The Web Developers Users' Group met on August 16, 2002, at 3:30 PM in the Parliamentary Room, PSU 313.

Digital photography presentation

John Wall, Director of Photographic Services, delivered a digital photography presentation to the Web Developer Users' Group. View the outline of his presentation.

In addition to his outline, John also mentioned the following during his presentation:

• Photographic Services plans on being 100% digital within six months
• Chemical retrievement and disposal is a major cost and ecological concern.
• Digital photography is usually not well suited for very large prints.
• Photographic Services recently purchased a dye sublimation printer, which can make digital prints in CMYK that are thermally bonded to the paper, which can be more permanent than normal color photos.
• Output costs tend to be higher for digital photos. Lawrence Photo in Springfield currently charges 19 cents to develop and print a traditional photo versus 49 cents to print a digital photo.
• Avoid digital zoom, as it can significantly decrease image quality; optical zoom is fine.
• One of the disadvantages of the Mini CD based cameras is the size of the cameras needed to accommodate the media.
• Cameras with larger internal buffers will allow more photos to be taken sequentially without waiting for the camera to write the photos to the storage media.
• Media readers can cost between $20-50 and can be much faster at transferring files than transferring photos directly from the camera. It also frees the camera up for use as well.

Missouri State web maroon color change

Sara went over the proposed Missouri State web maroon color change with the group. The new color's hex code is #4A0010. This change currently has to be approved by Administrative Council but is expected to be approved. You may see an example of the new maroon color on the staging server.

The color change has already been approved by the Web Advisory Committee and is an attempt to best match the web colors to the official print and merchandise color. This is currently the third web maroon color. The last update was two years ago.

The group discussed a potential timeline for the old web color to be phased out. The group felt that one year should be more than enough time to make all of the necessary changes.

Sara will begin a mass find and replace to start changing the color reference on all main Missouri State web servers August 21or August 22, 2002.

Update Notice: web maroon color change approved

The proposed Missouri State web maroon color change was approved Monday, August 19, 2002. Sara will begin rolling out the changes Wednesday, August 21, 2002.

Staging server online

The new staging server is currently up and running. It is currently undergoing testing and guidelines for its use are being written.

Email server change reminder

Sara reminded the group that the @mail.missouristate.edu address for emails no longer works. Computer Services has notified her that some web pages and forms are still attempting to send to that address. She reminded all developers to check their web pages and forms to ensure they are using the new address. Any web pages and forms that use the old address no longer work and should be updated to the new @missouristate.edu address.

Proposed meeting time alternation

Sara mentioned the possibility of alternating the current WDUG meeting times to allow members that cannot make it to the Friday meetings to attend. The group liked this approach.

Next meeting

The next WDUG meeting will be held in the Parliamentary Room, PSU 313, on September 20, 2002 at 3:30 PM. Dan Will, an Missouri State student worker, will be giving a presentation on using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for web page formatting.