So over the last few months I've been working intermittently on a project to bring together all the various UF news sources into a single site. They had almost grown out of control, making one person navigate to http://www.napa.ufl.edu/ufnews/, http://calendar.ufl.edu/, http://www.napa.ufl.edu/digest/, and http://www.pr.ufl.edu/nwsevnts.htm if they wanted a overall sense of UF news.
On our side, we decided it would have to be standards compliant, accessible, css, etc etc. The usual for such a forward thinking group of nerds :) Anyway, we also needed it to be easy to manage on the backend for the people posting stories, photos and events. Free is always better, and open source gives the Webadmin team a fuzzy feeling. While I use (and love) MovableType, I am pretty happy that we decided to go with Wordpress. It's free, works beautifully, and gives PhotoMatt an ego boost :)
We officially launched our public beta yesterday when we linked UF News from www.ufl.edu. So now that its out there to be judged, used, loved, hated and all that I thought Id try to point out some of the cool(er) things.
Cool Geeky Stuff:
- Pretty much every page I can find validates (besides cursor:hand which I left in for IE5.5s benefit)
- We implemented Doug Bowman's Double Rollover on the footer image
- The subscribe box on the front page is sweetened with non fat lo cal ajaxy goodness. Go head and try unsubscribing
- UF PODCASTING. With inline flash players generated dynamically.
- On the explanatory page for Podcasting, You can listen to our fight song!
- Relative font sizes (thanks to Kent Brewster @ SXSW for hassling me about pixels :)
Just for fun I'll also throw an early, early rendition at cha so you can laugh.
I'd love to hear your comments/thoughts and (constructive) criticism. I am pretty much responsible for every piece of CSS in there.
Also thanks to Daniel (bonus points for writing a bazillion custom Wordpress plugins to accomodate this project), Mark, and Al for being a great team to work with.
And people were worried I quit blogging. pfffft.
06:55 PM on 07.22.05
It looks great. I can imagine how frustrating it was to have to trawl through four sites trying to scrape up all the news, so compiling it all is a great idea. Not only that, but you've pulled it off with style. Good stuff.