End-o-summer update

So far how is the summer project list going?

- I created the new website for the Venture Initiation Project, at http://vip.wharton.upenn.edu. This site features a login system so students can update company information and logos, and I plan to show them how to use the site to show an RSS feed from their own blogs or twittrs. Also, on the What Students Say page there’s a video edited from various student exit interviews we’ve been doing. I did that too.

In more detail: the site makes a lot of use of technologies scattered around WEP’s other sites. Every HTML page pulled up actually doesn’t read a file direct from the file system (which is how web servers usually work) but instead draws from a database and puts the content into the main content area of an ASP.NET master page (the same master page, or template, used for the .aspx script pages – so if I need to change a layout element, I change it once and it will affect everything on the site). A nice added bit of magic is that the content area is rendered from code that isn’t raw HTML, but rather a WIKI-language (very much like wikimedia’s markup used on Wikipedia) which can be typed in directly or generated with the help of buttons on the page editing window. So users have a lot of direct control over formatting without needing to know HTML. The site also includes an image uploading widget that uses IFRAMEs and ajax to allow users to upload a file in a way similar to how GMail handles file uploads – it happens with a click while you’re still filling out the rest of the HTML form. Very swanky. The overall effect of the wiki and upload system is that administrators are updating their web content directly, rather than relying on me – when they rely on me, they tend to hold back on changes, not wanting to bother me.

Another minor innovation on the site is that I found a nice way to handle the departmental (and school) need to have the WEP and Wharton logos prominent on the page. The tabs at the top very clearly represent the stacking hierarchy of VIP to WEP and Wharton, provide an obvious link out, and make an asset out of the potentially worrisome fact that they’re three different color schemes. Overall I’m very happy with the site and look forward to finding ways to make it more useful for the students to take advantage of it.

Another accomplishment, albeit less work, was that our WEP Pre-term session video was added on the WEP website in the teaching area. We did an hour plus of informational session, and I shot the whole thing from the audience. We tried recording the room’s direct “press feed” for microphones, but the recording was too hot and clipped a lot (I set things too high because I was worried about them being too low!) so it’s just the camera audio, which is still pretty good.

The Wharton SBDC website got updated in credit card handling, using a new vendor with new requirements for passing data back and forth. The Real Estate center will be updated similarly very soon.

WEP’s Venture a Guess! trivia contest for undergrads will enter its second year this fall and the coding is done for it; we’re doing an internal test now. This year we’re doing much simpler questions and we designed a much more open way of handling prizes to encourage more participation.

We’ve also done sundry updates around the website, for instance updating the research area, but under the surface is where the WEP site is getting the most help – a lot of technical advances modeled in the VIP site are being transferred into the WEP site, including support for wiki pages, a login system for students, consolidation of the style template pages, and possibly that image uploader too. We’ve also changed video playback modules to one that doesn’t have as much stuff surrounding it but doeshave a timestamp, as well as a much easier time being scaled. We also have a unified signup engine – last year every time we had an event I created a new page and database to handle it. This year I can use this system to spawn a new signup without any programming or db work – hopefully mastering it all enough so that next year I can have it friendly enough that anybody can do this.

Outside of the web, WEP’s machines all got upgraded to Office 2007 this summer and we have some new printers, many of them reflecting a general shift away from HP in our office. HP’s old strengths have dissipated over time and we’re finding better cost-per-page efficiency in the Ricohs and Dells we’re bringing in.

I think that’s all! Not a bad summer of work.