Category: Project work

includes School Work

Inventory & Not Reinventing the Wheel to Create an IA

I had previously written about creating an IA basically through inventorying an existing site and using some basic assumptions to choose what to include.

I was recently tasked with creating another new section or portal to the website, but this time, I was not working off of an existing section.  Instead, I am creating a new section based on our needs and what other similar organizations have done.  So, this time I did it differently. In a sort of two step process:

  • inventory
  • looking at other websites

The websites I looked at were actually chosen by my boss because he knows which ones generally had the resources to do a lot of testing with their users and a good IT department with experienced staff members (or maybe it was just that he found these ones to be really good, probably both).  Looking at other websites helped create some initial categories as well as identify items that we might have missed in our inventory since there was no easy way to search for the content we needed.

Based on logical groupings and categories that other sites used, I created an initial IA to be used as part of the card sort study.

Launch of Help

So with the launch of help today, it will mean a redesigned section of the website. The key things we were going for:

  • clean & easy to read
  • consistent look & feel
  • standardizing some of the content
  • organization that makes sense to users
  • providing a design that gives a primary, secondary, and tertiary focus

This was the original main page, which was just a bunch of links which were not very well organized after the years of simply adding things compared to the new main page.

We took out the “Ask Us” from the main navigation bar and put it in a site wide side button, which many new sites are doing with feedback buttons. We also took out a mouse over menu from the main navigation bar that was a user guide type of page depending on the patron’s role (“Services for You”).

We moved those onto the Help page as well and linked to new versions with more or less the same content, but with some of it standardized and with a common look and tab navigation.

I like it and thinks it looks way better than before. Plus I think it’ll help our users find stuff!

EDIT: We received a lot of positive feedback! Yay!

WordPress annoyances

Warning: This is more of a rant than productive thought

maybe I’m just inexperienced, it probably doesn’t help that I don’t have admin access, but even asking coworkers whether something is possible seems to give me a “no”. Mind you, it’s not wordpress.org, but wordpress MU where my access is more or less restricted to the kinds of things I would be able to do on wordpress.com.

I haven’t figured out how or can’t do the following:

  • redirect pages (short of hardcoding it into the server)
  • make the frontpage not look for blog posts (and if there are none, not to display an error)
  • display subpages on a page (not in a navbar) short of manually doing it
  • change the width of a column (I know, I know, this is coded into the theme)
  • know exactly what it’s doing with my HTML code…. I’m stuck right now because I’m having a problem where the HTML code looks just fine but there’s something going wrong (thankfully a coworker is looking into that)

I’m sure I will be more and less frustrated with WP as I learn more about it.

When Wiki and HTML Formatting Collide

So I’ve been messing around with wiki coding since obviously I’ve been working on developing content on the wiki. One of the things I was trying to do was a hanging indent (here’s another more complex one where you don’t need to set a margin and documentation is better) in order to display citation examples properly. More than that, I wanted to offset the whole citation (i.e. add an indent) in order to make it stand out from the rest of the text.

Template Code (Hanging Indent)
Whether you look at the first or second template, they both modify the CSS in order to make the hanging indent. They essentially change two attributes:

margin-left:2em;
text-indent:-2em; (shifts the first line of a paragraph)

Now in order to indent a line or paragraph, there are usually a couple of ways to do it in wiki, but throw the hanging indent template into it and it didn’t always work out so well.

Add Wiki Code
Usually the best way to do a simple indent in wiki is using a colon, such as

: Indented text

However, I suspect that rather than adding to the margin, the wiki changes the margin for that text, and the hanging indent code overrides it. So, the result is that it does nothing.

Add HTML Code
The other option was to use the <blockquote> tag. As the blockquote does not interfere with the CSS styling, this had the intended effect except that just like in this post, if I use blockquote,

you get spacing before and after the blockquote as you would with a <p> tag

My Solution
Not a very elegant solution, and rather the brute force way, but I just ended up creating a template for citation examples that hard coded the extra margin. I suppose the other solution would have been to add an extra variable to the hanging indent template but I figured that would not be worth the trouble.

PDF2Wiki Conversion Comparison

So, some people may ask, why are you trying to convert PDF to Wiki? PDF is usually the last step in the process, so just use the original document. My response would naturally be, what if you don’t have the original document?

A Two-Step Process
Through my searching and reading on the topic, it seems there is no PDF2Wiki Converter. Every site that I have read explains converting the PDF to one of: DOC, RTF, HTML, XML first then to wiki format.

PDF2HTML
I tried a number of PDF to HTML programs, but none of them worked to my satisfaction. Most of them only converted simple formatting, such as bold and italics.  Adobe has an online conversion tool. It’s better than some of the others I’ve tried as it interprets lists and such. The resulting code is rather ugly and a lot of the code would need to be stripped before using a HTML to Wiki converter. See my previous post on HTML2Wiki for a couple of tools on tidying or stripping HTML code.

PDF2DOC
I found that a much better alternative was converting the PDF to a DOC/RTF file since it’s a lot simpler and some formatting might be lost, but you won’t have a lot of needless code that might mess up your wiki page. There are a lot of online tools that provide a PDF to DOC/RTF service, however, again, they only tend to do basic formatting.  Adobe Acrobat does a really good job, because it will change lists into formatted lists (instead of normal text).  The major downside of course is that Acrobat is a paid program though there is a 30-day trial.

Conclusion
I had a lot of problems in particular with PDF to HTML, so I thought PDF to DOC/RTF is simply. Honestly though, unless you have a PDF file which is really long and has a lot of simple formatting (bold, italics, etc.), if you cannot get your hands on Acrobat, then I suggest simply copy/paste (or alternatively save as a text file) and manually formatting it in the wiki’s editing box. Of course this depends on the wiki you’re using because ones that don’t have a toolbar to help you quickly format might be a bit of a pain. Someone please let me know if you have found a better method!