Archive for 2006
A little back-end upgrade
If you work in technology, most likely, you are familiar with the feeling that you get when you take something that is old or unreliable and make it modern and robust. For those of you who don’t work in technology, it’s like sitting in front of a fireplace, sipping hot chocolate (or Irish coffee) and […]
A College Calendar face-lift
The College Calendar is an important hub of information. It is the centralized source of all events at Gustavus. The calendar received a small but substantial face-lift yesterday to help improve its usability. Here is a rundown of the most important changes. Shorter, smarter URLs Similar to the effort to shorten many of our URLs […]
The College Calendar, Hot Off the Press!
The Gustavus College Calendar is a great resource of events and announcements for the entire Gustavus community, which anyone can submit items to. Events in the College Calendar may show up in many places automatically, including the Gustavus-L e-mail list, the On-Campus Community pages, lab and kiosk desktops, the Yellow Sheet, and departments’ and organizations’ […]
More Usable Contact Form
In celebration of World Usability Day we re-designed Technology Services’ contact form. How is this better? The new design divides the form into two logical sections to help visitors input their information as quickly as possible. It also sports a larger text box for visitors to type their concerns. Additionally, the form now will remember […]
A Classics face-lift
The Classics Department recently approached us about redesigning and updating their website. We fully understood that they were a small, but incredibly vibrant department, and we wanted this to be communicated without putting an added strain on time or resources. Back to basics We first examined the information they wanted to make accessible. We came […]
Wanna say something? You have 4 seconds.
New research shows that four seconds is the acceptable threshold for loading times on retail websites. This comes in light of similar recent research which suggests that visitors judge the quality of a website in a mere 50 milliseconds. So, if you want to say something on the web, you have no more than four […]
Search Engine Plugins Updated
Our three search engine plugins (Gustavus website, College Calendar, and the Gribly — previously here) have been updated to use the OpenSearch standard that Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 use for their built-in search boxes. One exciting new feature of Firefox is auto suggestions in OpenSearch plugins. Now when you search for something at […]
Firefox 2 Released
Mozilla released Firefox 2 yesterday, which is a huge update to the increasingly popular web browser. Firefox 2 has a ton of new features and bug fixes to offer, including inline spell checking and identity theft protection. Those two features alone make it worth a download for me. Once you get settled into the new […]
New Search Results
Along with Google’s announcement of the new Google Custom Search Engine, we are happy to announce that we are using the service for search results on the Gustavus website. Combined with the search cloud that we added in August, we believe that searching for pages on the Gustavus website has never been better. The new […]
XHTMLParagraphFormat() Version 3
Version 3 of the previously posted XHTMLParagraphFormat() ColdFusion function has just been released. Thanks to visitor and commenter Christopher Lewis for drawing my attention to a minor bug. Get it while it’s hot: Download XHTMLParagraphFormat() Version 3 I’d love to hear if you end up using this function or if you have any suggestions, fixes, […]