Category Archives: Week in Review

This week…

It’s been a little while since I’ve done a Week in Review!

This was the first week with the Web Team’s new designer, Justin McDowell. He’s getting himself set, which makes me realize how much I’ve already figured out in just four months. 🙂 Also, how helpful my previous experience at Pierce College was, and how helpful it is to have two family members who attended Evergreen.

But now we can start to set up common processes and systems, toss out old stuff, start big new stuff. So that’s very cool.

This week I worked quite a bit on OARS (Online Academic Records System) — some personas work, which I find I really enjoy both the research and the writing. (I was a creative writing major at UPS. Go figure.) And also some UX work with the very first bit of the system. I’ve never done UX design in Excel, and yet for this piece it was exactly the right tool. Since, really, it’s just a table. The OARS project team has a cowork/meeting one morning a week, and we mostly worked on that — clarifying from what I’d done and what the lead developer had done, and getting to something that made sense to the whole team, and that we think will be good for students…someday.

I also did lots and lots of Google Analytics reporting, which can be mind-numbing, but then there are flashes of insight. Those are kind of delightful; it even included discovering that something I’d done was actually helpful to our site visitors, measurably so!

There’s been one incredibly dull project that’s also incredibly necessary to move some other projects along. TBH, it’s sort of nice sometimes to just have something quiet and routine to do.

Two months

This morning doesn’t feel like a great time to be posting a note about having been here for two months…I’m super-groggy this morning, starting the week with a sleep deficit; the weather’s very gloomy for July; CMS2 isn’t working; Susan’s out of town, and I’m feeling somewhat adrift.

And yet…I’m still glad to be here.

Elaine Nelson

July 5, 2012

Today feels oddly like both a Monday and a Friday. But it’s Thursday, the day after a holiday. Despite that oddness, I have gotten some things done.

week in review: thinking about Cascade

And…it’s the end of week four! Already! And I haven’t posted here since the end of week one.

This week I really dug in to Cascade; I created a custom content type, with the goal of making the big picture on the homepage something that can be clicked on. (The specific details of what that will look like are yet to be determined.) It’s pretty convoluted, really, and I haven’t entirely worked out which things ought to be done before which other things. But I got it working in “CMS2”, which is the installation for testing & development. In theory this should be the template for other sorts of structured data: alumni profiles, events calendar, etc. The part that I was afraid couldn’t be done, or would at least be hugely difficult, was selecting a single item at random…and as it turns out, there was a “common” XSLT formatter already in the system to do that very thing. So…yay.

I’m also beginning to realize that one could — again, in theory — set up the catalog entirely through the CMS, instead of having a bunch of PHP helper scripts. Cascade can (via XSLT) do some pretty crazy things with XSLT. There’s so much that it could be doing, if I can just figure out how it wants me to do things, instead of fighting with it. (And, honestly, instead of wanting it to be Drupal, which is what I’m accustomed to.) Because it can be built smart, with reusable components and structured data, which is really the key of any CMS.

Week one in review

AKA: I can haz teh brain fry.

Really, it’s been good, but there’s a lot to learn and a lot to adjust to, plus I’ve spent big chunks of the last two days in meetings. I’m starting to get a glimmer of understanding how Cascade works, which is pretty different from the CMSs I’m accustomed to have worked. I did my very first (tiny!) content edit; ironically (?) it was correcting a typo in the name of my last employer. I’ve got a small editing project to do across multiple sites. I’m going to be working on a subsite project with Susan. I’ve got an idea for something really new that I haven’t any idea how to accomplish.

Plus, you know: setting up my workspace, physical & virtual; getting paperwork filled out; meeting at least 50 people in four days, etc. All the usual new job whatnot.

I’m still glad to be here, at least.