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2004-5 Webmaster Brownbag Series

sponsored by CITES

Welcome to a new series of brownbag seminars, workshops, and other assorted educational events for campus web developers, designers, and maintainers. Our intention this year is to provide a wide range of learning opportunities for Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced skill levels. We'll try to clearly label each event for the intended audience, but as always, feel free to dive right into any or all of them. Sometimes the best learning is unexpected.

As often as possible we provide links to presentation files (PPT, PDF, etc) on the Brownbag Archive pages, available from this index page. These pages serve as an official record for all events and a long-term resource to campus webmasters.

And as always, please let us know if you think we should cover a specific topic, or if you'd like to share your knowledge with the campus web community. Your work is important, so let the world know it!

Best regards,
The Campus Webmasters Coordinating Group

Tuesday, May 24th, Noon to 1 PM

 

Overview of the OneNet Content Management
System

RealVideo archiveRealVideo archive of the presentation


Location:

126 Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 501 E. Daniels, Champaign

Presenter:

Mike Scott, Manager of Accessibility Solutions for MSF&W Inc, is the chief architect and manager of the OneNet project

Description from Mike:

Summary: OneNet is a web editing and content management system designed to facilitate the creation of sites that are accessible to users with disabilities. The simple, web-based OneNet Editor makes creating accessible content easy by integrating accessibility throughout the authoring process and providing tools to help authors better
understand the reasons behind accessibility techniques. OneNet is currently being used by the State of Illinois Department of Human Services to automate an intranet serving almost 15,000 staff, including many with disabilities.

 

Friday, April 22th, Noon to 1 PM

 

Opera at UIUC

RealVideo archiveRealVideo archive of the presentation


Location:

126 Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 501 E. Daniels, Champaign

Presenter:

Allison Katz, Opera Software USA

Description from Allison:

The Opera Web browser is renowned for its speed, security, and standards compliance, and we are proud to offer the fastest, safest, and easiest to use full-featured browser on the market. Opera has spearheaded browser innovation for a decade, continuously setting new standards for what a Web browser can and should do.

Opera Software will be here to demonstrate the latest version of the browser first-hand and will also be available for questions. Everyone is welcome to join us to see what the Opera Web browser has to offer.

Wednesday, April 13th, Noon to 1 PM

Dynamic Database-driven Web Applications using Java Servlets/JSPs and JDBC

RealVideo archiveRealVideo archive of the presentation

Location:

126 Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 501 E. Daniels, Champaign

Presenter:

Milt Epstein, Software Engineer, CITES

Milt's description:

In this talk I will describe how to use Java servlets/JSPs and JDBC to program dynamic database-driven web pages. I will present a few basic examples demonstrating the use of these technologies, including the Tomcat servlet container and the Java Standard Tag Library (JSTL). I will also discuss such ideas as n-tier applications and the Model-View-Controller design pattern. I will use MySQL, although the code/techniques presented can be used with other databases with minor modifications.

This talk does not assume a prior knowledge of Java, although it would be good if you don't freak out at the sight of Java code and XML.

Wednesday, April 6th, noon to 1 pm


The Library's Windows-to-Linux Web Migration

Archive of Presentation:

RealVideo archiveRealVideo archive of the presentation

Darlene and Adam's Powerpoint Presentation

Location:

126 GSLIS, 501 E. Daniels Street, Champaign

Presenters:

Darlene Chirolas and Adam Lewenberg (Library Systems Office)

Description:

We discuss the technical and management challenges in migrating a 40000-page web site from Windows/IIS4 to Linux/Apache.

Wednesday, March 23th, noon to 1 pm

Web Design with ColdFusion & PostgreSQL on RedHat Linux
 
RealVideo archiveRealVideo archive of the presentation
 
Mary Winters-Meyer's Powerpoint Presentation

Location:

126 GSLIS, 501 E. Daniels, Champaign

Presenter:

Mary Winters-Meyer, Network Analyst, Dept. of Crop Sciences, University of Illinois

Description from Mary:

Macromedia, the software company that owns ColdFusion, says: "ColdFusion makes Internet application development and deployment faster and easier than any other solution available today. ColdFusion is designed for developers building dynamic websites and Internet applications. Easy-to-use visual tools and an intuitive server scripting environment dramatically shorten the learning curve for new developers."

