We hope that the schedules will be even more informative and useful than ever with this non-course information. Scheduling meetings has never been easier.

Big thanks!

I’d like to extend a big special thanks to Mary Milbradt, Ethan Sommer, and Jennifer McCabe for all of their help in making this possible. Projects like this would never succeed without good people who are eager help out. How about a round of applause?

Schedules

We’ve been planning for this feature for a while and are happy to see it go live today. We hope that things like this make our projects better. We love to make people’s lives just a little bit nicer and maybe even a little easier.

Do you like this?

If you like this feature or would like to see any other new features, we’d love to hear from you. Please leave us a comment.

Schedules

Today, we announce room schedules.

Is this new information?

Schedules for rooms are based on the same data that we have collected for the faculty portion of schedules, so re-purposing the information was fairly straightforward. However, room schedules do not accurately depict all of the times when any given room is in use. Rather, it merely shows when rooms are scheduled for class.

Eventually, we hope to integrate room schedules into the college calendar some more, but that is still a very long way off.

The details

Each room’s schedule page is similar to an overlay of faculty member schedules. However, instead of overlaying a list of people’s schedules, the room’s schedule overlays all of the events that are happening in that room.

You also have the ability to overlay a number of rooms. We hope that this will simplify scheduling tasks for people across campus.

What’s next?

We are looking at adding the ability to browse backwards and forwards through people’s and rooms’ schedules. This will allow you to look at what has been scheduled as well as giving you the ability to peer into the future to see what is in store next week, or even next month.

We are also hard at work integrating features from the schedules throughout the Gustavus website. So, if you have any ideas as to where you would like to see schedule information, please let us know.

Schedules

We know this is a small thing, but we are always looking for ways to make our services better and more effective and love to hear constructive feedback and good ideas. As always, please let us know what you think either by leaving a comment, using our feedback form, or the five-star rating on the bottom of each page.

Schedules

What’s the same?

While the new version of the schedules brings a number of enhancements, there are a lot of similarities with the previous version.

For starters, the first screen you are presented with still contains an alphabetical listing of the faculty who have schedules.

Additionally, you can still click either on the name to view a single person’s schedule, or check multiple people and select overlay to see a composite schedule. This is especially useful for deciding when to schedule meetings.

What’s new?

The entire project has been re-thought-out and rebuilt from the ground up. While this rethinking helped us add a few new features, we also made a number of smaller improvements.

On the technical side, the new version is written in PHP instead of ColdFusion. This will allow us to be more agile with our development practices and help us to incorporate the code we are writing today into new projects that we might be working on down the line. Plus, PHP is free and it has an enormous community. What’s not to like?

The feature that stands out the most is the new details window that is displayed when you put your mouse over a time. This will give you all of the important information you need. The best way to understand it is to simply check it out.

What’s left?

While this is all new, the project has not been completed yet. This is only phase one, so we have a bit more work to do before we can call things good.

Currently, most of the important functionality is written in JavaScript. While most users have JavaScript enabled in their browsers, a very small percentage will be affected by this. We believe that this works well as a temporary solution; however, it isn’t all that accessible. We will be working on migrating some of the core functionality from JavaScript to PHP, which will improve the performance and accessibility of the application.

We also need to allow people to add non-course events to their schedules. While this step has traditionally been completed in the Deans’ office, we hope to give individuals who are interested the ability to add to and update their own schedules.

What’s on your mind?

We would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions about the new schedules. What works for you? What doesn’t? What would you like to see happen? Let us know in the comments for this entry.

Schedules

We’ve added new CSS and javascript to the site, including a box on the right that keeps track of people you’ve selected to overlay and makes the form easy to submit. The nifty thing is, we were able to avoid a visually jerky and semantically questionable javascript solution for the box’s placement, and implement the placement completely with CSS, despite the fact that Internet Explorer (pre-7 beta 2) doesn’t support the position:fixed CSS declaration.

We based our solution on work by Mark Wilton-Jones, as described at http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/fixedPosition.html. This hack/work-around isolates a couple different versions of Internet Explorer and feeds them appropriate CSS fixes (some of which is proprietary Microsoft stuff, which ends up invalidating our CSS, but it seems like a decent compromise).

We also recoded the HTML of the directory-esque information to conform to the hCard microformat. hCard attempts to encode vCard information in XHTML by giving specific classes to elements containing certain data. We’ll be trying to use this technology (along with the hCalendar microformat) in more places around the Gustavus site.

There were many reasons for the delay in getting this data. However, now that the obstacles have been overcome for getting this information, this is a huge step forward in bringing current, important information to our visitors on the web in other places such as the campus directory. We are very excited about the possibilities this technique will bring.