Elaine – Page 39 – elaine nelson, aka epersonae

9/17/2012

Web Services

Oh dear, heavy accent. Which is fine, but will definitely take some extra effort to attend to.

SOAP? Really? Not REST? (Not that I know much about either.)

Anything with bulk changes. Is this where the “bug all page managers” thing I want to do comes in?

Oh….also could use it to create a form elsewhere and then turn the submissions into assets. I guess this is the thing that I was thinking about for calendar and/or catalog.

hmmm…authentication piece could be tricky. (remembering the issues with publish sets.) create a “web services” user? guy sittingÂ next to me said they do something like that.

idea: drupal module for writing to cascade? are there soap-related modules?!

so every time something gets edited in the CMD (for example) it also gets sent to Cascade AND published. No PHP. Automatic URLs/Page Titles. I think you could even do the preview with that technique. Maybe.

Mind blown.

And now I have a slightly better idea of how SOAP works in PHP, which seems a lot like how Ajax stuff works in JS.

9/17/2012

Template XSLT Formats

Trying to decide whether I’ll want to knit during this session. (And whether I want to go to the next one at all. Neither one is really calling to me.) Transforming one kind of XHTML into another XHTML? oh, hold on: this means i could make the content talk to the navigation so I could do that “you are here” thing I’ve been wanting, WITHOUT js. conditional js, based on what the content is. maybe obviates some things i’ve looked at content types to do. I did take out my knitting, tho I’ve had to stop a couple of times. this is pretty stony, now that he’s getting into it, but he started with a lot of talking about talking. start-root-code THIS. this is what i wanted to do all along. but wait: does this mean you have to put the content into the asset format as actual stuff? “[div id=”hideBodyId”]special[/div]” – how odd. but the 2nd format removes those. could you put a definition list in the first format? that would be super nerdy. www.iu.edu/~pagriet/csuc12/ oh, now I get it: you attach a format to the template in the template editing interface. (a really basic thing that was confusing me the whole time.) lightbulb just came on for reals. instead of all ids – “hideTitle” “hideBreadcrumbs” or “showBreadcrumbs” – use classes “hide” and “show” and then ids (or definition list) to know which thing.

9/17/20129/17/2012

Roadmap Session

I’ve never actually been to a conference for a specific vendor. It’s weird to see a presentation that includes how they moved into new offices.

Still wondering what exactly it means for Cascade to have “full HTML5 support” — does that just mean that you can use new tags in content without them being stripped out?

Yep, this is the talk talk talk blah blah blah session I thought it might be.

Topic-based user groups.

Oh hey, the KB might suck less.

Huh, this is actually still just the welcome, not the roadmap. The actual roadmap session might be better?

…which starts…now.

“the engineers are the employees with beards”

so no women, then?

this is probably the sort of session where I ought to be knitting instead of writing snarky journal entries or tweets, mostly so I don’t miss stuff.

“modules are a little vague” – adding functions w/out so much coding? no idea what he’s talking about.

focusing on usability. hrmph. but they’re talking about it as “features” and not so much as “omg working in this makes me want to yell at something.”

Auto-saving drafts. On the one hand: I love that in WordPress. OTOH: I gather drafts have caused horrible disasters.

All of this contextual editing is great, I guess, but what I really want is for someone to be on the actual website, and when they see something that needs fixing, be able to click a button and jump to the right spot in the CMS.

Customizing the toolbar! I was going to see if I could hack into that myself. 🙂 And the equivalent of content/tag filters in Drupal. (No, you CAN’T create an h1, rather than making it look ugly and they don’t understand why.)

o look: an automatic report that would’ve let us know about that thing that was probably broken for 6 months.

site-wide link check! that’s actually pretty cool. per-asset link check on publish? should already exist, but does that include external or just internal? should look that up.

I think Susan might especially appreciate some of the reports stuff.

more about modules:

Guy in front of me is looking at info about contribute. Hilarious.

twitter feeds module. oh dear, I think that means my recent very

built-in image sliders. I wonder if that’s going to suffer from the same problems as all the carousel etc modules in Drupal, which meant tha I ended up preferring getting Views to generate a list and then including the cycle lite jquery plugin in the theme.

“give users the ability to create these things” — oh wait, that’s basically the same thing as the image gallery thing I built this summer? :\

any ARIA support?

ways to indicate that an image is “decorative” rather than meaningful.

“only a single h1 element” — but if using headers, sections, articles, is that still best practice?

so there’s an accessibility checker? where’s that? but apparently it only checks the asset’s content?

ARIA in TinyMCE. that’s kinda cool.

50% of site redesigns of projects they work on are including response. apparently session tomorrow abt mobile will be focused on RWD, so maybe I will go.

looking at better support for HTML5 Boilerplate, Twitter Bootstrap, etc. looking to export some of their services projects to Github, sites that you could actually just import into a site. Innnnnteresting.

ah, one of the HH employees just responded to the single snarky tweet that I hashtagged. #awkward

SO MANY things we can’t do until we convert to “Sites”. Dammit.

Two minutes left, in theory.

Seriously, I’m beginning to hate the term “user” when referring to people who do stuff inside a CMS. (this isn’t a Cascade complaint specifically.) How hard is it to call people authors, editors, or managers?

