CSS Bullets libguides, ILLiad, Facebook App

Well, a busy week as I finally got around to doing a couple things I should have done a long time ago. First, we have not had ordered list display properly in libguides since we brought over the campus-style sheets for the look and feel.

What I would run into, when I would display the bullets, is a double bullet in our regular lists, and then in the book lists, you would get a bullet but the object in the list like a book would be pushed to the next line. Finally got the single bullets correct, but the issue with pushing down content in a new div element still existed.

So I needed to isolate the book list ul li combinations, I was able to do that. But once I got that figured out, it turns out there are like three other lists like these ones for web sites, and another for RSS feeds. Hopefully, I'm not missing any other lists. I think I have them all fixed with the following CSS additions.

/ ** Bulleted List Cleanup **/

.s-lg-col-boxes ul li {

-webkit-margin-before: 1em;

-webkit-margin-after: 1em;

-webkit-margin-start: 0px;

-webkit-margin-end: 0px;

-webkit-padding-start: 8px;

}

.s-lg-col-boxes ul>li:before {

content: '\2022';

display: inline-block;

color: #c0ac7e;

font-size: 1.5em;

vertical-align: middle;

margin: 0 .2em 0 0;

line-height: .9;

position: relative;

top: -2px;

}

ul.s-lg-link-list.s-lg-link-list-5 li:before {

display: none;

}

ul.s-lg-link-list.s-lg-link-list-2 li:before {

display: none;

}

ul.s-lg-rss-list li:before {

display: none;

}

While working on this issue, I also had a staff member working with ILLiad software to send ILL articles out to other libraries using a tool called Odyssey. What is really weird is that it takes like 2-3 minutes to send the article, when in the past it was pretty much just automatic. Nothing has really changed other than we did have her desktop re-imaged and had to reinstall the software. So it definitely seems like a Windows issue, and we are still working on a solution. One thought I'm going to have her try is to first open the article in Adobe Acrobat, and then have her try and send it.  

Finally, I have been going back and forth with Facebook over our app which we use to display our library posts on our main page. So it's really not an app, but just a feature on our website. It's a feature if it was not available would not break our hearts, but well try to jump through their hoops, as they tell us how we can access the posts. The one bright thing from this is I got to learn how to use QuickTime on the mac to create a screencast, it's very straightforward and puts it in a .mov file format so it can be submitted to Facebook. Update our Facebook app which needed manage pages has been approved.

Logs, Customizations, and Omeka

Challenging week, and I'm not sure my fix is in place yet, but it seems like it could be the cause of my current challenge with ILLiad. So are incoming borrowing requests on ILLiad, coming in on Article Exchange were not automatically processing when they came in. So I was thinking all kinds of different things with a recent server move, and after struggling with it for a couple days, I remembered that there are some great logs on the ILLiad server.

I then found this:

2019-10-17 09:10:11,502 [29] INFO AtlasSystems.ILLiad.DomainLogic.Sites - Adding ILL as parent site (Request ID: e65ad5e2-c52f-467b-a752-fccf156bd81e)
2019-10-17 09:10:11,502 [29] WARN AtlasSystems.ILLiad.DomainLogic.Sites - Found empty or NULL NVTGC value (Request ID: e65ad5e2-c52f-467b-a752-fccf156bd81e)
2019-10-17 09:10:11,502 [29] INFO AtlasSystems.ILLiad.DomainLogic.Templates.Notification.NotificationTemplateService - Retrieving Borrowing Electronic Delivery template for site ILL. (Request ID: e65ad5e2-c52f-467b-a752-fccf156bd81e)
2019-10-17 09:10:11,502 [29] INFO AtlasSystems.ILLiad.DomainLogic.Sites - Adding ILL as parent site (Request ID: e65ad5e2-c52f-467b-a752-fccf156bd81e)
2019-10-17 09:10:11,518 [29] WARN AtlasSystems.ILLiad.DomainLogic.Sites - Found empty or NULL NVTGC value (Request ID: e65ad5e2-c52f-467b-a752-fccf156bd81e

So I decided to look for "Found empty or NULL NVTGC value", and was lucky enough to find this document from Atlas on when you have just one ILLiad server to use this on your new user form:

<input type="hidden" name="NVTGC" value="ILL">

and sure enough it was on my previous form, and I had failed to bring over the customization when we customized the user registration form. There were about 30 people who have registered since we updated the form, and Liz was able to easily identify those folks and update them. So note to self, if you have customized something in the past make sure you carry your customizations forward.

