Tim Hatch

Somebody Set Us Up The Bomb - COBA v3.0 01 Apr, 2005

The new coba website is now live, the product of about a year of work — the first couple of months with just me, but the vast majority with my fellow minions hard at work getting it all put together.

Go ahead and check it out before continuing to read this, which is the ersatz release notes that go along with it: http://www.coba.unt.edu/. The more marketing-oriented release notes are at http://www.coba.unt.edu/ciltc/redesign05.php which chronicles COBA v2.0 vs v3.0 from the manager’s point of view.

The redesign was made possible by the letter X, the number four (both totally random inventions), and the contents of the “Eclectic” section of iTunes Radio playing on Charlie [the boss’s] speakers (which is true).

Aims of the Redesign

First off, our list of things we wanted to accomplish with this redesign was quite large. Insurmountably large, in fact, so we had to pare it down:

• Stunning design
• Tableless layout, XHTML, CSS (aiming to be the first Standards compliant site at UNT)
• More muted colors for a more professional feel
• Alpha transparent PNGs (obviously didn’t happen)
• Integrated search, easier-to-locate contact info

Issues Encountered

In setting all this up, we quickly discovered several things which were some prereq’s we had to fix before going any further:

• Apache/PHP sends iso-8859-1 as the default character set out of the box. Argh. Luckily we are using PHP and have a single include file where we could add the necessary header to send utf-8. We wanted to use utf-8 to make our lives easier. I use it in all my personal projects because I want everything to be (required effort)+1 and torture test anything I release because it needs to be able to handle all those odd edge cases. I made one signup form for CS 4010 that correctly handled word breaks even in Hirigana, and tested by plunking German, Norwegian, and Japanese all in the same field just to see if it would work. (it did).
• Things copied from Word are in Windows-1252 and not anything sensible. Typographic quotes are really a pain. We adapted some code from php.net to handle the conversion to our GCD, utf-8.
• The XML classes in PHP are nice, but somewhat buggy on Netware where getting access to PEAR is nearly impossible, and you can’t really touch anything.
• File reading on Netware is buggy, if you turn on warnings — error_reporting(E_ALL) and then have a loop $fp=0; while(!feof($fp)) fgets($fp,4096);, then not only will you have an infinite loop, but the warnings exhaust all memory available to Apache, and make the server hang nicely. I managed to bring down our 4-node cluster this way. The documentation on feof() does not mention this very prominently… and IMO, feof(NULL) would logically return true. Check the docs to avoid this gotcha (the worst I’ve found in PHP so far… compounded by NW’s memory management).
• Nested floats and print stylesheet overlays are a bad combination. Our print stylesheet still has a number of issues which trigger different browser bugs in IE5, IE6, NS7, and FF1.0. This is not fun. However, it does bring up an interesting feature: Print Stylesheet Switcher. What if when you press Ctrl/Cmd-P, it pops up with a box asking if you want the high contrast version, the low-graphics version, the WYSIWYG version, etc. I think that’d be pretty cool. OmniWeb, are you listening?

The Day of Reckoning

As of last week, my coworkers finished a bunch of the little sites and we were ready to go live — so yesterday (31. March) Charlie stayed late to flip the switch. A lot of what we had on our old site was cruft (backup_of_backup_of_old_index.shtml) and needed to be gotten rid of, but some of it (like stuff out of /images) was needed by non-public pages such as our lab reservation system. Today we’ve been putting out little fires such as those and overall letting the praise sink in (which is awkward for me, hearing how much better the new version is than “that old site”, given that “that old site” was my first major assignment when I started working here 5 years ago).

Our whiteboards are full of doodles and organizational aids, trying to keep track of it all. For documenting the progress, we didn’t go with anything nearly as complex as a Gantt chart, we used (what else) an internal html document with classes and styling for the list items. We’re all such nerds.

Where do we go from here?

“Well the battle’s done, and we kinda won, so we sound our victory cheer.”

— Buffy et al.

Future enhancements include:

• Making the logo clickable
• Fixing the issue with shades of green on the top bar
• Perfecting printing (which may well necessitate a complete rebuild of the master stylesheet to isolate the problem)
• Wicked-cool sitemap

Postscript

“You have an infinite abyss of information at your fingertips. Use Google.” - Kate

“What do bowling balls and beds of nails have to do with Albert Einstein? Bring your friends and relativities.” - Ad heard on KCRW