Scott Bush

As the web­mas­ter for the Office of the Uni­ver­sity Reg­is­trar at the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton, it’s my duty to improve the Registrar’s web pres­ence. Today marks a bit improve­ment: the launch of a new ver­sion of the site—and what a big project! I inte­grated two depart­men­tal sites manged by the Reg­is­trar into a third. There are two or three smaller depart­men­tal sites to incor­po­rate in the com­ing weeks, too.

I’ve writ­ten a post about the improve­ments in the new site on the Registrar’s blog. (The intro­duc­tion of a blog is an improve­ment in itself.) That was writ­ten for a diverse, non-technical audi­ence. There was a ton of work behind the scenes that is inter­est­ing, but not appro­pri­ate for that forum. Here’s a run­down, each of which could be its own blog entry:

• File con­ver­sion — All files were changed to PHP from reg­u­lar HTML, which was nec­es­sary to enable some of the items below.
• Clean mark-up — Most of the files had been gen­er­ated by Front­Page, other old HTML-creation soft­ware, or hand-coded with out-of-date pre­sen­ta­tion HTML. I cleaned up tons of this crufty mark-up into clean, seman­tic XHTML.
• Style sheets — I cre­ated a num­ber of cas­cad­ing style sheets (CSS) to unify the site’s aes­thet­ics, which had been unmatched among the sites. It also allowed me to get rid of the table-based lay­outs in favor of a purely CSS-based design.
• Include files — Cre­ated and linked to a num­ber of include files to make chang­ing head­ers, foot­ers, etc. quickly.
• Ana­lyt­ics — Installed Google Ana­lyt­ics so we can see how the site’s being used. Actu­ally, I’d installed it on all the sites when I started here, and I used its data to guide which sites to incor­po­rate into the main site first.
• Task-oriented lay­out — The pre­vi­ous ver­sion of the site fea­tured a home­page that sim­ply listed the Registrar’s mis­sion state­ment in a set of bul­let points. That’s been replaced with a design allow­ing mul­ti­ple points of entry into the con­tent, orga­nized into the audi­ences: stu­dents, staff/faculty, employ­ers, and the community.
• Graph­ics — Cre­ated more styl­is­tic header images and tabs for the pages, as well as a num­ber of visual “post­cards” on the home­page for top events.
• Blog feed — The three lat­est blog entries appear on the home­page to keep con­tent on the page fresh.
• Redi­rects and autho­riza­tion — Ensur­ing that links and book­marks still work, I used reg­u­lar expres­sions to redi­rect indi­vid­ual pages on the old sites over to the proper page on the new site. Reg­u­lar expres­sions also played a part in ensur­ing par­tic­u­lar pages could only be viewed by stu­dents or mem­bers of the UW community.
• Bet­ter forms — Mul­ti­ple, com­plex forms that pre­vi­ously had lit­tle val­i­da­tion or usabil­ity were entirely re-written in PHP. They now have a strong struc­tural base (for use by screen read­ers and older browsers) and a num­ber of input val­i­da­tions (Live­Val­i­da­tion javascript on the client and PHP checks on the server). Switch­ing to PHP from the old FormMail.cgi opens up the abil­ity to store the form sub­mis­sions in a data­base for other uses.

There are prob­a­bly other things I’m for­get­ting, but that’s a pretty good sum­mary. It really moves the registrar’s web pres­ence into the “mod­ern age” of the web. More impor­tantly, it’ll let us build from here to add web ser­vices and more inter­ac­tiv­ity as we find more ways to serve stu­dents’ needs.

The JEA/NSPA con­ven­tion invari­ably has a silent auc­tion dur­ing its post-judging evening recep­tion. There’s usu­ally a col­lec­tion of art of var­i­ous descrip­tion from local artists, a signed foot-, base-, or bas­ket­ball signed by a player from the city’s pro team, some gift bas­kets, soft­ware pack­ages donated by ven­dors, etc.—that sort of thing.

Fri­day evening’s auc­tion in Phoenix offered the worst item I’ve seen in my 10+ years of attend­ing: Rocks. Rocks? Yes, just rocks. Two of ‘em. I thought it was a joke.. c’mon, two rocks val­ued at $15?. Open­ing bid, $1. When I left they were up to $6. Hope who­ever “won” them has a big stack of paper near an open win­dow or something…

Impor­tant: par­ents, please fol­low our Twit­ter feed for up-to-the-minute updates (at least as long as we’re not in the air) on our return to Seat­tle Sun­day after­noon: MTHSHawk­eye

It may be a Sat­ur­day, but there’s not much rest on this, the final day (for us at least) of the con­ven­tion. Sunday’s sole con­ven­tion activ­ity is the indi­vid­ual award cer­e­mony, but unfor­tu­nately our flight is so early we have to skip it this year. The stu­dents’ write-off awards (and I’m cer­tain there’ll be some in our group!) will be posted on the JEA web­site and should be post­ed  by the time we get home. We will miss the pro­mo­tion for the upcom­ing fall con­ven­tion in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. Those pro­mo­tions usu­ally enter­tain­ing, though I doubt they’re intended to gen­er­ate the laugh­ter they often do. (more…)

Ah, adviser hos­pi­tal­ity. That’s the name given to the room at these con­ven­tions where there’s free cof­fee, pas­tries and fruit on Fri­day and Sat­ur­day morn­ings. It’s good to be an adviser, er… chap­eron.  Mark and I started our very long day there.
Fri­days are always long at the con­ven­tion; here’s a rundown:

• Ses­sions from 9 through noon
• A break for lunch
• Keynote address
• More ses­sions at 2:30
• Break/help stu­dents pre­pare for write-offs at 4
• Pre-judging din­ner
• Judg­ing (usu­ally two to three hours)
• Silent auc­tion and reception

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Although ses­sions didn’t start in earnest today, it def­i­nitely felt more like the con­ven­tion had begun. That’s mostly due to stand­ing in line to reg­is­ter the Hawk­eye for the con­ven­tion when it opened at 1pm.

The con­ven­tion is being held in the (no sur­prise) Phoenix Con­ven­tion Cen­ter. It’s a huge, open, and quite new build­ing. In fact, the build­ing we’re in wasn’t here when we were last in Phoenix a few years back. I hope that the big ball­rooms mean that the ses­sions won’t be stuffed to over­flow­ing with stu­dents cranky because there’s no room left. Another strik­ing fea­ture of the con­ven­tion cen­ter is a piece—a mon­strous piece—of instal­la­tion art. It’s dif­fi­cult to tell from the photo, but it’s a giant bath­room mir­ror dis­play­ing the words “Art guar­an­tees san­ity” in its reflection.

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For the 12th year (or so), I’m priv­i­leged to be chap­er­on­ing the stu­dents of the award-winning Mount­lake Ter­race High School news­pa­per, the Hawk­eye, to a National Scholas­tic Press Asso­ci­a­tion (NSPA) and Jour­nal­ism Educator’s Asso­ci­a­tion (JEA) national con­ven­tion. (Read my accounts of the last year’s con­ven­tion or 2007’s.) The spring con­ven­tion, held on the west coast, is usu­ally better-attended than the fall con­ven­tion; this time it’s being held in Phoenix.

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