Finally had an Omeka session that seemed to go rather well. I walked the students through the presentation until I got to the actual steps of creating collections, items, and exhibits. I then would just go over each of the slides as I had already demonstrated the steps. I then had handouts for the students to use, and they went about creating their collections, items, and exhibits. Both the instructor and I both agreed Omeka is really something that you just have to use to get the hang of it, and it seemed like a very productive session.

Google Form Add Ons, Accessibility Audits, and SSL

So these were my three main points of focus this week:

1. As I finished up GamePlan this year, I needed to send out the assessment survey. I'm not a real big fan of sending the survey out the week after the quiz and the program should really be over, and I think it hurts my response rate just a bit. So this year, I got 43 out of 114 back, so just over 37%, not that great. The year before I a little over 50%, and I think that was due to the fact that I would just send them straight to a survey after the form. With the move to a Google Quiz this year, I had lost that option. So I was talking with a fellow football official who makes use of Google Forms at his work and he mentioned there is a number fo Google Form add ons. I ended up using one that was authorized by our Google Site Admins. What a time-saver, it now sends out a follow-up email after the quiz is submitted. I'm going to be curios next year where my response rate on the survey will come in at.
   
2. Doing some work on our web site to improve the accessibility, I had been using the WAVE tool extension, and then Mike mentioned to also use the Google Developer Audit for Accessibility, I went with Mike's tool and our main page had a score of like 65, not that great, but with the addition of some alt tags to our photos, and some aria-labels to the search boxes, I was able to get the score up to an 86. The last two items that need to be fixed really can not be changed right now. I did notice the WAVE tool was able to also check the javascript hidden panels, where the Developer audit only did what was on the screen. Most likely I will continue to use both in conjunction with each other.
   
3. Finally, in working on a "Best Practices" libguide, I was reminded of our need to get all of our guides to only contain content from SSL servers. At some point soon, libguides is going to force all of our content to be from SSL, it's time to get a jump on these guides and correct them. Now I just also need to convince some of the library producers of our libguides to limit linking to images coming from SSL servers. 

Google Quiz, Mysqli and Bind, Alma Skin

A good week for saving some work and time on different projects.

1. I finally decided to flip my GamePlan quiz, which I send to all the student-athletes that go through my GamePlan program at Willamette. In the past, I had just used a campus mail form script to capture quiz answers, have them emailed to me, and then I would have to compare the results to the correct answers and tally the totals. Now by flipping my Google Form to a quiz, Google takes care of all that work for me. When the student-athlete finishes the quiz, they get immediate feedback on their result, and their score is also captured in the response sheet.
   
2. Finally got back to some coding this week, and did some more converting of some php mysql to now use the binding technique to eliminate any chance of SQL injection into our database.
   
3. On Friday morning we had a librarian at Oregon State who had an issue reported to him about the Summit request form not properly displaying. He knew it was most likely something in the CSS he was going to have to fix but was unsure of where that was maintained. Is it in Primo or in Alma? This is an odd one, at first, I was going to see if anyone else was going to jump in with an answer but after not seeing anything on it for 30 minutes I decided to get my brain around the issue. So, the alma delivery skin, is actually uploaded in the Alma interface and its setting as to which file you can use is set in the Primo Back Office tables. Jesse Thomas at WWU also reminded us that some of the elements on that form can now be controlled from the Alma interface as well. Always nice to see how the Alliance can work together as a team.