Salem County Special Services School District

November 22, 2008

Daretown School Home - Daretown SchoolThe mis­sion of the Salem Coun­ty Spe­cial Ser­vices School Dis­trict, a region­al edu­ca­tion­al ser­vice agency, is to pro­vide high qual­i­ty, cost-effective pro­grams and ser­vices to the schools and dis­tricts of Salem Coun­ty and Cum­ber­land Coun­ty, New Jer­sey. This site built with what are for me fair­ly gener­ic tools: Mov­able Type as CMS, with Flickr inter­gra­tion. The design style sheet was built from scratch using CSS.

Vis­it: Scsssd​.org

Pen​n​char​ter​.com Media Pages

May 18, 2008

William Penn Charter School Media PagesOne ele­ment of a gen­er­al social media con­sul­tan­cy project I’ve under­tak­en with Philadel­phi­a’s William Penn Char­ter school is a dynam­ic media page. They had col­lect­ed a large num­ber of pho­tos, movies and pod­cast inter­views, but the media page on their site was sta­t­ic and with­out pic­tures. I worked with them to come up with media poli­cies and then built a media site that auto­mat­i­cal­ly dis­plays the lat­est Flickr sets and Youtube videos, all laid out attrac­tive­ly with CSS. The Flickr part was com­pli­cat­ed by the fact that Flickr does­n’t pro­duce feeds of sets and this required access to it’s API and fair­ly exten­sive Yahoo Pipes manip­u­la­tion. The orig­i­nal pod­casts were just uploaded MP3 files and I worked to col­lect them togeth­er via Odeo (host­ing) and Feed­burn­er (feed pub­lish­ing), which then pro­vides RSS and iTunes sup­port. The actu­al con­tent for the page is col­lect­ed togeth­er on the Mar​tinkel​ley​.com serv­er and embed­ded into the Penn Char­ter media pages via javascript. Oth­er work with Penn Char­ter includes Google Ana­lyt­ics and Dreamweaver support. 

Update: Pen­n­Char­ter redesigned their web­site in August 2009 and the Media Page is unavailable.

Client Testimonial:

“Mar­tin has worked for our school to inte­grate Web 2.0 technologies
into our com­mu­ni­ca­tion mate­ri­als. Mar­tin is highly-personable and his
is an expert in cur­rent tech­no­log­i­cal approach­es. This is a hard match
to find in con­sul­tants.” April 30, 2009

Michael Moul­ton, Tech­nol­o­gy Direc­tor, William Penn Char­ter School.
Hired Mar­tin as a IT Con­sul­tant in 2007, and hired Mar­tin more than once.
Top qual­i­ties: Per­son­able, Expert, High Integrity.

Movable Type and RTL languages

May 7, 2007

I’m work­ing
on an inter­na­tion­al site built in Mov­able Type and includ­ing statements
in mul­ti­ple lan­guages, includ­ing “Right to Left” lan­guages like Arabic
and Hebrew. 

I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised when I cut-and-pasted an Ara­bic text from
MS Word into Mov­able Type and found the let­ters look­ing good both in
the MT entry box and the resul­tant post. I did­n’t real­ize just how pow­er­ful UTF-8 encod­ing
is and how well MT sup­ports it through­out the sys­tem. Still, the output
was­n’t cor­rect, as it was­n’t dis­played in right-to-left fash­ion. I
need­ed to fig­ure out the CSS for this kind of out­put and an easy way to allow the client to set this with­out forc­ing them into coding.

Using the highly-recommended Right­fields Plu­g­in I added a check­box field for posts that should be dis­played in RTL. Here’s a screenshot:

Right­Fields has an IF func­tion that we can use to set a new DIV with our RTL style. Here’s the cod­ing in the MT tem­plate, stuck in just after the “entry-body” div:

<MTExtraFields>
<MTIfExtraField field="RTL">
<div class="rtl-display">
</MTIfExtraField>

Note: you’ll also have to add sim­i­lar code to close the div at the end of the passage.

Final­ly, as best as I can deter­mine, this is the prop­er CSS des­ig­na­tion for RTF dis­play (Microsoft has a good web­page on this). It works in Fire­fox, IE7 and IE6.

.rtl-display p {direction:rtl;text-align:justified;text-align:justify;}

I’d be hap­py to get any feed­back or cor­rec­tions to this. I’m a typ­i­cal ‘Mer­i­can
whose for­eign lan­guage skills don’t go far past a dozen phras­es lifted
from Sesame Street and long-ago French class­es. Ara­bic and Hebrew
type­set­ting are quite unfa­mil­iar terrain.