CCMS Web Site

Spent most of last week working on the CCMS site. I think people who don't know the limitations of the Web should not be placed in charge of design decisions. The designer seems to think that the same level of control that is available in print is available on via HTML. The other suggestion being to just use images. Somewhat frustrating but I've given up on trying to help her understand. My goal now is to just implement the site as designed. If I had been involved earlier in the process maybe things would have worked out better. Once I get everything functional I plan to work on an alternate stylesheet that's pretty much just plain vanilla.

Web Oversight

Our statistics tell us nothing. At least that's my general feeling about the current usage analaysis of our web site. I've decided to make one of our discussion points about the information we're trying to find beyond the total traffic.

Just realized my method of finding out the number of hits for the category pages has been woefully inadequate. I've modified so that I'm only getting actual page hits and not also lines with referrer information. See sample below.

find /C /I "/parents.htm - 200" ex0312??.log

I think I'll change the total traffic chart to 16 months so that we can get a better feel for year-over-year performance. Current chart really only shows the site performance for the past year.

Instructional Components Prototype

Spent a good amount of time this week working to get the IC demo working on both Mac and windows. There were various problems with both the treeview and the slidemenu scripts. I had to make heavy modifications to the demo to get things working smoothly.

• Update the scripts to the most recent versions
• Modified the treeview script to add a highlighted menu item (perhaps this is a built-in feature … I didn't really have time to investigate)
• Modified the treeview script to allow for the use of javascript for the link
• Modified the slidemenu script to add a ID and CLASS to the menu item container TD
• Modified the slidemenu script so that menu item mouseovers call a function that modifies the container class instead of the BGCOLOR attribute.
• Modified the slidement script by adding three functions, two to handle the above calls and one to handle the switching of highlighted menu item based on the selected section (this also modifies the container class)

Scripting

I've been trying to discover valid syntax for e-mail address information. A few different formats are used within our scripts and I wanted to find what is valid by the RFC. The most relevant RFC I've found is RFC 1036, which describes how usenet messages are communicated. This document describes standard formats that I've seen in a number of instances, minus one that seems to be in wide use today.

I've decided to note this information for future reference.

Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1036.txt

Sample
User: John Doe
E-mail Address: jdoe@aaas.org
Valid E-mail Syntax Forms:

(John Doe)
John Doe
"John Doe"

Notes
According to the RFC, cases one and two do not need the angle brackets. Unfortunately, a lot of mail servers return errors if these are not used. The safest choice is to use the angle brackets in all cases.

Case four is not part of the RFC but seems to be a supported standard.