‘Standards’ Category
College Calendar Redesigned
One of the oldest, largest, and most important pieces of the Gustavus website, the College Calendar was just rethought, redesigned, reprogrammed, and released.
hCards in the Footer
As part of our ongoing quest to incorporate useful microformats throughout the Gustavus website, we have added an hCard to the footer of every page within the Gustavus template. What does this mean? Now, visitors who use hCard aware technologies, such as the Operator extension for Firefox, will be able to add contact information for the [...]
Linking in Style… CSS3 Selectors for the Win
Today, we made a couple subtle but visually helpful additions to hyperlink styles in our site-wide CSS. We used some advanced features of CSS3 to isolate off-site links, to add an extra background image and padding to the link, based on how MediaWiki handles off-site links. We also added a mail icon to mailto: e-mail [...]
What microformats mean to you
Recently we’ve highlighted a few instances where we’ve incorporated microformats into web applications and websites (e.g. faculty schedules and the 2006 Nobel Conference site). We’ve even hinted that more microformat-enabled goodies are in the works, yet we’ve only given very cursory overviews as to their purpose, importance, and usage. Rather than embark on our own [...]
Faculty Schedules Improved
We recently fixed and improved on our Faculty Schedules pages. Somehow, the CSS file for the site was deleted during the 2005-2006 school year, making the page harder to read and use. 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 [...]
2006 Nobel Conference Website
The 2006 Nobel Conference website, featuring an original design by Jerry Nowell, is now live. The cool feature on this year’s Nobel Conference website is the slick implementation of the hCalendar microformat on the Conference’s schedule page and the hCard microformat on the presenter pages and schedule page. This will allow software that can recognize the [...]
Gustavus Homepage Concept
Our homepage was one of the final pieces of the Gustavus Website that needed to be updated to the look-and-feel we introduced in December. We have been hard at work to create a concept that incorporates global trends, reflects our new design paradigms, addresses known information architecture issues, improves the accessibility and usability of the [...]
Understanding CSS
For the most up to date version of this article, please visit the GTS wiki. Within the context of the WWW, Cascading StyleSheets (CSS) are powerful sets of rules that tell clients like web browsers how to render documents. Currently these documents are most often written in XHTML, HTML, or a hybrid of the two. CSS [...]
Visitor Snapshot
Thanks to Shaun Inman’s Mint, we are able to see an extremely current and accurate snapshot of who is visiting our website. I checked out some of the user agent statistics that we collect and was pleasantly surprised with some of the figures. Firefox is In While Firefox is a relatively new browser compared to the ancient [...]
Gustavus Template Advanced Techniques
If you are a web developer at heart and happen to be using the Gustavus Template Container for your Gustavus web pages, today is your lucky day. Harness a little more of the power the Gustavus Template offers by reading up on our new Advanced Techniques. There, you will be able to learn some of [...]