Jason Garber
Eastern Mennonite University

Universities are dynamic places where supporting technology must keep pace with vigorous academic and student life. This presentation is a practical look at what it takes to build, deploy, and support web applications in record time using the best tools available today for source control, collaborative development, testing and deployment. Primarily I will demonstrate Ruby on Rails and why it is appropriate for development of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other social and collaborative applications, especially ones requiring AJAX enhancements. Our experiences with these technologies and frank assessments of their strengths and weaknesses will be generously sprinkled throughout.

View the presentation (24:41; .mov; Quicktime required).

Steve Lawson
Colorado College
http://library.coloradocollege.edu/steve/

Blogs have been hyped as “push-button publishing;” indeed, it is fairly simple for an educator, librarian, administrator or the like to set up his or her own blog with almost no knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. But for those who do so, this lack of knowledge can quickly become limiting and frustrating when they want to customize their blog.

This session is designed to help you learn enough about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to feel comfortable making changes to your blogs and other web pages. It will work like a case study; we’ll start with a blog right “out of the box,” and use free tools like the Firefox Web Developer extension to customize and personalize the blog. In the process, you will gain confidence in making small changes to existing templates, preparing you for more extensive, adventurous changes in the future.

Additionally, this presentation has many links and pointers to further reading for those who either need more background on the fundamentals of HTML and CSS or who want to explore the ideas and techniques introduced in the session in greater depth.

Most of this presentation is text, but screencasts illustrate the projects.

View the presentation master page (HTML).