I got back from my vacation in the middle of last week and found myself busy again, needless to say.

Current projects, in no particular order:

• Finalizing daily automatic user creation: This is really close to done. The user creation script itself works just fine; all I need to do is go through the code and make sure I can turn off all output to the screen, because when you run something as a scheduled task (AKA crontab or “cron” job in the unix world) any output that would normally go to the screen instead gets emailed to the user under whose security privileges the job runs as. I can’t just redirect all output to null, because if there’s ever an error message, we need that email to notify us, so instead I need to make sure that all non-critical output is suppressed inside the script.
• Website master database: This is a big one, and I’ll be talking about it more in the next weeks. We’ve been planning for almost a year to redo our entire website, primarily to make it easier to maintain. It will be written in PHP and we’ll hide a lot of the common template features in external files. Anyone who views the source code of a WOU web page can see how complex our current template source is; this will be replaced by a few lines at the top and bottom of the file, with only the actual page content in between (still written in HTML so people don’t have to learn a whole new language.) These external files will query our Oracle database for some page-specific information, and right now I’m working on the administration utilities for that information.
• Detail work on the Calendar of Events: There are still a few things that need to be cleaned up; the event display needs a few tweaks, and I need to make the error messages friendlier.

What a week. I’ve been fighting a cold at the same time as I’ve been fighting a deadline to get accounts created for next term’s students. That’s finally done (with lots of help from Troy), and in the process I’ve gotten a lot closer to automating the process. Hopefully by January, as soon as a student shows up as admitted, an account (complete with email and blog) will automatically be created for them the next night.

No FAQ again; things have been just too busy around here.

Have a good weekend, everybody!

Projects I’ve been working on lately:

Further refinements to the Calendar of Events. The new dynamic version just went up today, and we put a better date entry method in the submission form.

Automatic user creation. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to automatically detect when new students have enrolled and creat their user accounts immediately. This still needs some work, but is getting closer. This is the main project I’ve been putting time into, lately.

Web maintenance. I’m finally caught up again with user requests, except for one that I’m still waiting for information on. If anyone is waiting on me for web alias creation or editing rights, please remind me again.

Looks like I’ve been getting a bit lazy with the blogging, here. Part of that was vacation, but I’ve been back over a week now and still no entries! What gives, you may ask?

Mostly it’s because I’ve been busy with other things. The events calendar has been one; I had a nasty bug last week that I was beating my head on the wall about for several days, but finally solved thanks to a hint from Michael Ellis.
I’ve also been working on granting everyone access to the new web portal system; that’s pretty much ready for prime time now. You can get to it at https://wou.edu/portal. Just log in with your WOU username and password. The next FAQ will be about the portal system, which has some cool and useful features.
Aside from that, there’s been the usual large amount of time spent on migration cleanup and adding features to the user creation system. That program is now over 2100 lines long, not counting a bunch of code that’s been stored in separate modules; this may seem like a lot, but it does the work of three separate programs we used to use in the old system. Plus I’ve been working on user requests for web permissions and so forth.
All this is making me wish for another vacation! Luckily Thanksgiving is coming up soon.

Well, I’m back. Actually I got back yesterday, but spent the day digging out of the pile of stuff that built up while I was out. I finally feel like I’m caught up with the small stuff so I can get back to the bigger stuff.

Current top priorities (in no particular order):

• Trying to figure out how to enable Portal services on people’s user accounts in bulk, by adding LDAP attributes.
• Working on the Public Relations Calendar of Events (it’s really close now!)
• Figuring out how to use the security features of the new webserver for some departmental pages that need security right now rather than after the web migration.

So anyway, I’m going to get back to doing that stuff instead of talking about it.

Hmm, I see I need to make time to do more entries here; my original goal of one a day proved unrealistic, but I need to do at least two a week.

Today we had our first Personal Development Time, instead of a staff meeting. It was interesting: I got to watch (and occasionally help with) a Solaris 10 installation, and got some reading done on Object-Oriented Perl, which i hope will help my scripting and make it easier for me to create programming tools usable by others.

UCS folks, please take a look at the Personal development Time wiki page (created by Mike Ross.) Feel free to add your own ideas, comments, suggestions, experiences, whatever you please! It’s a wiki, after all.

Travis had a good idea about a different way to spend the time we normally take in staff meetings.

I like the idea of personal development time; right now, I have to get up early and drive in to work without knowing whether there’ll be a meeting. I don’t mind it too much, because coming early means I get to leave earlier, but it can be a pain when I was here too late the night before. (Luckily that doesn’t happen too often, and when it does, it’s generally either my own fault or else totally outside anyone’s control.) Knowing I would have a chance to work on my own stuff would give me a better motivation to come in those mornings.

I’d probably spend the time learning stuff like advanced CSS coding, because that’s something I’ve fallen behind on but would really help me with web page design. It would also be nice to work on automating some of the more repetitive tasks I need to so, like feeding webserver logs into the Urchin log analyzer, and setting up web permissions, and stuff like that. I have a serious case of “programmer laziness”; I get frustrated having to do the same stuff over and over, and would rather build a tool to do it for me, even if it takes longer to build the tool! I’d love having time to do stuff like that.

It’s been a busy week so far. I finally got to all those web permission requests I’ve been needing to do; if you’re still waiting on one, please let me know, because it means your request has fallen through the cracks somehow. I also got a bunch of public_html websites fixed; I know I didn’t get all of them, so if yours still isn’t working, please let me know.

I made a bit of progress on the event calendar, but not as much as I would have liked. I think I can still get at least a basic version of it done, but it’s going to be close, considering I have one and maybe two meetings tomorrow and need to get the weekly FAQ ready.

Well, I was hoping to have it done sooner than this, but the event submission form is live. It feeds into the existing database (with a couple of extra fields kindly added by Summer.) Next I need to get the actual calendar display working from the database so they don’t need to code it by hand anymore. Plus I still have a stack of web requests I have to get to. Sorry, folks! I should be able to get to most of your stuff tomorrow.