Here is an excellent and thought provoking talk entitled The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS. The CSS in the new website design doesn’t follow these principles, but lets keep them in mind as we iterate the design.
A little while back we launched the Research Tuesday Blog. We spent quite some time tweaking the blogs theme. Not surprisingly a lot of effort goes into getting all the elements of themes for wordpress working the way we needed. Also we have imported all the previous posts from the old web site, along with all the audio and video too.
In the last couple of month we have been pretty busy behind the scenes here in the Online Media team. We have been working with WordPress 3.1 on the development blog system for some time, along with all the plugins that fill out the features that we need.
So, in the last couple of weeks we have rolled WordPress 3.1 and upgraded all the associated plugins to the production blog system. We have found and fixed a number of bugs. However there is possibly more we haven’t found. Please let us know if there are things that do not behave as expected. Yes the admin bar at the top is new and some of the menus on the left in the admin area have changed. One casualty of the upgrade is the pluging ‘Wassup’. Wassup has a number of bugs and has created a much increased load, so we have disabled it for now. We hope to replace it in the near future.
With that said, WordPress 3.1 has made the admin of the blogs easier and has certainly improved the workflow for the Online Media team. And there is more in the pipeline…
In the last couple of weeks we have been working on upgrading to WordPress 3.1, testing all of the plugins and our theme. This upgrade will happen “soon”, dates will be posted shortly.
We have also deployed blogs for the Business school and Faculty Learning and Teaching.
This week we have rolled out more blogs. The International Student Centre and The South Australian Centre for Economic Studies.
So this has been a good couple of weeks for the blogs service. We found a little bug that obviously needed fixing. When you uploaded images and other media, it was only uploaded to one of the servers in the blog cluster. We have rolled out the first of several steps to make sure that the content is kept in sync.
Also we have updated the theme, tweaked a few little font and spacing related issues and sped up the image load time with the media server. So your pages should now load faster!
The MSC team have also put together a new blog, the Digital Media blog. The aim here is to keep an a cataloge of the work we do and use this as a portfolio we can refer back to when working on new campaigns.
Over the last week we have moved the Faculty of Sciences blog to the University Blog server.
It turned out to be quite straight forward to export all the content from the old blog and import it into the new one, with author attribution along with the images, etc.
Head on over to the visual identity page to see the recent logo refresh.
Screen casting is like making a movie of the things you are doing on your desktop, then uploading it for your audience.
Screenr is a webapp that is getting very popular in the techy microblogging world right now.
Perhaps it would be useful for;
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Blog service update
The University blog server has been moved across to a new web service. This will provide speed and storage improvements.
Also in this update is the move to the current version of WordPress, upgrade from and older MySQL to current MariaDB, and updates to Memcached.