Vanderbilt designers converged today from all corners of campus for a first-ever meeting and lunch. I wouldn’t have made the cut, but fortunately the graphic artist at the Cancer Center, the same wonderful person who designed the gray-haired lady featured on this blog’s banner, urged me to come. I’m so glad I did, even if it did give me a slight Alice-in-Wonderland feeling.

I’m used to geeks, and while there was a healthy sprinkling of them too, the predominant theme was art. At one point they started talking favorite Pantones. I was proud to even know they were talking about color. And many of them can draw! One used to be a courtroom artist. Wow.

Even more amazing, over a one hour lunch they decided to set up both a listserv and blog, and by quitting time today, both were in place. Zoom….

If you are a Vanderbilt employee, you can get to the blog here: Vanderbilt Designers Blog. One challenge it creates: I follow blogs via Google Reader, but it doesn’t support password-protected ones. I’m not sure how it will unfold, but I certainly do admire the pluck of these artists willing to dive right into Web 2.0.

Last week Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 Beta (IE8). I’ve been swearing (under my breath) at IE for the last five years, but it may be time for me to find another fall guy. Microsoft has not only been listening, they’ve been soliciting feedback from their most outspoken critics — web developers who care about standards.

If you’re a web standards fan, I’m sure this isn’t news. But if you are like most of the rest of the world, you’re probably saying, “So what?”

Good question. Standards are the bedrock of the web, and while it would be erroneous to say Microsoft played fast and loose with them, they were notoriously sluggish about improving IE and bringing it into compliance. They had almost total market domination with IE6 for five years. During that time IE’s lack of standards compliance slipped from being a minor headache for web developers to a major crisis.

The crisis peaked when Microsoft finally released a new version — IE7 — and jillions of websites broke. At Vanderbilt, IE7 didn’t just cause cosmetic problems; it broke some mission-critical hospital applications. Because of this many IT departments around campus have blocked deployment of IE7. I expect we’re far from alone. The irony is that the problem was IE7 being more standards compliant than IE8. But it still wasn’t as compliant as any of the other major web browsers.

It’s been an enormous e-pickle. To their credit, Microsoft took ownership of the problem, scrambling to come up with something better. The result is IE8.

Should you rush right out and download IE8? I’d advise holding off, because it will overwrite whatever version of IE is currently on your PC. However, if you’re responsible for websites, you should get it soon. The good news is it should be able to toggle into IE7 mode. As soon as it’s a bit more stable I’ll be updating the PC I run IE7 on, testing IE8 and reporting back.

Vanderbilt University today unveiled an iPhone optimized version of its website. If you go to vanderbilt.edu on an iPhone or Touch, it will automatically reroute you to vanderbilt.edu/iphone/.

And what a handsome page it is. The University Web Communications team has done an excellent job. It’s not your usual blah gray or blue mobile site. While maintaining the minimalist style best suited to an iPhone, it manages to look very Vanderbilt — black with touches of gold and dark red.

As well as the home page and admissions, the top layers of the news, calendar, athletics, and several other sections have been optimized, and I expect more will come soon. It’s a great start and a very pleasant surprise.

Vanderbilt has three telephone exchanges which consistently resolve to 5 digit extensions within campus. Numbers that begin with 322- have an extension that starts with 2-; 343- begins as 3-; and 936- begins as 6-. Recently I was asked to display phone numbers from a database where the numbers were entered inconsistently. To do this, I leaned on the PHP string token function — strtok.

For those who might need it or are learning how to use strtok, here are the gory details.

// Start phone number expansion
if ($row['telephone'] != "") {
$phone = $row['telephone'];
$phonestart = strtok($phone, "-");
switch ($phonestart) {
case '2':
$phone = '32' . $phone;
$phonestart = strtok($phone, "-");
break;
case '3':
$phone = '34' . $phone;
$phonestart = strtok($phone, "-");
break;
case '6':
$phone = '93' . $phone;
$phonestart = strtok($phone, "-");
break;
default:
break;
}
if ($phonestart != '615') {
$phone = '615-' . $phone;
}
echo $phone;
}
// End phone number expansion

Forget PowerPoint.  And Keynote too.

Friday I’ll be doing a presentation using my favorite simple, but elegant, presentation application. It’s Eric Meyer’s Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System (AKA S5). I happened across it a few years ago and have used it ever since.

What I love about S5 is that it’s mostly one HTML file which tidily holds all of your links, graphics, etc. If you’re going to be showing webby things, why not use a webby tool? Best of all its look-and-feel is powered by CSS, so customizing it is a breeze for those of us who design web pages day in and day out.

For those who don’t and work for Vanderbilt Medical Center, here’s a zip file to download and a quick demo. To go through the demo, just hit the space bar or arrow keys a few times.

