28
Last night, just before the U.S. Olympic Team Trials–Track and Field got underway in Eugene, Oregon, CMI launched a major overhaul of the website for the Track and Field Writers of America (TAFWA).
TAFWA’s previous website, launched in 2001 or 2002, had languished several years without a visual overhaul. The design broke in several modern browsers, some of the site’s content was visibly obsolete, and all of it was difficult to update without the help of the original developers.
We installed Drupal for TAFWA, and installed and configured several modules to customize the popular free CMS to the organization’s specifications. It is now simple for authorized members or officers of the organization to update pages on the site and post organization news without needing to know HTML. It’s also possible for TAFWA to share particular information with its members and not the general public. We imported the membership rolls of the previous website, thus allowing certain parts of the site to require member login.
With its eyes on the marquee sport of the upcoming Olympic Games, TAFWA doesn’t have time to muck around with HTML tags–but they do need a site which looks as sharp and professional as the words of their journalist members. CMI helped them address both aspects of the problem.
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26
We’ve not been doing very well at reporting our activities here, even though things have been happening which are worth reporting. Forthwith, an update.
La Cucina Italiana occupied a significant chunk of our March. Phase Two of that project, which will see the beginnings of that venerable publication’s massive recipe database becoming available on the site, is complete and is only awaiting editorial oversight of the recipes being entered in the database. Phase Three is under discussion, and is the most exciting part from our point of view, as it will allow the site’s readers to engage the brand directly on the site through comments, ratings, and discussion.
We’re drawing closer to the public launch of an interesting project we started last fall with Scott Soloway. We’ll tell you more about this site when it launches, but for the moment we’ll say that it’s a web service of a sort we’d never handled before, and it includes a strong machine-learning component, which we loved.
We learned just a day or two ago that we’ll be building a new iteration of the website for the Track and Field Writers of America (TAFWA), a professional organization Parker has actually belonged to since his days at Runner’s World. Like many professional organizations, TAFWA has a specific audience to address and clear goals and constraints for their site, but their skills tend not to lie in web development or HTML coding. Our goals for this site are to create a site which is easy for non-technical users to maintain but which will help TAFWA itself provide useful services for its members.
With all this contract work going on, you’d worry that our own projects are being neglected. To the contrary, both “common” sites have seen development activity in recent weeks, though not necessarily in visible ways. My post earlier this week sprung from work I’m doing implementing a machine-learning based shoe recommendation system for Common Running, for example, and we’re gearing up to refresh the shoe database with the latest models.
Common Kitchen got a typical update earlier this afternoon, in which we updated the process for adding cookbooks and magazines to the site. This involved ripping out a chunk of code and replacing it with the neater, tighter acts_as_amazon_product code from Netphase. Their code searches books only by default, so we tweaked the plugin a bit ourselves to handle magazines and other product types using an optional parameter. The difference is pretty slight from the user’s end, but it’s typical of the work we’re doing on Common Kitchen nowadays, where we trim, tighten and otherwise refactor the site’s code based on what we’ve learned since we started.
There’s more CMI work waiting in the wings, both some potential outside projects and some ideas we’re brewing for our own sites. We’ll try to keep you posted here!
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6
I’m trying to track down a particular CSS problem in Safari. In Firefox, a div with width set to auto will expand to fill available space, and a float: right image will go to the right edge of the window; in Safari, the width appears to set to the widest text element, and the floated image crams in uncomfortably.
What I discovered was that Safari (at least up to the 2.x version I’m using) has a nice “Debug” menu which is disabled by default. To enable it, quit Safari, then go to the Terminal and give this command:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Then restart Safari. Unfortunately, this doesn’t include a CSS debugger anywhere near as helpful as the Firebug extension available for Firefox. Firebug not only shows the CSS rules applied to each HTML element on the page, it allows you to tinker with them and preview your changes.
I’m still not sure why my auto-width div won’t expand, but I added a min-width rule which seems to be an acceptable stopgap for now.
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