Also, the word “blast” in re marketing can die in a fire. (email, facebook post, whatever. DIAF.)

Gah, missed a bunch about performance improvements while copying (some) of that into tweets. Whoops.

9/17/20129/17/2012

Cascade User Conference liveblogging

Hey, it’s conference blogging! I haven’t done this in here in a while; when I went to PNW Drupal Summit last year, I was trying to move everything to my “Web Generalist” blog. But I’ve pretty much shuttered that, so now it’s here.

For my loyal readers: Cascade Server is a content management system (CMS) used at The Evergreen State College. Its care, feeding, and spiffy new web features built with it are my job. I’m at the vendor’s annual user conference in Atlanta, GA — where I’ve never been before — to learn more, get ideas, and meet people.

I’m not totally suffering on EDT, mostly because I stayed up all Saturday night before my flight on Sunday. (D&D Saturday until 11ish, airport shuttle at 3:45, so packing & watching Zoolander twice kept me going through the night. Which meant I was exhausted enough to go to bed at 7:30(?) last night, and wake up not too long before my normal alarm time.)

9/13/2012

Flickr Updates for 2012-09-14

little slice of fall-ish sky

9/12/2012

old posts?

I have three drafts of blog posts on my tablet — two from last fall (November maybe?) and one from sometime after that. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out whether there’s a way to see in the Android WordPress app when they were originally written. If I could, I’d just publish with those dates.

Should I publish “Immediately” with a note at the top? Because I’m kind of tired of having them in my drafts.

(FWIW: one about knitting, two about role playing games, the second of which is just a fragment.)

9/12/2012

starting year 38

Year 37 wasn’t easy, and I’ve been sort of vaguely dreading the future. In the last year the grey hairs have become constant, my eyesight has gotten to a point where I take off my glasses to read up close…I would say that I’ve got more general aches and pains, but really: I was in a car crash last November, which I’ve written about a couple of times, and it took more out of me, physically and emotionally, than I really would’ve expected. December is sort of a vague blur. I let the yard go wild this summer, and now quite a bit of it is a carpet of morning glory. Which is pretty, but overwhelming.

And now I’m the same age that my mother was when my father died, which is disconcerting in its own way.

I haven’t been writing, not here or much of anywhere, for quite a while. (I keep trying to remember if I started NaNoWriMo last year, but I think that work — another fantasy novel — was in 2010, not 2011.)

Not too much biking either, given that the new job is a much more difficult commute than the old one, and also given the crash. (I had to make some adjustments to my bike to make it more comfortable.)

::sigh::

On the other hand.

I had a month off in April/May, which was pretty awesome. Hadn’t had that much time off since I graduated from college. Didn’t get very far on my ominous to-do list, but I got a lot of rest.

And I went from that to my New! Job! — which yes, I’m still excited about. Working for a boss I’ve known for eight years, and negotiating that relationship really well. Figuring out my job, getting to do more of the things I like and am good at, and fewer of the things that I dread. Feeling like I’m doing things that are useful, engaged in something that’s a plus for society. I also got to have a pretty big role in picking the third member of our team, who starts next month.

Then there’s knitting, which is pretty cool — fun and relaxing, and I’ve made some nice things — and canning, which means I have homemade jam in the winter, and that helps keep my spirits up.

***

I started that two days ago (on my actual birthday), and couldn’t figure out how to finish the post — plus IIRC I was at the end of my bus ride home. Which is a reasonably good metaphor for where I’ve been at lately. Feeling as though there are too many things going on, too many things unfinished and interrupted.

I didn’t write about D&D, which has been a fairly notable part of my life this last year, altho somewhat erratically. I was in one game that sort of fell apart, another that trailed off, and I’m currently playing one game (Pathfinder) and running another (AD&D 1st edition). It can be both a good way to blow off steam, an excellent creative outlet, and yet another source of OMG I HAVE TOO MUCH TO DO.

Which reminds me: this last year I also cut waaaaay back on my volunteering: resigned as Secretary of the neighborhood association, left the board of the Friends of the Library, and didn’t go for another term on the Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Committee. All of which has been a huge relief. I still have some outstanding projects, mostly for the neighborhood association, and it’s taking me a lot of mental effort to shift from seeing it as Yet Another Piece of Work to something that I’m excited & care about.

And I just remembered the other big thing in the last year: our old kitty diagnosed with kidney failure, and having to deal with that. And it wouldn’t be at all surprising if she died before I see 39. I don’t know what that’s going to be like for us, but it’s going to be intense.

Today I was helping out at a tech fair for faculty and ran into someone from my graduating class at UPS, who was with me in creative writing classes, and who’s now teaching physics at Evergreen starting this month. He asked if I was still writing…to which the answer is “sort of” — I did mention my one finishing NaNoWriMo, and blogging, but the question’s been rattling in the back of my head all day. And what I want the answer to be. And to be honest, how much better I feel when I’m writing regularly. Not just journaling/blogging, either, satisfying though that may be.

So: 38. (Thirty-eight?) I don’t want to put too much significance on it, and I don’t want to over-commit. But I yearn for…something.

9/9/2012