Project: DIGS: Digital Image & Graphics Source
Patron: uss
Medium: html in TextEdit with the back end some crazy Canto Cumulus Web Publisher thing.
Status: Draft 2.0
Deadline: mid July

So, this has been a really cool project, especially as I've been getting my fingers into the html and mucking around with these strange cgi include statements. It's like server side includes, but not.

My most recent problem is trying to find where canto is hiding the script/doc/include statement, that is generating <td></td> tags and links for its category page. I want to change that to a <select></select> option and make it a jump menu, or even just a multiple select drop down menu. The problem with the table is it is just going to keep getting longer. We need a way to keep as many of the categories infront of the view as possible.

It really looks like a script output document, mainly because of the repetitiveness plus, you can call it to determine a real time category list on the fly. But damned if I can figure out where the script is hiding. It seems to be one of the few things that Canto has tried to lock down. They are actually very good about giving you access to the html and templates that this cgi / database thing runs on...if you can figure out where the home directory is. I can't help but think though, that there must be a less server intensive way to go about it.

At 4 today, I finally gave up and wrote support. I'm sure there is some guy in San Diego commenting on how "its that woman from us steel again." Yeah, me an Canto support. We go way back....

I guess one of these days I'm going to have to force my brain around the server end of all this.

The design is really actually pretty sedate. I hope to be bringing home some screen shots of it once its completed and before my eminant *ahem ahem* departure. I actually got a lot of good feed back from the actual web services folks about good basic design for websites. UI logic. It occured to me that maybe it would be a good idea to find a class or lecture on UI design. There must be some standards that would make my designs more solid. (like there are print rules of thumb of good design)

I am sad to say that it looks like hoemke.com and pis-cis.net are down again, or at least struggling. Kind of a pain really.