Do You Think Our Web Sites Stink?

If you do, then come join our team and fix them! We're looking for a Programmer Analyst to join our team. To get the official skinny on the position, go to the University job site and search for position 2007405. If you've got the skills, come and join us!

New Homepage Out!

Hi folks! We are very obviously giant slackers around our office, as we haven't posted anything for ages now. Our apologies -- we hope you've found other ways to fill your time than sitting at your computer, staring at this weblog and clicking "Refresh" over and over. And over. Aaaaaand over.

The good news? The new homepage is up! The bad news? LiveJournal hates it! But according to the email we've been getting from faculty et al, they love it. Who to trust? We've been hurt so many times before...

So help us out -- we want your input! Pop on over to the new home page, kick the tires, and let us know what you think in the comments here. If you think it's sucktastic, let us know. If you think it's brilliant, let us know that too. (And if you want the phone number of any of the students profiled in the "Be a Bobcat" section -- sorry, we can't help you with that.)

New Homepage Sneak Peek

Happy New Year, everyone!

We've been plugging away at helping folks make the transition from Gato 1 to Gato 2. That transition is going well: we've moved the majority of the sites off of the old system, and hope to take it behind the barn and give it the Ol' Yeller treatment by the end of February. The University Home Page moved to the new system about 3 weeks back, and has been running like a champ.

Speaking of the University Homepage, a massive redesign is in the works. In the nerdy details department, we'll be creating a fully standards-complaint, accessible, XHTML/CSS site for your browsing pleasure. In the area of look and feel, we're working with the talented and eager folks in University Marketing to revamp the appearance of the site, hopefully making it more usable in the process.

Now's the part where we need your input! Here's the first draft of what the new University Homepage will look like. Take a look, and use the comments form to let us know what you think. Though we can't promise that we'll slavishly implement every suggestion, we do promise to read them all and take them into consideration as we're working through this process.

So, without further ado, here it is (click for a larger version):

UPDATE: Oops! Apparently University Marketing wasn't quite ready to share their work with the wide, wide world. We've removed the image at their request, and will repost it once things are a bit further along.

It's a Slow Train, But It's Moving On

Howdy, folks,

Just a quick heads-up to let you know that the first Gato 2 site is now live. We chose to use our project site as a guinea pig, so as to spare other people the inevitable hiccups as we get the finishing touches put on a new service. Come on by and check it out!

So far, things are going great. We're going to continue to shake down the system for the next week or two, get a few more pieces online to help handle the load, and then start publishing more sites, including the University home page. (You won't see anything different right away, but there's a redesign in the works for that too, by the way.)

Anyway, if you see anything odd on our project site, please let us know. And if all goes well, we'll have more progress to report soon!

New Stuff Coming

Howdy Folks,

Sorry it's been so long since we've written. (Or sent flowers. Or called. We know, we know. We're horrible.)

A couple of news items for your consideration:

1. The CMS project has now officially been christened "Project Gato". Now you know.

2. We have a shiny new project website up here. It's still in its early stages, but come on by, kick the tires, and let us know what you think.

3. And the best for last: we've come to the realization that our first stab at this CMS stuff wasn't nearly as good as we wanted it to be. (We have high standards!) So, we're working hard on Gato 2.0 now, which should feature Email Forms, Photo Galleries, and most important, much, much better ease-of-use. More details on this to come.

Now, all of you with existing CMS websites, don't fret -- you just keep working on those, and we'll get your stuff moved over to the new system as soon as it's ready.

As usual, if you have any problems with or questions about this CMS stuff, send us an email at webdevelopment@[the university's domain]. (Take that, spammers!)

At Last!

Hi Everybody! It's been a while since we've posted, mostly because we've just been head-down getting stuff done and implementing lots of the good suggestions we've gotten from all of you. But finally, after much hard work from both the College of Health Professions and our team, we have our first site live on the Web Content Management System: the Department of Physical Therapy Site.

This represents a big milestone for our team. Now that we've cleared it, we expect site migrations to continue at a more rapid clip. We'll be doing two more on May 8, and will continue to pick up the pace as time goes on. There are still a few issues in the framework that we're working on sorting out, but for now, we're going for margaritas!

Those Wiley Spammers

A small administrative note: we've recently been hit with a number of comment spams, which we've gone through and deleted. Thus, if you see comments that have been deleted, it's not because we're fascist, anti-free-expression agents of The Man, but only because we don't want this weblog to turn into a commercial for someone else's. (Don't worry -- we haven't deleted any comments by real humans; we appreciate them far too much.)

Further, we've turned on some anti-spam features for the weblog, so hopefully we won't have to deal with much more of that in the future.

RSS And You

One thing we've been evaluating some lately is what degree of support for RSS to provide. If those of you visiting could help us by answering a few questions, it would be extremely helpful. (You can answer in comments or send an email to seanmctex@txstate.edu if you'd prefer.)

1. Do you know what RSS is?


2. Do you use an RSS aggregator? If so, which one?


3. Did you know that there are RSS feeds available for the Texas State homepage and each of its subsidiary "audience" pages (like the "Current Students" page, for example)?


4. If you were aware of the RSS feeds for the various pages, do you use them? Why or why not?


5. How valuable would you find it to have RSS feeds for the various college, departmental, or organizational sites the University hosts?


6. Any other comments?

Thanks in advance for your feedback! We appreciate it.