Today we launched a new interactive (Google) Campus map , http://www.uww.edu/maps/ that should make finding resources on campus easy and fun.  While it’s currently a basic map with buildings and a few major resources, over the next few months we’ll be adding new features as well as increasing the amount of information displayed about locations we are currently mapping. So check back frequently as we make updates. See something we missed, or have a  suggestion? Let us know by filling out our feedback form.  Your suggestions will help shape our plan for new features and upgrades to current ones.

Yesterday Apple released the final patches to safari 3 to clean up a nasty vulnerability that allowed remote execution of code. All safari users should make sure they update to version 3.1.2.  Also last month Firefox 3 officially launched on June 11th. Currently we are testing both browsers against our current sites and services. Most services and sits that functioned in Firefox 2 will also work in Firefox 3. However there are large differences between safari 2 and 3 so we are leaving Firefox 3 and Safari 3 as a tier two browsers until we can officially support them. Happy browsing! and please send us an email if you find a page that doesn’t work right in FF 3 or safari 3.

Hello,
I wanted to let everyone know that Serena the company that owns our Collage CMS product has decided to stop development on the product. This means that there will be no new versions or enhancements to the product. While we still have support into the foreseeable future, we (the Web Team) believe that this is an opportunity to look at alternative solutions.

So what does this mean for you?

At this point nothing will change; we will continue to use Collage while we evaluate our future direction. In the upcoming months we will be calling on you to aid us in requirements gathering and product evaluation.
As I can only assume many of you will have questions; please post them below and I will respond to them the best I can.

Joel

With the release of IE8 beta 1 yesterday to developers/public, the web is becoming an exciting and scary place. Once released into production IE8 will round out the group of having all four of the major browsers, those being: IE8, FireFox 3, safari 3 and opera 9, being for the most part standards compliant and all passing the Acid2 CSS test. Which should allow web designers and developers to provide better consistency across all updated browsers.

This however still brings the question of old browsers and legacy/third party web applications that require older and for the most part specific versions of a browser and can we fully support web standards and at the same time ensure that these older and out of date browsers can still use the website in a acceptable manner that is the challenge that we face as web designers.

We’re proud to announce the release of the new version of the UW-W homepage to a public beta. The new site is a culmination of months of planning and development. We hope you like the fresh new look and find it easy to use and navigate. You can view the site here: http://beta.uww.edu. Please let us know what you think of the site and take a while to get accustomed to the new site, so that when we launch it into production you know where things are.

So as you might have notice we’ve moved a little. Sorry about that. However, as you might see (maybe not) we’ve moved to Wordpress(WP) MU, and I’ve managed to keep the same look and all old posts and comments, thanks to the ease of WP themes and our server admins. I’m thinking of adding some plugins but we’ll see. Have any ideas post a comment. I’ll be posting a WP theme tutorial soon, well as soon as I write it.

an interesting article on relative CSS font sizing was posted on A List Apart today. they did some research into cross browser font sizing. The results are quite surprising.

Check out the full story: http://alistapart.com/articles/howtosizetextincss.

As i discussed in my last article on search engine optimization (SEO) there are many factors that figure into where you rank on a search engine. There are basically 3 keys. Of which I’ll touch on in this 3 part series.

The first key is properly using meta tags. Meta tags can be a big help to your search ranking, but if used improperly can actually hurt your rankings. There are two tags to work with here, three if you count the title tag, which for all intensive purposes I will include because it’s in the same place.

Getting started
Lets take look at what these tags do and then see how to use them to our advantage.

Read more…

Much has been said over the years about how writing for the web is different than writing for print. While that may be true one thing is certain the look of your website is equal to the quality of the content this is on your site. Too many times we create pretty websites that have little or no quality content just because we think we have to have a website for this. Well this week’s issue of A List Apart, a web magazine, has two very interesting articles on writing for the web. I encourage you to check them out. http://alistapart.com/issues/242. The better the content we have on our Web sites the greater the effectiveness that site has.

When posting content from Microsoft Word on the web. There are a few things to remember so that you don’t end up having to go back and reedit your documents.

First and foremost Word does funky things to formatting, especially when it comes to quotes and fonts. In order to make your word files look good; whether your posting in your blog or creating content in Collage or even in Dreamweaver, watch out for quotes because while these look “good” if you do it wrong they look like this ?quote? and no one likes these. So what’s the best way to fix this problem, I bring you two solutions one using Dreamweaver and the other a little bit more work.

The easy way first. In Dreamweaver make a new HTML page and then paste your word content into the design view. It should look exactly like the text out of Word. Onto the clean up, under the Commands tab at the top select the clean up word HTML option, the defaults will work just fine and hit okay. Dreamweaver will now run through the code and strip out all the unwanted Word formatting and leave you with code you can paste into any web based WYSIWYG editor.

Now for the multi step way. From Word open up notepad (easy way is to hit start > run and in the dialog box type notepad) from here paste the content from Word into notepad. Because notepad can’t understand the Word formatting it just skips it but you will need to walk through your text just to make sure everything is as you want it to be, as it doesn’t clean it up like Dreamweaver does. Once you’ve walked through your text; in notepad now you can paste it into what ever web editor you wish.

Hope that helps rid you of the many headaches that can arise when pasting from Word. Have other tips on cleaning up word text? Post a comment.