For web designers who are already familiar with HTML coding and who have a basic understanding of programming principles, ColdFusion really is easy to learn and to start using immediately to develop web-to-database applications. In this talk, we'll tour the Crop Sciences intradepartmental website and discuss the code behind one of the database applications. I'll also discuss why we chose the combination of ColdFusion and PostgreSQL and the tools we use to interact with the two systems.

Wednesday, March 16th, noon to 1 pm

Web/Database Design: PHP and MySQL Basics

 

Archive of Presentation:

RealVideo archive RealVideo archive of the presentation

Location:

126 Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 501 E. Daniels, Champaign

Presenter:

Michael Greifenkamp, North Central IPM Center Webmaster, University of Illinois

Mike's Description:

Do you want an easy, low-cost (free!) way to create dynamic database-driven web pages? An increasingly popular solution these days is the duo of PHP and MySQL. Both are open source, and run on a variety of server platforms. During this hour I hope to show how PHP and MySQL can be used to retrieve information from a database and then dynamically create an html page. I will also demonstrate how an html form can be used in combination with PHP and MySQL to accept information from an end-user and insert it into a database table.

Intended Audience:

Anyone just starting out in the world of Web-Database development. The more the better....

Wednesday, March 9th, noon to 1 pm
 

A Relational Database and SQL Language Primer or "Databases in About an Hour"

 
Archive of Presentation:

RealVideo archive RealVideo archive of the presentation

Location:

126 Graduate School of Library & Information Science, 501 E. Daniels, Champaign

Presenter:

Jay Geistlinger, Network Administrator for EnterpriseWorks and the Research Park Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES)

Summary:

The Webmasters current web-to-database brownbag series presupposes some knowledge of relational databases and the most common method of accessing them, the SQL programming language. This presentation is intended to be a "catch-up session" for webmasters who haven't had much exposure to databases and/or SQL.

Topics will include:

The aim of this presentation, in the limited time available, is to provide the basic concepts and vocabulary of relational databases and the SQL programming language, so that attendees will have a better understanding of the future, undoubtedly more interesting, brownbag talks on specific implementations of web-to-database technology.

Although the subject of databases and database access languages can be dry material, no mathematical formulas will be given, the pace will be snappy, and parts of the presentation will be interactive, so bring your thinking caps, your sack lunches, and your willingness to talk with your mouth full!

 

Wednesday, February 23rd, noon to 1 pm

 

Web/Database Fundamentals

 

Archive of Presentation:

RealVideo archive RealVideo archive of the presentation

David Goldfeder's PowerPoint presentation

Presenter:

David Goldfeder, Web and Database Specialist for the Mechanical Engineering Department

Location:

126 Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 501 E. Daniel Street, Champaign

Summary:

After a few weeks discussing the display of web content using cascading style sheets, it's time to move on to managing that content for display. More and more, databases are the way to go but creating a database driven web site is still something of a black box to many web designers.

If you're interested in the answers to these questions, or even just curious about how database driven web sites work, you are welcome to attend this Webmasters Brown Bag Session on February 16th to hear David Goldfeder, Web and Database Specialist for the Mechanical Engineering Department, speak about his experiences with database driven web sites. Following this introductory presentations, other presenters will provide examples of some database driven solutions to common web site tasks in the following weeks.

Intended Audience and Skill Level:

This is a basic-level presentation, and we assume you've never set up a database-driven web site before. We intend to follow up by presenting additional brownbags on specific database technologies and examples, so get in on the ground floor with this one.

 

Wednesday, January 26, noon to 1 pm

 

Graphical Effects only available in CSS (Part Three in the CSS Series)

Archive of Presentation:

http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/presentations/2005-01-26-css-2/index.html

Presenters:

Doug Burgett, Office of publications
Victor Cortez, Office of publications
Jon Gunderson, CITES/DRES

Location:

126 Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 501 E. Daniel Street, Champaign

Summary:

This session will present CSS positioning techniques as an alternative to using tables for layout. The Dreamweaver Template developed in the previous week will be modified to use CSS for layout. Other CSS techniques will be demonstrated to show how to create CSS based pull down menus, scrolling data tables, dynamically hiding/displaying content and having fixed navigation bars with scrollable text without using FRAMES.

