Web Services
A division of Technology Services
The Benefits of Single Sign-On (SSO)
Single sign-on (SSO) is a mechanism that consolidates the authentication process of multiple services into one spot. This connection allows users to be logged into multiple services when they sign in to one. At Gustavus we are currently using a combination of CAS and Shibboleth to secure most of our services (e.g. the Gribly, College [...]
Single Sign-On (SSO) for Gribly, College Calendar, and more
As of this afternoon, if you log in to the Gribly, you will also be logged in to the College Calendar, Google Calendar, Moodle, and a bunch of other areas of the Gustavus website. We hope that this will help users effortlessly glide around the Gustavus website without needing to unnecessarily re-authenticate for each section [...]
College Calendar Gets Better Search
Search can be one of the most effective ways to find what you are looking for. When search is missing or ineffective, combing through a tangled and growing haystack of data can be a veritable nightmare. Thankfully, we just launched a major improvement to the way that the College Calendar displays search results. [...]
Weather on the Calendar
Hot on the heals of yesterday’s announcement of a new weather page and data provider, today we have added some weather information to the College Calendar. Hopefully each day’s forecasted high and low temperatures will help give event-goers a little more context of what to expect at their events. College Calendar
Weather for Saint Peter
We switched from a fee-based weather data service to use the freely available weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration today. In the transition, we cleaned up the interface a bit and add some useful features, like a handy sparkline that shows the current temperature in context. Additionally, our weather data is now a [...]
Commission Gustavus 150 Survey
The Commission Gustavus 150 Survey, our biggest roll-out in a long time, is officially under way. If you have a Gustavus username and password, you should hop on over and provide your input before May 31. Our goal was to design a web-based survey that would allow anybody in the Gustavus community to provide their input [...]
How the Air Force Responds to Blog Posts
Responding to negative blog posts is an artform. Here’s a flowchart that describes the United States Air Force’s rules of engagement for blogging, or rather, what their plan is when responding to blog posts. It seems to cover most situations well and would be a solid substitute for the knee-jerk freakout reaction. The Air Force’s Rules [...]
Get your Gravatars!
We recently enabled some new features involving comments on blogs at Gustavus. One of the coolest features, and the one that could use a little help from you readers, is the addition of Gravatars. What are Gravatars? From the Gravatar website: A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to [...]
How to Find Free Images
Have you ever been writing a blog post or putting together a website and thought that all it really needs is a couple of decent photos? If you don't have the time or talent to take photos for your pages, you might feel like you are out of luck. On the contrary, there's good news for you--an ocean of free images awaits you on Flickr Creative Commons search.
Calendar Widgets Get Date Links
You may have noticed that a number of Gustavus pages feature calendar widgets that display events from the College Calendar. Today we added a small but hopefully useful feature to these widgets--whenever a date is shown, that date will link to the same date in the College Calendar.