Entries by Dan Scott

Coffee|Code : Dan Scott

Sunday, April 21. 2013

Making the Evergreen catalogue mobile-friendly via responsive CSS

Back in November the Evergreen community was discussing the desire for a mobile catalogue, and expressed a strong opinion that the right way forward would be to teach the current catalogue to be mobile-friendly by applying principles of responsive design. In fact, I stated:

Almost all of this can be achieved via CSS, possibly with some changes to the underlying HTML (e.g. tables to divs or whatever so that "Place Hold" appears under the bib info instead of way over to the right).

I have this bad habit of talking more than doing. So when I saw the Beanstalk mobile catalogue resurrected again at the Evergreen 2013 lightning talks, it bugged me that I still hadn't put any effort into a proof of concept of what was possible with CSS media queries. Thus, today, on the last day of my holidays, I spent a few hours trying things out on our development server and came up with this rough branch to work towards making the exact same HTML that we serve up for desktops provide an experience similar to that of the Beanstalk generation of catalogues for mobile, just via CSS.

As you can see from the commits, I made one change to the HTML to define a viewport, and added one set of CSS rules wrapped in a media query; in essence:

...
<head>
...
<meta content="initial-scale=1.0,width=device-width" name="viewport">
<style>
@media only screen and (max-width: 600px) {
    #header {
        padding: 0px;
        margin: 0px;
    }
    .facet_sidebar {
        display: none;
    }
    ...
}
</style>
<head>
...

Results and trade-offs

Here are a few example URLs from our test server (which is slow, and might get wiped any day, so test them quickly if you have a mobile device around!):

  • Search results - sacrificed facets, per-item actions, and the language picker
  • Record details - sacrificed per-item actions, flattened the item table vertically

In general, I removed a lot of the frippery from the header, while trying to retain the most valuable pieces. However, some bits are broken: Another Search doesn't actually let you do another search because the search bar is totally hidden. Other bits haven't been touched (Advanced search is still overwhelming, and My Account, while functional, could be much prettier.

What I've done so far is oriented towards our 2.3-ish lightly customized Laurentian skin (we force full details in search results, for example) but the principles should be applicable to an out-of-the-box Evergreen catalogue. In working through some of the challenges, I've determined that I was pretty much on target back in November; with a few HTML tweaks that would improve the layout for desktops as well, we could keep the per-item actions and facets around, but just move them to a different location.

Less talk, more action

So who's with me? What we have to gain is a single set of HTML to support for TPAC, and a single set of CSS, all available from the same URL, rather than trying to maintain overlays and monkeying about with mobile-vs-desktop URLs and the like. Feel free to dig in and start pushing branches with improvements over my rough attempts and let's make this thing happen for Evergreen 2.5.

With thanks to Firefox...

I would be remiss if I did not mention the marvellous Responsive Design View introduced in Firefox 15, along with the Style Editor; together, these tools (built into Firefox) made my developing and testing work so much easier.

If you want to live on the cutting edge of Firefox, you want Aurora - go and get it :-)

Download Aurora

Posted by Dan Scott in Coding, Evergreen at 22:48 | Comments (3)
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Friday, April 12. 2013

Structured data: making metadata matter for machines

Update 2013-04-18: Now with video of the presentation, thanks to the awesome #egcon2013 volunteers!

I've been attending the Evergreen 2013 Conference in beautiful Vancouver. This morning, I was honoured to be able to give a presentation on some of the work I've been doing on implementing linked data via schema.org in Evergreen. I think I did a good job of explaining the potential value of linked data and arguing for improving Evergreen's schema.org publishing ninja skills.

My slides, with a reasonable number of useful speaker notes to provide context, are available in LibreOffice format.[1]

In addition, the amazing organizers of the conference also streamed most[2] of the talk and the recording will be available on the conference web site in a week or two.