Intended Audience and Skill Level:

This is a basic-level presentation, intended for those with little or no experience using CSS. This is Part Three of the CSS Series...if you missed the first two you'll still learn a lot!  While Dreamweaver will be used as an interface for creating the CSS in this seminar, the CSS principles are universal and you don't need to use Dreamweaver to benefit.

Wednesday, January 19, noon to 1 pm

 

Styling with Cascading Style Sheets (Part Two in the CSS Series)

 

Archive of presentation:

http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/presentations/2005-01-19-css-1/index.html

Presenters:

Doug Burgett, Office of publications
Victor Cortez, Office of publications
Jon Gunderson, CITES/DRES

Location:

126 Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 501 E. Daniel Street, Champaign

Summary:

Come learn about the basic Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) terminology and
techniques for styling text, creating borders, changing text padding and
margins, use of background images for styling, hover effects and accesskeys
as we create a Dreamweaver template using CSS for control of styling.
Issues of accessibility, compatibility with non-graphical technologies like
cell phones and PDAs will be presented, along with compatibility issues with
legacy technologies like Netscape 4.77.

Intended Audience and Skill Level:

This is a basic-level presentation, intended for those with little or no experience using CSS. This is Part Two of the CSS Series...if you missed the first you'll still learn a lot!  While Dreamweaver will be used as an interface for creating the CSS in this seminar, the CSS principles are universal and you don't need to use Dreamweaver to benefit.

 

Wednesday, January 12, noon to 1 pm

 

Dreamweaver Templates

Archive of Presentation:

http://www.campusrec.uiuc.edu/webtemplates/

Presenter:

Julie McMahon, Designer/Web Manager, Division of Campus Recreation

Location:

126 Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 501 E. Daniel Street, Champaign

Summary:

Macromedia's Dreamweaver has become the most widely-used WYSIWYG web design tool. But how many of us get the most out of it? For example, Templates in Dreamweaver allow you to maintain a consistent design throughout your site, and update the entire site by updating a single template.

If you haven't delved into the world of Dreamweaver Templates, you might want to show up for this month's Brown Bag, "Templates R Our Friends," hosted by Julie McMahon, Campus Recreation. Julie is a converting designer in the web world, who is learning as she goes.

She'll share her insights into the benefits, the pitfalls, the limitations and the great respect she's developed for templates; how they've helped her, frustrated her and taught her to work within her limited knowledge of programming language.

Intended Audience and Skill Level:

This is a basic-level presentation, intended for those with little or no experience using Dreamweaver Templates. You will leave knowing how to begin using them to better manage your web site.

 

Wednesday, December 8th, 2004, noon to 1 pm

 

The Basics of Cascading Style Sheets: How CSS can improve your Web Site and your Life


Archive of Jon Gunderson's Presentation:

http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/presentations/2004-12-08-webmasters/

 
Presenters:

Jon Gunderson, Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services, College of Applied Life Sciences

Victor Cortez and Doug Burgett, Office of Publications and Marketing

Location:

126 Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 501 E. Daniel Street, Champaign

Summary:

CSS is a very simple but powerful technology for formatting elements on web pages. You can use CSS to make your web site more usable, more accessible, and easier to maintain. How exactly do you do that? In this brownbag seminar we'll cover the fundamentals:

 
Intended Audience and Skill Level:

This is a basic-level presentation, intended for those who don't have a great deal of experience with CSS. You will leave knowing how to begin using style sheets to transform your web site.

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004, noon to 1 pm

 

Banner/EDW Quick Start for Application Developers


Archive of Presentation:

http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/oet/db/banner/

Presenter:

Kim Nystrom. DataMaster Group; College of Education Database Administrator - UIUC

Location:

126 Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 501 E. Daniel Street, Champaign

Summary:

A central data repository is a powerful resource.  The implementation of the University-wide Banner system has changed the data landscape.  Users at all levels are grappling with this change -- the implications, opportunities, and moreover, the investment of time.

