The Web Developers Users' Group met on October 21, 2002, at 10:00 AM in the Parliamentary Room, PSU 313.

Developer utility sharing

Several group members shared utilities that they felt were useful in developing web pages.

Joe Kuster, Web Access Compliance Team member, demonstrated the Microsoft Web Developers Accessories utility package from Microsoft. The Microsoft Web Developers Accessories package includes two different utilities, View Partial Source and Display Document Object Model. The View Partial Source utility allows developers to highlight any part of a web site and view the source code for that specific part of the page. The Display Document Object Model can be used to show many properties of a web page such as date last modified and display the true URL of a page contained in frames.

Norman Hill III, Web Access Compliance Team member, demonstrated the Diamond Demo Tools. The Diamond Demo Tools are a set of which allows the user to display any web page a certain way, or notifies the user of certain accessibility or usability problems. The utility includes three tools, View Images without Alt Tags, Kill Style Sheets and View as Grayscale.

Sara Clark, Missouri State Web Coordinator, demonstrated the web-based utility Net Mechanic. Net Mechanic has a variety of tools to check and optimize web pages such as check for broken links, slow pages and browser problems.

Update:

Rob Hornberger, Coordinator of Web and Data Support for Enrollment Services, mentioned Color COP and HTMLed during the meeting and submitted links for those utilities and a few more after the WDUG meeting.

• Color Cop
  Color Cop is a color utility that can obtain the hex number for a color of any font or point on an image.
• HTMLed
  HTMLed is a customizable text based HTML coding program.
• ExactSeek Site Submitter
  ExactSeek Site Submitter is a program that allows automatic site submissions of web sites to approximately 40 different search engines.
• Perfect Keyboard
  Perfect Keyboard is a macro program.
• Traceroute
  Traceroute is a program that can trace the path to an IP and test the response time of each network node in between the address and your computer.

Conference sharing

Sara discussed with the group the WebDevShare and Educause conferences which she recently attended. Her conference notes are available.

Rob Hornberger discussed one of the lectures he attended at WebDevShare. He mentioned the University of Boston online student information system similar to the Missouri State My Information site with the addition of the ability for the student to grant others selective access to view their personal information such as grades, schedules or required student fees.

Don Hendricks, Assistant Director of News Services, described how Boston College developed a system similar to a content management system called "Web It," which allowed developers to update site content by entering text and images into university templates.

Sara also mentioned the University of Indiana Web Team. The Web Team develops web applications, databases and other web projects for departments across the university on a cost recovery basis. She asked the group if they felt that it would be a good idea for Missouri State to implement, and they agreed it would be useful.

Sara also briefly discussed the lectures she attended concerning web portals and single sign-on systems.

Server migration

Sara notified the group that Computer Services has begun the migration of web sites from the old web server KRYPTON to the new web server THOLIAN. This will not affect how the web site looks or the site address. If a developer is accessing it from the network path, he or she will need to use the new server name instead.

Strategic web plan

Sara mentioned that the Web Advisory Committee is currently working on the university's strategic web plan.

Next meeting

The next WDUG meeting will be held in the Parliamentary Room, PSU 313, on November 20, 2002 at 10:00 AM.