Footnotes

  1. I felt pretty dirty not using HTML5 + RDFa Lite to actually mark the whole thing up; there was some question close to the time of the conference as to whether anything but PPT or perhaps PDF would be an acceptable format... a concern that was subsequently removed, but a little too late to be worthwhile changing course.
  2. The room was standing-room only (well, sitting-on-the-floor-room only), and one of the organizers accidentally sat on and unplugged the Ethernet cable, so something like ten minutes were lost. Heh!
Posted by Dan Scott in Coding, Evergreen at 15:11 | Comments (0)
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Friday, February 15. 2013

Introducing SQL to Evergreen administrators, round two

Three years ago I was asked to create and deliver a two-day course introducing SQL to Evergreen users. Things went well and I was able to share the resulting materials with the Evergreen and PostgreSQL community. Perhaps one of my happiest moments at the Evergreen conference last year was when one of the participants in that course, told me that many of his fellow participants were still successfully writing SQL queries and getting work done. Huzzah!

Time goes by and another group, OHIONET, was running into difficulties getting started with PostgreSQL and Evergreen. They asked me if I would be willing to give the same sort of training I had given a few years back. "Sure", I said, thinking it would be a great opportunity to polish the materials and add some updates to cover new features in PostgreSQL and Evergreen. We also opted to skip the travel and do an entirely virtual training session via Google Hangouts, which worked out rather nicely (but that's a different story).

As it turned out, I probably ended up putting about four days worth of effort (crammed into lots of late nights, weekends, and vacation days) into overhauling the instruction materials. But the results were worth it, in my opinion; I'm rather proud of the content, and while I believe it stands up on its own, the guidance that I was able to provide during the live instruction sessions was well-received by the participants.

Thus, I am pleased to be able to offer to the broader community the latest version of the Introduction to SQL for Evergreen Administrators, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (Unported) license.

So, a huge thanks to OHIONET for giving me the impetus to overhaul this material, and for giving me a chance to introduce them to the wonders of SQL with PostgreSQL, and to the inner workings of the Evergreen schema. It was a blast! And thanks for agreeing to let me share these materials with the broader community.

Posted by Dan Scott in Evergreen, PostgreSQL at 21:32 | Comment (1)
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Sunday, January 20. 2013

Introducing version control & git in 1.5 hours to undergraduates

Our university offers a Computer Science degree, but the formal curriculum does not cover version control (or a number of other common tools and practices in software development). Students that have worked for me in part-time jobs or summer positions have said things like:

if it wasn't for that one summer I worked at the library for/with you using the version control software (which was my first real time ever using it) I'd have been really confused in my first job after graduating

That kind of statement reaffirms my belief that a Computer Science degree should include some form of introduction to software development norms--you could perhaps call it software development literacy. While I've heard the "sink or swim" argument when it comes to having a clue about what you are expected to do when you land an actual programming job (as in, "students that don't learn this on their own probably aren't going to learn it from us"), I'm sure that some minimal level of exposure to these norms and specific tools from future peers will help more students swim. As I am particularly interested in development within free software projects, I've been in close contact with the Computer Science Club to try to start providing this outside of the formal curriculum.

So, as part of this mission, a few days ago I gave a presentation to the Club on "version control", with a particular emphasis on using git. The turnout was low, alas; not a sexy subject, perhaps, or just the start of term, or perhaps I need to improve my marketing efforts. In any case, I believe it went well--heads were nodding and I had the complete attention of the participants for 1.5 hours while I built up a conceptual framework for understanding version control as practiced in git.

I'm happy to make my presentation materials available under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license; maybe you can use them and improve on them!

Posted by Dan Scott in Coding at 08:22 | Comments (0)
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About Me

I'm Dan Scott: barista, library geek, and free-as-in-freedom software developer. I hack on projects such as the Evergreen open-source ILS project and PEAR's File_MARC package .

By day I'm the Systems Librarian for Laurentian University. You can reach me by email at dan@coffeecode.net.

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