Institutional Knowledge

Nothing makes as web designers blood curl more than hearing someone remark, “it looks too 1990’s”. Talk about an arrow through the heart. Enter our CAS login page. Over the last couple of months I have been refining the look and behavior of the CAS login page to give it a modern look and also create a stronger visual association with CSU, Chico.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit, when we developed these pages last year there was some heavy 37signals influence that carried through (bright colors, larger type, etc). However, we had a good justification for those decisions. CAS was launch simultaneously with the new Portal so we wanted to grab the attention of everyone clicking through the login. Now, after a year with the new Portal, it was time to make things a little more subtle and increase the connection with the campus.

To strengthen the bond with the universities online brand we adapted a similar background gradient which also helped contrast the white background of the login form. In addition, we included the Chico signature header and grey seal combination from the universities web template system. With the previous version, the only references to CSU, Chico were the Wildcat logo and text Wildcat Login.

Other changes include a crude pop-up div that explains what the username actually is. In addition, we added support phone numbers for Students and Faculty/Staff incase users have problems.

Hopefully the new design will roll out next week after graduation. For the time being, I’ll be tweaking the design and continuously running browser tests.

Without further-ado, CAS Version 2.

Today we saw a preview of the new English Department website that featured a directory listing of faculty members. Here’s an example sample of some of the markup for one faculty member

If we add a few classes to this existing structure (plus a few @span@s) we could make the site microformat compatible.

Bam! Microformat compatible.

Scott came back from SXSW all jazzed about microformats …and really, who could blame him? It’s something so simple and easy to implement (it’s just markup) that to not embrace them is an act of stubborness.

But the first step in taking advantage of a microfomat is knowing of it’s existence. For that, we have Tails, a nifty Firefox extension that alerts you to the presence of a microformat. You do use Firefox, don’t you?

The latest rage in the world of web-dev is “mashing” or in laymens terms, taking data from multiple sources and blending it together to form a new view on an old thing. I’d been kicking around ideas of how to incorporate the coolness that is Google Maps with campus related information.

One of the first things that came to mind was WiFi hotspots on campus. With a little help from MapBuilders and the CNS website I was able to create Google Maps Mash of Wildcat Wireless Hotspots. In essences, this simply takes the map and coloring aspect of this PDF document and merges in the data for specific buildings

If another department wanted to use this mash-up on their website all they would need to do would be copy the HTML and Javascript file and apply for a free Google Map Key for their specific directory and place it into the HTML code (see below).

So while is nothing new or super-fantastic it is a new spin on old data. Not to mention, it could give a website that wanted to convey this data the ability to do so with a little more flare than just a PDF document of a campus map.

Check it out today at Campus Wireless!