BG Views Developer Blog

Summary

Over the summer and through this fall, I have been helping redesign and develop the new website for the BG News, entitled "BG Views".  The new website is going to be community based and will offer much more than the current website.  Users will be able to create their own accounts to personalize everything to their own taste.  With these accounts, they can post housing openings, add information on their favorite restaurants, add information on their business, post blogs, add events to the community events calendar, and more.  Besides being able to access all of these new features, the BG News will be available on the site as well.

 

Links

• BG Views Directory
• BG Views Events
• BG Views Newspaper (Beta)

 

Duties and Responsibilities

While working on the BG Views website, I have performed the following tasks:

• Created a mockup of the final website via Photoshop
• Taught myself the basic understanding of CSS
• Taught myself the basic understanding of the Joomla! software
• Taught myself the basic understanding of the jReviews software
• Coded a majority of the new template for use
• Added all of the listing categories
• Added all of the listing fields
• Added many listings to each category
• Installed LightWindow for use with images/YouTube videos
• Upgraded jReviews 1.4 to the latest 2.0 version
• Answered questions at the Fall 2008 Housing Fair
• Created BG Views email accounts for all new BG News staff
• Maintained the new BG Views Google Applications account
• Designed a newsletter template for the BG Views email list
• Designed a newsletter template for the Parents' Connection email list
• Designed a newsletter template for the Parent & Family Programs events email list
• Created a banner advertisement for Game Informer for use on BG Views
• Created a banner advertisement for Nintendo Power for use on BG Views
• Created a banner advertisement for PC Gamer for use on BG Views
• Created a banner advertisement for Play for use on BG Views
• Added categories to the BG Views Events Calendar
• Added listings to the BG Views Events Calendar

 

Other tasks I have completed at the BG News:

• Installed the Adobe Creative Suite on multiple new computers in the newsroom
• Installed NewsEdit on multiple new computers in the newsroom
• Installed fonts on multiple new computers in the newsroom
• Disinfected the BG News file server from a Microsoft Word macro virus
  • Disinfected every computer in the newsroom as well
• Answered various computer/technology questions
• Archived back issues of the BG News and posted them on the current website
• Created a banner advertisement for the BG Buck$ coupons
  • Created the web page for it as well
  • Linked each listing on the table of contents of the PDF to it's page
• Created a banner advertisement for the Hilton Garden Inn contest
  • Created/maintained the web page for it and provided the Hilton Garden Inn with the results
• Created a banner advertisement for the SBX $500 Giveaway
  • Created/maintained the web page for it and provided the SBX with the results
• Created a banner advertisement for the BGSU Spring 2009 Registration
• Made backup copies of training DVDs/CDs for use in the newsroom

New start of semester.

Get more familiar to the interface of the Developer Blog in MT and the same content in BGViews.

Learn the basic of Template in MT.

For some reason, the Google Maps marker for BG News was out in the corn fields (honestly that is not that surprising, this is North West Ohio after all). But the marker was an entire two miles off. So I went to the Local Business Center and fixed the location, and added some stuff to the listing. I need to add more but will later.

The thing that irks me is that they have to send a postcard to verify now. That takes "two to six weeks?" When I added my business listing, they allowed you to verify by phone, what the hell happened to that option?

So I guess in two to six weeks our location on Google Maps will be accurate.

UPDATE: Some yahoo put markers for BG News on Poe Road and clear out next to Bishop Road. I have requested these duplicates be taken down, I wonder how long that will take.

Because it did not work the first time. I changed the ping address.

EDIT: It worked! Follow the FAQ instructions that I linked to in my previous post, It has you installing a Facebook app to allow offline access, and changing some settings around in the Simplaris Blogcast app.

Finally. That took forever to get working. Not that I was working at it nonstop, but to have an RSS feed on a Facebook Page and not have it update automatically is utterly pointless.

I changed the ping address to the one Jeff told me to, I have read their blog posts here and here. So if it works, this post will automatically show up on the BG News/ BG Views Facebook page.

If not, I guess I will need to bug them for more help, or give up on this altogether. On a side note, it seems that updating RSS feeds on Facebook is one of the hardest things for any app developer to accomplish.

For as much of this site as possible, we will have mobile versions of all content. The only reason we do not have it is if the software used will not export to a secondary template. All the blogs and forums will have mobile versions.

This is a Movable Type template based on Taichi Kaminogoya's template set. Changes were made in CSS to make it look good on tihngs other than an iPhone/iPod Touch.

At the bottom of the Home Page, there is a More link, this will allow you to see more than just 10 articles. The inside pages are also built to look like a native iPhone app.

The inside template displays the name of the blog in the header, so you don't get confused. In the footer of each page is a link to go to the full version of the site.

The next step is to enable iPhone app-like effects like page turning, Tap-To-Email and the like. Also slated for the future of the mobile sites is to add search and comments.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you already got a trio of screen grabs from my iPod on various things I have been working on today. With some help from Chris Hall at Six Apart and Dan Wolfgang (thanks for the suggestions guys) I was able to get further than before.

Dan pointed me to a better, newer, Userpic Template Module. Mine was pre-4.21 I guess. This solved the problem of bringing in Facebook profile pictures and MT native Userpics.

I am also going to theorize that it may take a couple days for Facebook to recognize a new app and the web site(s) that interact with that app, so thay may well be the reason for all those errors before.

I still get errors, two jQuery errors, but this is far better than what I saw previously. As you can see from the screen grab above, the round trip connection from BG Views to Facebook is working. My Facebook App is now syncing the comments, which it was not doing yesterday. Now it works, and looks like this:


There is a bug report in by Chris about the jQuery issues. I hope they get it straitened out soon. If you are wondering "but Ken, what does it break?" It prevents a couple things:

• The Sign In | Register does not show up in the upper right of any article page.
• The Name, Email and (depending on authentication) URL fields do not collapse as they should when you are logged in.
• When signed out, you should get a Sign In, or comment anonymously in the comment section.
  

One of the most amazing plugins to come out of the MT community is Action Streams by Mark Paschal. We will be using Action Streams in our blogs. I personally cannot wait until MT 4.25 (Motion) is final and Action Streams and Community Actions is part of the base Movable Type install.

But of course I can't wait that long, and I have been running on a beta version for a while now. I just recently upgraded to the beta of version 2.0 and added a bunch more service. See my activity page up in the nav bar.

Action Streams brings dozens of your activity feeds into one place, your blog. In the example of my Action Stream above, I have 41 services listed (not all bring in content, some just link to profiles elsewhere on the web).

I have added 22 more service plugins from MT.org, that plus the ones that are built into the Action Streams plugin brings together a staggering amount of data that shows what you have been doing around the web. I even have one setup for your BGSU Weblog.

For the time being, an Action Stream is on a seperate page, but soon it will look like the Motion beta.

So much for this working without head pounding happening. Facebook commenting works, you can see that on my previous post here. However, when adding the needed scripts to the HEAD tag, there are a lot of Javascript errors.

I know, doesn't that look like a lot of fun. There are jquery errors that are loaded remotely and another error in the local JS file inside the Facebook Connect plugin folder. I have detailed this on my blog so you don't have to see it all here.

I hope to have this fixed soon as we are launching the site soon, with or without Facebook Connect.

Movable Type 4.23 has been installed in both the Pro and MTOS installs we are using (Community and Blogs sites, specifically). This might not sound very exciting, but this means I can now install the new Facebook Connect plugin to allow people to login with their Facebook profile. Hopefully that install will be easy, seeing as I already have the Facebook app. setup for the Motion beta.