terms, we want these to appear right under their parent. I had to modify my algorithm so that I only print the words that are not themselves children. After this, for every word that does have children, I would print them below their parent.

The last little bit to the Glossary page was creating labels for every letter. This is mostly for design purposes. I achieved this by comparing the initial letter of our words to the next one, printing a label when a different letter showed up.

As you can see, this works pretty good. When new words show up, they will now appear in the Glossary, as well as new labels for different letters.

As for next steps, I will now work on linking the pop-up definitions to their corresponding Glossary entry. I also have a meeting with the client during my next shift. I will show her how to insert new words and how this changes the site dynamically.