August 2008 Archives

Hello all. It’s now day five of my employment as a senior information specialist in the Web Communications department. That means I haven’t been here long enough to really know what I’ve gotten myself into. I suspect I’ll be busy since I just overheard my boss asking if an office with air conditioning could still be considered a sweatshop, but I’m trying to ignore such comments.

I’ll be writing for Mizzou Wire and providing editorial support for the various Web sites that our department works on. The writing is self-explanatory, but the editorial support is something I’m still figuring out myself since I come from a magazine editorial background.

Most recently, I was in New York as the copy editor at Science Illustrated, which is Popular Science’s sister magazine. That’s where I learned how to deal with mind-numbing research studies (and the people who write them) without giving in to the overwhelming desire to zone out and daydream about less scholarly topics like the latest episode of Weeds. Apparently I did that so well that I was offered an opportunity to conduct research (aka extremely un-glamorous Web surfing from the comfort of my cubicle) for Food Detectives, a new show on the Food Network that explores food in the context of science. Ted Allen is the host, and several Popular Science editors appear as talking heads. Good times.

All that recent science-related editorial work has led me to my role at Mizzou Wire’s go-to person for stories originating from the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, the College of Engineering, and anything related to the medical professions. I’m used to talking to people who are smarter than I am and don’t shy away from asking them to explain things that they take for granted, so it’s a good fit. Right now I’m working on updating all of the faculty profiles for the new Sinclair School of Nursing Web site. After that, who knows…

Over the past few days, I’ve come across a couple of interesting JavaScript topics that others might find useful. For those of you not interested in all the gory details, I will give you the short list:

1. In JavaScript function calls, the “this” variable points to whatever class/function called the current function. Even if your function belongs to a class, the “this” variable will point to outside of the class if that function is called directly from somewhere else.

2. To my knowledge, there is no way to directly access members of a parent class in JavaScript. You have to pass a reference to the parent class to whatever child classes it creates.

3. In JavaScript you can access any member of an object with array notation (document.formname[“elementName”] for example). This is very useful for referencing parts of objects when you don’t necessarily know what they will be called.

Okay, with that out of the way, those of you interested in all the details can feel free to read on.

Usability is something that is becoming increasingly more important in the construction of our Web sites. However, not many people who design and build Web sites truly understand what usability is.

There are two important components in building a good Web site that should never be overlooked: usability and usefulness.

I’d like to share a site that is a great resource for learning about usability and what you can do to create a more user focused site. The company is called User Interface Engineering. They also run some great conferences if you’re in the market for a good experience in the future.

The other component I mentioned, usefulness, comes down to whether or not you’ve been strategic in the development of your content. If you review your own site or benchmark with others you can easily find tons of content that is taking up valuable time and real estate on a Web site, but, it isn’t really useful to many people. Information is what the Web is all about. I challenge you to take a few moments to review your site and see if there’s something posted there that is taking up time and space that you can get rid of. It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to trim the useless material from your site and begin to regain focus on the things that are really important.

Go ahead. Give it a shot. Let me know how it feels.