This brownbag is directed towards web and database application developers wanting to tap intoBanner/EDW datavia ODBC.  Topics covered will include:

 
Intended Audience and Skill Level:

Application developers (web or desktop based) interested in learning about Banner/EDWdata:  how to access it and the potential it might offer.   Familiarity with relational database concepts is helpful.  However, attendees need not support a database product in order to utilize Banner data.  This brownbag aims to give the novice user a quick start on connecting to and utilizing EDW data via ODBC.

Deliverables:

Attendees should leave with a clear map of the steps involved in accessing and using Banner data. Attendees should also be tapped into core resources and tools for further exploration and development on their own.

A website url will be sent out the morning of Nov 17th providing access to materials and urls covered in this presentation.

Thursday, November 4th, 2004, noon to 1 pm


From the web to print: collecting form data and returning PDFs

 
Archive of Presentation:

http://mcc0.mcc.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/wiki/amyoung/amyoung.pl/Talk_Overview

Presenters:

Amy Young (MCC-UIUC), Kris Williams (MRL-UIUC)

Location:

Room 28 College of Education, 1310 S. Sixth Street, Champaign

Summary:

The Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory Business Office has a paper order form which faculty, staff, and students complete by hand when they need to purchase equipment and software. The goal is to replicate this paper form's functionality over the web, and increase functionality when possible. We present a proof-of-concept and show the original paper form, the web form, and the PDF generated.

Who might want to attend:
 
Amy will discuss:
  1. the overall workflow: what tools you need, how long it took
  2. the perl script that:
    • generates the form
    • generates the XML from the form values
    • calls the processor that generates the PDF
  3. installing and configuring the apps
  4. writing the XSLT for the XML -> PDF
Kris will discuss:
  1. Unix to Win, and Apache to IIS issues
  2. working with the client, in this case, the MRL Business Office
  3. other PDF-generating tools he's looked at

For more details see:
http://mcc0.mcc.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/wiki/amyoung/amyoung.pl/Web_to_PDF_talk

To tell me what you want to hear about, go to:
http://mcc0.mcc.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/wiki/amyoung/amyoung.pl/1Web_to_PDF_talk

If you aren't familiar with wikis, see this page for some editing tips:
http://mcc0.mcc.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/wiki/amyoung/amyoung.pl/Amy's_Quick_start

Thursday, October 28th, 2004, 1 to 3 pm


Macromedia Contribute: Demonstration of Macromedia Contribute 3


Archive of Presentation:

http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/oet/web/edwebs/contribute/index.html

Presenter:

John Barclay, College of Education Webmaster and Research Programmer

Location:

Room 16, College of Education, 1310 S. Sixth Street, Champaign

Summary:

The first half of the workshop will involve a walk through of setting up a Contribute/Dreamweaver site using Dreamweaver and configuring the web server. The second half will be hands on where participants edit web pages within the site using Contribute. It will last a couple of hours.

Intended Audience and Skill Level:

Web site administrators who wish to distribute content authoring. People who are considering implementing a Dreamweaver/Contribute site.

Deliverables:

Additional Resources:

Wednesday, October 27th, 2004, noon to 1 pm


EdWebs: The College of Education’s web publishing system


Archive of Presentation:

http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/oet/web/edwebs/edwebsworkshop/index.html

Presenter:

Ryan Thomas. Associate Director of Information Technologies College of Education

Location:

126 Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 501 E. Daniel Street, Champaign

Summary:

In 2002 the College of Education began the effort of redesigning its web site and the programming architecture behind it. EdWebs is the name we've given the new web publishing system developed during this project. With the help of Macromedia's Contribute web publishing tool, content editing is now in the hands of departmental staff. What makes EdWebs more than just a Contribute solution, however is a locally developed web application -- a templating system using XML, XSL, XHTML, and CSS. This templating system allowed us to unify the look and navigation of the site throughout "official" college sites including departments and add a number of features which could not be achieved with static html files.

The mix of a home grown web application with an off the shelf web editing tool gives our users a high quality GUI web page editor with good documentation and allows us to hook into our dynamic data and implement an inheritable set of page and site properties and menus.

The purpose of the brownbag is to illustrate the benefits of the design while giving a general idea of how the application works.

Example of Tool in Use:

http://www.ed.uiuc.edu

Features:

Intended Audience and Skill Level:

Web site administrators and authors. While knowledge of XML, XSL, and other technologies will be helpful, the goal of the talk is to illustrate the overall design and implementation rather than the details.

