Elsewhere...
Another excellent piece by Andy Rutledge, an admonition/checklist for being a professional designer/developer.
Both the BBC and Fox news web sites have recently been redesigned, with the BBC losing its looks and Fox getting neat and serious.
jQuery diagramming with jsPlumb — cool.
Another wonderful blog post by Walter Russell Mead, this time hoping that the blogosphere find a not-so-distant mirror in 18th-century London.
Google argues that its mobile YouTube site is better than its YouTube iPhone app.
Jakob Nielsen tests reading usability on the iPad and Kindle and reports that they’re almost as good as reading on paper. People didn’t like reading on PCs — it reminded them of work.
Falling out of love with the iPad. None of this surprises me.
Wow, icons made entirely in CSS3 (currently Safari, Chrome only).
ack in February 2009, when we launched the Master In-Service Program for the Christian Schools of Florida web site to manage teacher training, we left until later the report required by the state Department of Education summarizing points accrued for each component. That report is now up and running.
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Client
Christian Schools of Florida
Crystal River, Florida -
Sectors
Education -
Services
Web Development & Design
The annual report from the Christian Schools of Florida (CSF) Master In-Service Program (MIP) to the Florida Department of Education — in both summary and drill-down views
First, some background. The Christian Schools of Florida’s Master In-Service Program manages the activities that the CSF member schools hold for their staff so that they can be re-certified as educators. Each in-service activity qualifies for credit towards a component set by the Florida State Department of Education. What the new report does is summarize the various types of participants — teachers, administrators and non-certificated people — who gain credit towards each component.
In previous years the report was compiled manually. This year however, since all participants in all activities are now entered into CSF’s MIP web system by individual school in-service administrators, the report is simply a print-out of a web page on the CSF site (that must nonetheless be a precise replica of the handwritten paper report). With over 500 teachers participating in almost 100 activities this year, the automatically-generated report has saved a lot of tedious manual calculations.
Uniquely, the report has two views: a summary, which is sent to the DoE, and the full details view, which drills down to the level of individual participants and shows how the summary’s totals are calculated. The report also generates warnings, such as when an activity has been assigned more hours than its component’s maximum.
The totals are not stored on the server, but instead are calculated each time the page is loaded. Some of this is done client-side using Javascript with the Numeric and Calculation jQuery plugins.
“Thank you for your good work,” CSF head Ken Wackes emailed at the conclusion of the job. “We are greatly satisfied.”
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