Spring Quarter Begins Today

Spring quar­ter begins today! This is tra­di­tion­ally one of the busiest times for our servers, and it appears they’re respond­ing fairly quickly so far. I’ll update this as the day goes on if there are any slow­downs or fur­ther devel­op­ments. If you notice any slow­downs or unex­plained occur­rences, please e-mail help [at] uw.edu.   Update… Read More


UW Streaming Services Upgrade

Our stream­ing media ser­vice has under­gone some sig­nif­i­cant changes and upgrades recently to improve func­tion­al­ity, com­pata­bil­ity, and ease-of-use. This was a com­bi­na­tion of three projects , and I was heav­ily involved in two of them. Helix Uni­ver­sial Server Upgrade We have upgraded the stream­ing media servers to ver­sion 14 of Real Media Helix Uni­ver­sial Server. This… Read More


WordPress Plugins

If you run a Word­Press site, you’ve prob­a­bly noticed that there are quite plu­g­ins that you can’t live with­out. The fol­low­ing is a list of a few plu­g­ins that I rec­om­mend to new and expe­ri­enced users. They’re made with an eye towards the aca­d­e­mic and uni­form access web pub­lish­ing envi­ron­ments. * Google Ana­lyt­i­ca­tor This will… Read More


Combining NetID and Basic Authentication

“I have some infor­ma­tion that I want to put online and share with about ten users.” the Pro­fes­sor writes. “Nor­mally I would use NetID authen­ti­ca­tion, but only five of our users have UW NetIDs. I could put up and main­tain two sep­a­rate fold­ers of con­tent: one pro­tected by NetID authen­ti­ca­tion, and the other pro­tected with basic pass­word authen­ti­ca­tion,… Read More


Drupal and Person Web Service Integration

The iSchool has been doing some nifty mod­i­fi­ca­tions and pro­gram­ming for their Drupal-based web­site. By using a “Locally Trusted Ser­vice” they’re pulling PWS and GWS data in a safe man­ner and then serv­ing it to the Dru­pal appli­ca­tion. You can find their mod­ules and source at the fol­low­ing site: https://drupal.ischool.uw.edu/projects


Red and Websites

At a UW Web Coun­cil meet­ing yes­ter­day, one of the pre­sen­ters men­tioned in pass­ing about how they don’t allow any of their site edi­tors to use red text on a web page.  This is a fairly com­mon rule that I had for­got­ten about, so I thought it would be worth shar­ing. If you need to use red… Read More


m.UW Mobile Application for Android

Not really web pub­lish­ing news, but we recently released the Android ver­sion of the m.UW appli­ca­tion. Check it out and install it on your phone at the fol­low­ing link: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.blackboard.android.central.uwash


PostgreSQL on Ovid

A while ago I wrote a post about installing Post­greSQL on Dante. Recently I dis­cov­ered that while no pre-installed Post­greSQL binary exists on Vergil, there is a ver­sion on Ovid. I was able to get it oper­a­tional and run­ning on my account, and put up a Dru­pal 6.20 install sup­ported by Post­greSQL. My pro­ce­dure is below.… Read More


Drupal and WordPress Users Mailing Lists

We have a lot of really excit­ing and well-made web­sites based on both Dru­pal and Word­Press. There are a few mail­ing lists on cam­pus that are a resource for Word­Press and Dru­pal devel­op­ers and users alike that I thought I would share to read­ers.   The Word­Press mail­ing list can be found here: http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/wordpress   Whereas… Read More


Freeing the World from IE6

Microsoft has started a cam­paign to drop Inter­net Explorer 6’s mar­ket share to below 1%, a goal to which I heartily sub­scribe. If you have any friends or col­leagues who are still using IE6, it’d be a great idea to help them upgrade their browser. You can learn more here: http://ie6countdown.com/