Upcoming web-related workshops

Mark your calendars and register for the following workshops from CITR:

Tuesday, June 5

• 8:30am - Basic Dreamweaver & Power Tips and Tricks

Wednesday, June 6

• 8:30am - Intermediate Dreamweaver & Increasing Student Interaction

Thursday, June 21, 2007

• 10:00am - Using the University Web Site Templates & Dreamweaver

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

• 8:30am - Digital Imaging

New Pew Report on Spam

From Pew:

The volume of spam is growing in Americans’ personal and workplace email
accounts, but email users are less bothered by it.

Spam continues to plague the internet as more Americans than ever say
they are getting more spam than in the past. But while American internet
users report increasing volumes of spam, they also indicate that they
are less bothered by it than before. Users have become more
sophisticated about dealing with spam; fully 71% of email users use
filters offered by their email provider or employer to block spam. Users
also report less exposure to pornographic spam, which to many people is
the most offensive type of unsolicited email. Spam has not become a
significant deterrent to the use of email, as some observers speculated
it might when unsolicited email first began flooding users’ inboxes
several years ago. But it continues to degrade the integrity of email.
Some 55% of email users say they have lost trust in email because of
spam.

Here is a link to the complete report:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/214/report_display.asp

Testing Accessibility with Firefox Extensions

The Web Developer Toolbar extension has many handy tools to help you prepare and test your web site, but that is not the only tool out there.

• TAW3 with a click
• Total Validator
• Page Validator
• CSS Validator
• Offline Page validator
• Window Resizer (for testing resolution/screen sizes)
• Domain Details
• Clear Cache Button
• View formatted source (format source extension) CSS
  (this potentially looks really useful, but not yet FF2)

List compiled by Hunt Dunlap, Malpass Library

Online Dreamweaver Tutorials

Web Support Services has posted a few Dreamweaver tutorials, but they tend to be focused on applying WIU configurations to the program. If you are interested in learning more about the program itself, Smash Magazine has posted an extensive list of links to online tutorials - some even included video.

Changing “directories”

Yesterday I set up a redirect on the server to take anyone linking to wiu.edu/directory or wiu.edu/directories to directory.wiu.edu. As a result, the links on the search engine result page were broken. The redirects are in place and the links for the search results are now displaying correctly.

Refining templates

The new web site launched about three weeks ago. Since that time, I’ve made changes and refinements to the layout. I’ve altered some of the wording used and changed the version of the Google search engine used on the WIU web site. Once these changes have proven “stable” I’ll provide templates for the university community. Expect them around mid-Feburary unless I run into problems.