I thought this past week was going to be a complete loss as far as productivity went but the end of the week was more successful than the beginning.
Thursday
I taught the first Web Writing class to four coworkers (everyone else will be this Wednesday). I spent the time prior to the class doing some experiments in the FCKeditor on the test website. Then I emailed back and forth with my boss about some of the finer details. The one hour session was not strictly about web writing since there’s no way I could have rambled for an hour on that topic. Instead, I mixed in a primer on what is going on with the website, the areas of a website, writing tips, and introduced our style guide which is based upon the New York Times. I received lots of good feedback on what staff thinks about should be done for the website. I had to keep pulling everyone back on track since they wanted to go into specific details despite me explaining that it’s basically only me working on the website since the content person left and I’m also working on a lot of the publicity materials and other documentation.
Afterwards I got pulled into a longer one-on-one meeting with the head of reference as we discussed the website. I was able to make a few of the smaller changes immediately. Then I met with the publicity person for the Children’s Library. She explained to me some of her issues with Contactology which led to me making a new template for her on Friday. We also talked about some of the stuff at the web writing class that she had missed. I am coming around to the idea that the Children’s Library is a separate beast that will need its own unique solutions. It was painful to hear the CL librarians talk about having to “learn to deal” with things being incompatible with their workflow. I reminded her once again that this is a large project (since the changes are coming a piece at a time instead of a complete revamp which would be easier), so while I can’t make everything better immediately, it’s good to think about what they want now.
Friday
This promised to be a frustrating day as it was time to update the Adult Technology Classes portion of the website. This is a beast which I have struggled with before. I will explain the process in the next post. The downside to this method is that we’re still relying on an outside source for help and I cannot edit the Wufoo pre and closed submission messages. As well, the list of classes depends on a status field (Closed, Open, Drop-in), to work properly for the Classes view (since I assume that people will want to know the status of a class. Once all this was done, I then edited my custom Views template to display the date/time. Thanks to the little bit of PHP I’ve learned since the original creation of this custom template, I figured out how to concatenate the fields. One surprise was needing to add the CSS within the print statement. I thought the Lullabot videos had mentioned that the CSS went around the PHP…
Then I made the new Contactology template for the Children’s Library. I still need to change the footer to the new type, but I had like 10 minutes to make the new one from a modified older one.
Finally, I created a widget in LibraryH3lp on the test site. We are wanting to add more relevant chat boxes throughout the website. I had to add the chat box directly to the tpl.php since it is Javascript based. I look forward to adding more chat boxes to the website this week!