The registration period is coming upon us quickly. I was given the task to make the ad for the Liberal Arts department about this. These are my first two drafts based upon what I was given in information and style guide. It is still just in its first form. Currently, I am waiting to hear peer review and feedback on how to refine this more to better fit the look for the department. The last design went a little crazy but it is enjoyable for me to look at.
The past couple days I have worked on scanning slides for a professor and trained Kevin/Jalissa with setting up and scanning the slides with the appropriate settings. When working on the slides I had to put together an instruction sheet to upload to the knowledge base so other people can use it for reference when finishing a basic training or working for a professor. The scanner we have in the office is very slow which made the process time consuming but Jalissa helped with finishing up half of them and helped me out a lot.
It’s been one heck of a summer and first month of school, but I’m back and ready to work!
So far, I’ve only really been working on vlabs. First reviewing PSDs, creating PSDs, and now creating canvasser interactives. The grav site is really coming along! I’t’s nice to see how far the project has progressed since the last time I worked on it. As for the CSS, since Emily left, I’ll be implementing the UI design of the site. As of right now, we’re still figuring out the kinks of the mockup and how everything will look, but I’m excited to get started 🙂
Stacy’s also having me continue working on Learning Persian again. I’ll be working on making the site responsive and cleaning some parts of my code I did previously on dropdown menus and stuff. Should be fun!
Finally, I’ve been working on updating Cascade sites. Both the web admin help site and Dr. Beaver, a professor of Linguistics, with his page. Nothing too new here, I’ll just be updating his publications, making sure the links on the page are all working, and reorganizing all the citations on the page.
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.
Project: WordPress Maintenance scripts
Client /Prof: Stacy
Completion status: Started September 3rd 2019
Staff guidance: Stacy Vlasits
STA team members: None
Description/plans: Write a series of scripts to automate maintenance tasks on our WordPress sites
To be completed: End of this semester
Project: Life & Letters Stress Tips Illustrations and GIF
Client /Prof: Michelle A Bryant – Associate Director for Public Affairs
Completion status: Started September 16, 2019
Staff guidance: Suloni Robertson and Valerie Tran
STA team members: Thuy Nguyen and Abriella Corker
Description/plans: Design a photo collage illustration for sections of the Stress Tips article that will be published in the Life & Letters College of the Liberal Arts Magazine. My role is come up with concept, design template, source content for image, client communication, and drafts. Thuy refined the images and communicated with me on drafts and style choices.
To be completed: September 30, 2019
