Sara’s Reflection

This project was a lot more fun than I had anticipated. Working with three other people with different schedules is always a challenge, but I think we pulled it off well with weekly meetings in Kent’s Meebo room and via email.

CSS Edit

Team,

I changed this line of code a {color: #00b53c; text-decoration: none;} in our CSS template to make sure that links are visible among the rest of our text. The color before, 333, was not enough of a contrast to make the links visible.

I like the new font of the Title, it is much cleaner than the more rounded letters.

today in wonderland

I changed the flashbar to be more appealing to the eye.
I created a survey using Survey Monkey to get more feedback.
I really like our site and my team.

Blogging

The wiki seems to be more of a great way to see how to get involved.  How about adding a “Conversations” portion to the top menu where we can ask everyone amazing questions and then allow comments to create a plethora of insight and imagination.  We may even solve some of these problems…  It would be a good way to get a conversation started anyhow and allow some participation other than adding more organizations or headlines…

Width of Wrappers

Hi Team,

Upon further examination of our webpage, I noticed that some of the items were running off the page to the right.  I also noticed that the section of the banner on the right was appearing gray.  Because of this issue, I moved the width of the wrapper items back to 700 which is the widest possible without the gray showing up. If we could find a way to move the AskECO module over to the left it would help, but I don’t see any way to do that and it is probably as far over as it will go.

I agree with Sara’s proposal that we list the choice parts of our reflection papers here.  It will help me to write the paper and will help us to share about our experience.

Ask Eco!

Since we are looking for a valid way to have the IM Reference work – I used the meebo badge form my own account (matching Nikki’s creation).  I figure this is the best way for us to offer the service since I am always on.  If we can come up with a simpler way – I am fine with changing back…

I also went in and made the font larger.  I wish there was a way to clean up the newsflash so the image is on the left and the title runs from its side rather than above it so tightly.  I couldn’t find an easy fix – so I backed out for now.

I would like to suggest that we each post the more interesting parts of our reflection papers in this blog so we can keep track of it all.  I think it would be very practical as well.  Don’t forget – you can split the post so only your initial paragraph shows with a “read more…” following it.  I think this is good protocol for posting and keeps the main page more uniform.

Aside from the paper portion – I think we have done a great job.  Kudos Team 3!

Uploading New Images into Joomla

I wanted to put a more appropriate image into our home page welcome so I looked in the Media Manager to see which files have the images for those postings.  The file is “stories”, so any image to be used for these content items must go into this file.  I found an image of the Earth from space on this Wikimedia Commons page provided courtesy of NASA.  I downloaded it, resized it to the dimensions of most of the images, which are roughly 160×160 or 150×110, and uploaded the resized image into the stories file.   Once I uploaded it, the image was available in the Images tab of the content of the article.

I also loaded this image into our gallery for more access. Hope this helps.

Photogalleries!

Thanks, Kent, for installing these.

I have about 30 Creative Commons photos from Flickr that are ready to go in as soon as we decide which gallery we want to use. I uploaded 3 test pictures to each gallery so that you guys can sort of see how the navigation will be for users.

Please check them out ASAP:

• Gallery
• Coppermine

I have not explored them enough to know all about the differences between them, but at this point I MUCH prefer Gallery. I like the look of the interface better, I like that it automatically populates the photo metadata (such as shutterspeed, compression, etc.), and it is much, much easier to work with the formatting on photo descriptions. Thus far I can’t get the bbcode to work properly in Coppermine for photo descriptions; this is a major problem because we need to link back to the Flickr photo in order to give proper CC attribution.

However, if you all disagree with me, we can use Coppermine instead!

Please comment on this post as soon as you can and let me know which software you prefer. Once I have your input I will upload the rest of the photos to whichever gallery we select.

Changed Link color for Readability

Hi team,

I changed the links from this light green color, a9d132, to a darker one, 3e7800.  I used Zexol.com to find and change colors because of its comprehensiveness.

Sara also mentioned this new theme from Themebase, which is intriguing.

Check it out and let me know what you all think.

Mike’s ePrints update

Hey all,  I was able to upload ePrints links to 16 wildlife audio-video files through the Cornell Ornithology Library’s Bioacoustics program — GUI leads to the files in five categories, for open access as I suspected, since it is a publically funded institute.  Also I loaded an additional 4 Government Documents to ePrints (that’s 20 files total), electronic links to docs, all open access too (I have  a list of 10 more if people want me to load more.  I may go back and edit some metadata, but the strcture is done.  I’m also done with my Koha input.  Working online has been good for me this week.  I am actually out of Boston in NYC visiting relatives from Ireland whom I have not seen in 20 years, so it will be hard for me to chat on Monday night.  Can the group keep me posted or let me tune in to the posts this weekend  — I have been more proactive as of late — I hope folks notice my effort to contribute… maybe I can follow up the chat transcript with specific tasks to continue for the final push of the next two weeks.  I’m thinking work on the Joomla wrapper interface is key, if you want me to work on that?  Thanks, Mike