Deliverables:

Tools Used:

Additional Resources:

Wednesday, October 20th, 2004, noon to 1 pm


Group Management: a suite of tools for automating the population of Active Directory groups from an sql database


Archive of Presentation:

http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/oet/db/groupmanagement/

Presenter:
 
Kim Nystrom. College of Education Database Administrator

Location:
 
126 Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 501 E. Daniel Street, Champaign

Summary:

Active Directory (AD) groups are a powerful means of controlling access and permissions to everything from web servers, to filespace, to exchange groups, to database objects. The College of Education uses a suite of in-house developed Group Management tools to automate the population of AD groups. This toolset capitalizes on existing College staff and Banner student data, automating a potentially onerous task, while also providing a user-friendly web interface for designated College power users to manually maintain AD groups. AD groups are more accurate, network administrators are relieved of tasks, and the investment in central databases provides yet more returns.

The purpose of this brownbag is to showcase the potential of collaborative work that bridges central data stores with Active Directory utilization. Technical details, such as code and architecture, will be provided. Note that this tool is sufficiently complicated that attendees will not be able to implement without moderate adjustments to code.

Example of Tool in Use:

An exchange enabled AD group composed of all college graduate students is maintained by a weekly query to the College student database. As students enroll and drop, the AD group is adjusted automatically, sending the group owner a summary of changes made. College staff rely upon the group for email. Intranet permissions are also granted based on this group's members . Other types of automated groups include classes of faculty and staff, unit staff, and class rosters.

Features:

Intended Audience and Skill Level:

This tool crosses database, network administrator, webmaster and programmer audiences. A multidisciplinary set of skills is required to replicate, to include ADSI, ADO, and LDAP programming, sql query knowledge, and AD query and administration skills.

Deliverables:
Tools Used:

Wednesday, October 13th, 2004, noon to 1 pm

The Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for Microsoft Office

 

Archive of Presentation:

An accessible version of this presentation, created with the Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for Microsoft Office, is available here:
http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/presentations/2004-10-13-brownbag/index.html

Presenter:
 
John Gunderson, Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services, College of Applied Life Sciences

Location:

Grainger Engineering Library, Commons Room, 2nd floor

Summary:

The Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for Microsoft Office offers an alternative to the native web publishing features in Microsoft Office for Word, Powerpoint and Excel.  The standard web publishing options often create content that can only be viewed by Microsoft Internet Explorer.  Even when options are selected to support more browsers, users cannot easily add information that is required for accessibility.  The Accessible Web Publishing Wizard simplifies the task of converting PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets to accessible and vaild HTML 4.01 with CSS through an easy-to-use user interface and automation of many of the details of conversion needed for accessibility.  The HTML generated meets or exceeds Section 508 and W3C WCAG 1.0 Double-A requirements for accessibility by people with disabilities and validates to HTML 4.01 and CSS standards.

Intended Audience and Skill Level:

Basic, but valuable for all involved in web development

More info on the Wizard available here:
http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/software/office/index.html

Tuesday, October 5th, 2004, noon to 1 pm

The College of Education Web Site Redesign Project: The Process Behind the Redesign


Archive of presentation:

http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/oet/web/edwebs/redesign/

Presenter:

Eric Ohlsson, College of Education Project Manager/Research Programmer

Location:

2240 Digital Computer Laboratory, 1304 W. Springfield, Urbana

Summary:

The College of Education web site is a major marketing and informational delivery tool for both internal and external audiences.  While many sites within the College of Education had pursued individual redesigns, by 2003 the web site as a whole had not had a major revision in 5 years. Disparate revision schedules, varying "looks" and wildly difference resources across units were clearly reflected. A major overhaul and redesign of both the site and the website maintenance process was needed.

This brownbag details the steps and process used to redesign the web site and better ensure its continued upkeep. This presentation focuses on our process of analyzing the audience, gathering the requirements, selecting the software products, converting the content, training users, and rolling out the web site.

Intended Audience and Skill Level:

Web site developers, web authors, and others interested in the process redesigning a web site.

Additional Resources:

http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/oet/projects/cwsr/cwsr.html

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