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

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RGT

I’m still working on RGT. I talked with Stacy before Thanksgiving, and he said that there will be some changes with the layout. I plan on talking with him soon to figure out the details.

Personally, I feel like that I’ve been in sort of a rut in learning Javascript and CSS right now. The largest issues I have are with website layout. BUT I’m slowly learning, so hopefully I’ll improve over time and be able to fix these issues faster.

You can see that the sidebar looks a little better now, and that Stacy added a map panel as well. The goal is to make the website seem like you’re physically at the site, and you’re just “pulling up” a map or the info panel. This is also where Stacy mentioned the layout changes will come into play. He wants some info to sort of “pop in” when you click on things, which is different from the slide-ins that I’ve been working on.

Slowly but surely, we’re making progress!

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2018/11/28/26010-2/

Cascade stuff for UT Support Page

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I was tasked to edit the contact information and instructions for the UT Support Page.  I was originally tasked to make an informational graphic, but that was nixed, so I just wrote down the instructions/guidelines/contact information with Suloni’s approval.

 

Wow. Much support.

 

I won’t be coming in tomorrow on Friday because I finished my hours for the week!

More Persian Layout

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More Persian Layout

 

The next thing I did was make every section of the site styled with an inline block like so: 

This prevents a section from breaking into separate columns like this: 

and instead looks like this: 

Mission Accomplished!

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The Canvas Appstore is done!!!

 

Project: Canvas Appstore
Completion status: Started October 19 2018 and FINISHED November 14 2018!
Staff guidance: Chris Pittman
STA team members: Jac
Description/plans: Build the interface for UT”s Appstore which will house different downloadable features to Canvas.

 

It is CRAZY to be writing this post. I can’t believe that my first (and big!) project is completely done. I wish I’d taken original photos from the very beginning that way I’d be able to do a better before/after but I suppose those are notes for next time. Here’s the home page after the very first day or working to the final coded version:

Transformed into…

 

And the Install page!

 

Transformed into…

Chris & the admin that I met with said that the Appstore should go into testing sometime this week & would be put out for actual use next semester! HOW COOL! 🙂

Persian Layout

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Persian Layout

 

One of the biggest improvements I’ve made to the Persian site is to the layout. The first thing I did was add an @media css rule to change the number of columns based on the screen width. That looks like this in the CSS: 

basically when the screen gets to width 800px we go from 2 columns to 1 column so that things aren’t squished together.

This is how that looks in the real world: