Feedbacks, I needs them! Help, Internets, uncover the egregious UI errors I've likely made! (Most of the pages are there in Students / Employers, but I haven't done the front page yet - it's not going to be incredibly different from the Students page, just ... more frontpagey. The subsection is good enough for a demo.)

What that is, of course, that web thing there, is the website I've been working on since September. Gak. I'm fairly certain that my prescription dropped two diopters from all the late-night squinting. Before I started, I had no idea that Career Services had so much content. There's, like, ten times as much on my desk as there is on the site right now, including videos and all sorts of workshop content. Designing the back-end was a lot more challenging then any other project I've worked on so far, because of the sheer diversity of the content they've got and the need for something that would basically accommodate it all in a way that would be vaguely sustainable for future years.

Also, I'm not sure about the orange.

One other thing: the "branding" of the site is Queen's branding. It's is something I stuck with on purpose, so that if you compare it with http://library.queensu.ca or http://www.queensu.ca you'll notice that the background, footer, and top-bar are shared, and the header is very similar. I'm not totally crazy about it, to be honest, but them's the breaks. Damn you, teamwork.

PS: Don't click on the "Job Postings" button, I haven't gotten my paws on that system's templates yet. But soon. Soooon.

PPS: Why yes, it IS Drupal! Also, SPOT THE COWS!

I've been thinking a lot about communications, both with respect to politics and my job. Here's a list of eleven things that every company and non-profit should make available, on its website (via login, probably), for subsidiaries or chapters or departments to use. These eleven steps will go a very long way to ensuring organizational memory, consistency of branding, and an easy way for under-funded sub-entities to look like their grown-up parents:

1. At cost website namespace, templates, and hosting - ie: xxx.organization.ca or organization.ca/xxx, on a giant CMS and via cPanel, infrastructure permitting. Yes, cPanel is not just for the big boys anymore. Yes, I'm saying that every company should be in the hosting business. Why? Because it's ridiculously cheap to buy resale space on banks of servers, it's just intimidating to think about. If the company can afford one web developer, they can do this with not much additional overhead.
2. A website template in Wordpress, Drupal, and Blogger.
   • In an ideal world, all chapter content should be automatically available to the organization as a whole, and in a format that everybody knows, to ensure continuity after so and so quits or whatshername gets too busy to update things anymore. The best way to do this is with option #1: a giant CMS, or at least space that the company can peek at now and then.

     The problem arises when, inevitably, the organization gets some web developer who really wants to put on their resume that they designed the website for their local chapter of the Brotherhood of Pigeonhawk Breeders or Ernst & Young or whatever. This person, who has just enough tech savvy to be dangerous, will inevitably throw around acronyms like "AJAX", "CSS", etc, and convince somebody in charge that their chapter/department is unique so they really, really need their own website to host the pet technology of the web developer. They're special, and not like the other departments/chapters because they have X members or are in a situation of X demographic anomaly, or whatever... The key point is that they absolutely, totally, completely need to go it alone.

     This will happen, and when it does, there needs to be lots of policy and guidelines around branding to allow the website to follow general look-and-feel while still being aggravatingly independent.

   • Conversely, this may be necessary because Head Office has gone on the wrong track, picked a horrid CMS that nobody can use, or has an overworked web developer who can't service the influx of requests for tech in a timely fashion, or the servers are overloaded and there's no money for more infrastructure. So it needs to be as easy as possible for sub-organizations to follow look-and-feel and basic branding so they can do it themselves instead of being tethered to a sinking content-ship.
3. Photoshop headers, swoops, ticks, gradient backgrounds, and stock photos for website and print materials. Essentials include:
   • an icon set
   • bullet points
   • a starter CSS file and XHTML page
   • Any other small but essential graphical elements that make up the organization's branding
4. An InDesign and Publisher newsletter template
5. An InDesign and Publisher newspaper (b/w) and magazine (color) ad template in a few sizes.
6. A one-page "Come to our great xxx"-type flier template in MS Word, InDesign, and Publisher
7. Logos in all colours and reverse-outs (this is duh territory, but hey)
8. T-shirt templates (seriously!)
9. Sample letters-to-the-editor, memos, and letterhead
10. An email address, chapter@xxx.organization.ca, for placing on communications (if it's a non-profit or similar organization where boards change their members more than Paris Hilton changes shoes).
11. A form where organizations can post events and news to the main website and access an RSS feed of same.

Except for #1, this is all stuff that the organization should already have. And #1, a basic CMS, is something they should have. cPanel hosting is a nice-to-have, to at least keep content, if not in the same format, at least in the same locally accessible space.

That's about it off the top of my head. Can anybody else think of anything more?

Since I've been working at Career Services, I've been poking my nose into various career... services, many of which are all about the knowing of thyself. Since I really like things that are about me, I'm really enjoy this. I did a test recently about learning styles, and much to my surprise I came in as a mildly visual learner. I thought I was a tactile learner, or at least an auditory one, what with my extensive background in music. On the other hand, I'm a designer. Which is primarily visual. But on the third hand (wait, how many hands is that?) I don't visualize things well - they're all fuzzy in my mind's eye, I don't see pictures. So I thought, well, definitely not a visual learner.

However, one of the things that I do love to do is to tell stories to make points. I analogize a lot. I find patterns and map them onto other things. It is probably vastly annoying to people who don't think the same way I do, because my mind works in a sort of gestalt - nothing makes sense until WHAM, it all does, and I act. Or, in many cases, tell a story. Turns out that this is a key hallmark of visual learners. Who knew? Maybe that explains why I've never liked audio books. Or sports.

PS: I turn 28 tomorrow. I take cheques. Made out to "Congratulations, you're officially in your LATE 20s. WHERE DID ALL THE TIME GO? GO GO GO! IT IS RUNNING OUT! THE TIME! AUGH!"

The wheel, it is being reinvented every day.

I've been doing a survey of the systems that Queen's uses for content and learning management, going around and meeting with people and chatting about web solutions. It's great, because I get to meet my contemporaries and forge connections. There are a lot of us out there, scrunched away in tiny offices, working away in the dark.

However, nice as it is to meet and greet, I'm simultaneously dismayed by the number of custom solutions we've all created, solutions that individual admins have spent years (and in some cases tens of thousands of dollars in salaries) working on... solutions which replicate functionality that out-of-the-box, open-source software already does.

And what for? In every case there is an admin - or, worse, a contract company - who leaves a custom, legacy system that nobody else knows how to update, maintain, or use.

This started when I was at Applied Science - they created a student portal, fully custom coded. Why were we reinventing the wheel? There were many reasons, but most of them came down to failures of research, rather than failures of options. But it wasn't just us: this survey I'm doing is turning up similar issues all across campus.

Part of it is excusable - sometimes, the technology wasn't quite ready yet, so three years ago admins went their separate ways, and created stopgap solutions that became institutionalized. But god, even if they'd worked together across Queen's we could have gone so much farther.

And then the failures: ITS chose an open-source solution that they abandoned a year later... because it didn't have the functionality they needed, and it wasn't being maintained anymore. Whoops. Again, I think, a failure of research and planning - decisions were made based upon thinking about negatives (we can't use it if it can't do this, this and this) - without considering the positives (can we roll our own modules? Is there a development community? Will the tech get better?) In geek-speak, then, Queen's has been talking closed shop when we should have been talking open source.

Why? Part of it is that everybody works in isolation and doesn't know the ins and outs of the available web technologies - let's be gentle and say simply that Queen's can't afford to pay industry standard salaries, so they tend to get hobbyists-turned-pro (like me) rather than people who were working for companies who already went through these issues using good project management plans. So the decisions about what systems to use, or not use - as ITS found out - still failed them, because they didn't actually have a CMS expert working with them to tell them what was what. They made decisions based upon slick demos rather than upon developer community consensus.

And here we are: three custom, unsustainable portals, two failed open-source ventures, two completely custom, unsustainable CMSes, and one monolithic and frightfully expensive LMS later. And we're SO FAR BEHIND other universities it's not even funny.

Enter Drupal.

I said to somebody I was chatting with recently that Open Source, and being a Drupaller, is like religion. But that was just me being flippant, beacause it's actually not: unlike religion, I have extremely good, earthly reasons for why I am so devout. And Sony, IBM, Warner Brothers, SPIN magazine, Yahoo, UPEI and Calgary, porn.org (no, really), The Onion, Adobe (just Flex for now), Universal Studios, Nike, FedEx, AOL, Sun OpenOffice, Popular Science, Amnesty International, Harvard, Belgium, and the frickin' UN all agree with me.

I started developing my newest project in Drupal 6.3 last week, up from 5.1 at my last position, and HOLY GOD IT IS AMAZING. I forgot a) just how easy, and how much fun it is, to use Drupal, and b) how fast Drupal evolves. Six looks much like Five, but it has simplified so much - hooks for module development, menuing, theming, and views - that it is, literally, a joy to use. Fast, simple*, easy. I can't tear myself away.

So GET ON BOARD, QUEEN'S.

That is all.

PS: Use Drupal.

* For developers. Drupal is not MT or Wordpress: it's for programmers. But that's alright - you wouldn't expect a civil engineer to use MS Paint, would you?

One of the things I'm doing for my new job is going through all the resources that the office has and finding ways to put them in The Internets. Some of these are quizzes and career resources, others are tips and tricks, books, and the like. The quizzes range from the Strong Interest Inventory to Meyers-Briggs (I'm an INTP. However I'm still not entirely certain about the accuracy of MBTI - I've read conflicting studies. But get this: "he or she may become overly critical and sarcastic with others." WHO, ME? NEVER.)

The one I did today is a pretty basic quiz that has you press on happy/sad faces to rate your preferences. It was only ten questions long. But for a quiz that asks "Do you like: taking and following orders?" this actually pegged me fairly accurately. But I've gotta say: LOBBYIST?? What's wrong with just saying "prostitute" ??

There were also about ten different entires for "mechanic," "gunsmith," "millwright," and then it popped up with "director." And I'm, like, wait, what? Unfortunately, nowhere did it say dictator which would have been way more accurate.

In short: not for me a career in law enforcement or early childhood education. Which I think was already fairly obvious to anybody who, you know, has ever met me.

But four in the top eleven isn't too bad...

I was talking to a coworker and I actually felt my fingers twitch when I tried to describe something. My knees flexed and I was about to launch myself towards the whiteboard in my office, a whiteboard which does not even exist. I must truly be a programmer. Either that or a terrible communicator. Note to self: get a whiteboard.

In other news, I accidentally fell in love with Sarah Slean.

I'm gathering SMEs! SMEEEEEEEEEEs! That sounds dirty, but it's not. I'm talking about "Subject Matter Experts," part of the requirements-gathering process for the integrated web presence that I'm working on in my new job. And by the way? My new job rocks, with the exception of the closet I'm temporarily working out of (which wouldn't be so bad except that the air conditioning vent is RIGHT UNDER MY FEET and there's nowhere else to put my desk. I'm going to have to rethink skirts). Still, on a scale of one to spiff, everything is fairly spiffy.

Things that I have: new quad core computer? Check. Universal Principles of Design? Check. Dual 22" monitors? Check. Cool co-workers? Yes indeed. Upper management with vision and a strong commitment to students rather than budget line-items? OH YES.*

(Also, good communication of that vision between management and staff? Oh, how I've missed you. I promised myself not to turn bitter, because it was so good for so long, and those are the times I want to remember. But it's hard to watch something you built fall apart - and the things that others built, too - especially when you leave and discover that it indeed wasn't you, it's them, because it's hard not to doubt yourself, you know? But never you mind, Internet. It's probably none of your business anyway.)

My new computer doesn't have an on-board speaker. Isn't that odd?

* Which is interesting. Does career education have a place in academe, where the emphases (was) education rather than jobs? Discuss.

Today I decided to go buy my lunch instead of packing something nutritious, because I am a very bad person whose boyfriend has high cholesterol and by god if I'm going to eat badly it has to be alone. I went up to the chip truck - it's called the chip truck but they also sell some bitchin' wraps and salads and subs, but also chips - and ordered a chicken burger (no fries, though, because that is my concession to health. Don't laugh.) Then I changed my mind, because if I wasn't having fries I shouldn't have a chicken burger either, because they are also deep fried. Technically. So I ordered a regular burger, a cow burger, a burger filled with CRAZY COW MEAT. This? This is living dangerously. I may not be able to afford sky diving, but by god I order BEEF.

The chip truck is run by this awesome Scandinavian family who has loud arguments about orders in Swedish, and since I worked in the building where they each ran in to use the loo four times a day they all know me on sight. I placed my order and, after a minute or two the older brother, whose name I should know since I see him almost every day, leaned out the window and said "Are you sure you don't want a chicken burger? Because we made one by accident five minutes ago for somebody else and if you want it, you can have it, for free." and I thought about it long and hard, and it was a difficult decision but I managed to say "YES! SURE! SWEET!"

So I got me a free burger. I think this is auspicious. New job? Check. Two 22" monitors and a Quad-core computer? Check. Free food? CHECK.