It’s remarkably easy to get Drupal working on Vanderbilt ITS servers — easier than WordPress even. Here’s all I had to do:

1. Send in a form request to ITS to set up a new database. This is likely to take a day or two. Once it’s set up, hang onto the connections strings and….
2. Download Drupal (version 5.6 in this case).
3. Unzip and move the contents to the correct directory on your computer.
4. Read the install.txt.
5. SFTP all of the files to the server. (I use Dreamweaver for this).
6. Change the permissions (temporarily!) to the file /sites/default/settings.php, so the server can write to it. I do this using CyberDuck.
7. Manually add a “files” directory and set permissions on it so that it can be written to.
8. Point your browser to the base url of your soon-to-be Drupal website. At this point you should see the setup screen. As well as filling out the required fields, click on “Advanced’ near the bottom of the page, and then replace “localhost” with the host ITS supplies.
9. Voila! Drupal should appear. There are just a few minor housecleaning items left.
10. Change the permissions back on the settings file you altered in step 6.
11. Go to the status report (in admin/logs/status) and see if there are any problems. You’ll see immediately if there are. Probably “Cron maintenance tasks” is highlighted. Just run it manually for now.
12. Chances are you’ll want cron to work automatically in the future. ITS has to do this for you. (They don’t allow SSH.) Email ITS Partner (its-partner@vanderbilt.edu) and tell them you need a cron job that looks something like “0 * * * * wget -O - -q -t 1 http://exampledrumpalsite.vanderbilt.edu/cron.php” — replacing “exampledrumpalsite.vanderbilt.edu” with your own drupal URL. This example would run your cron every hour on the hour. If you don’t need it that often, tell ITS.

That’s it. Now go forth and build a fabulous Drupal site for VU.

Now that Apple is letting you play with your iPhone screen real estate, guess what web developers? When someone saves your home page to their iPhone, you can give them a nice little custom icon. It’s not unlike the favicons that show in browsers, except it’s several times bigger, and thus several times easier to design.

There are simple instructions on how to do this for your own website on Dan Dickinson’s blog. The one catch is your site has to be in the root folder. If it’s in a subdirectory (e.g. vanderbilt.edu/mydepartment/), it doesn’t work. If you do have access to the root folder, it boils down to creating a 57 x 57 pixel PNG image, naming it “apple-touch-icon.png” and saving it in said root. That’s it.

For Vanderbilt Med Center web developers, here’s an image I created that you can download and adapt for your VMC site. If you use the PSD file, it’s incredibly simple to change the background color so it matches your site.

• A Photoshop (PSD) file
• A PNG file

[Thanks to colleague Chris for letting me know that this won’t work for non-root folders.]

When you use secured MySQL for your database, like Vanderbilt ITS servers, installing WordPress causes one peculiar problem that can be a pain to debug. Or at least it was for me. I couldn’t find any documentation anywhere. Fortunately, one of the ITS server admins had alerted me that the standard php mysql_connect function needs fine-tuning to connect to their server, and I guessed that was the issue with WordPress. Specifically you need to add the MYSQL_CLIENT_SSL constant at the end.

In WordPress, the file you have to update is wp-db.php in the wp-includes includes folder. As of today it’s found on line 69. Find the line that reads:

$this->dbh = @mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpassword);

Replace it with:

$this->dbh = @mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpassword, true, MYSQL_CLIENT_SSL);

That’s all there is to it.

But as long as I’m blogging about this, I thought I’d give those of you having to upgrade WordPress my list of things to do. (I wrote it down so I don’t have to rethink it with every upgrade.)

Upgrading WordPress With a Secured MySQL Server

1. Download and unzip the latest upgrade.
2. Rename your current blog folder (local side) something like blog.old. Put the newly downloaded and unpacked folder in its place (being sure to rename it as needed).
3. Review the readme file. Assuming upgrade instructions are the same as always, in the new folder….
4. Copy your old wp-config.php
5. Copy your old wp-content/plugins
6. Copy your old wp-content/themes/
7. Edit wp-includes/wp-db.php (see above)
8. Continue following the readme instructions, which usually means uploading the new files and pointing your browser to /wp-admin/upgrade.php

One last step: thank Vanderbilt ITS for their help and support with this kind of work. They rock.

I have a wonderful job. Every day something amazing crosses my desk (or monitor, to be more precise), and typically it’s completely unexpected.

Today’s miracle was an inspirational calendar to be posted on our website. Fashioned in Faith covers 18 months and features the stories of African American breast cancer survivors. Its beauty isn’t just the attractive layout and colors; it’s the spirit behind it.

You read, for example, about Sister Mattie Pratt, who “refused in no uncertain terms to let breast cancer take abundant life from her – or from us. As she would often remind, ‘I am just moving right along.’ That was the lesson she wanted us to remember – to keep moving right along – despite breast cancer, through breast cancer, and beyond breast cancer. Move right along to victory over breast cancer.”

To me it doesn’t matter than I’m not a breast cancer survivor. We’re all human, and the calendar speaks eloquently to the essence of the human condition. It speaks to triumphing over death. What’s more I see great love and dedication behind this work, and am deeply touched to be a part of it, however small my role might be. My heartfelt thanks go to Sisters Network, the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center Office of Minority Affairs and everyone involved in its creation.

Every holiday season, Vanderbilt’s Health Plus urges employees to Hold the Stuffing. Staff who participate are weighed in the week before Thanksgiving and weighed out the week after New Years, with a goal of gaining no more than two pounds.

I’d never participated before, but this year, given pants that were ever tighter, I got with the program. Today was my day of reckoning. And I made it. Woo hoo! Now I just have to not eat all of the lovely chocolate that’s still hanging around my house. And so my mantra must be…. A healthy web diva is a happy web diva. Thank you, Health Plus, for helping this unrepentant chocoholic.