We listen to your feedback, and requests for making Conductor better. One of those requests is to improve the Asset integration.
You can now sort the columns in the Assets listing page.
Asset Sort Column
You can now sort the columns in the Assets listing page. This is small step toward improving the Asset integration, but each journey begins with a single step. Stay tuned for more updates.
Conductor Events Module
Last week, we were notified by biology.nd.edu that Google Calendar was raising problems with subscriptions Conductor's events found at biology.nd.edu/events.ics. It appeared that there were a couple of issues:
- The event location said "Local community hall" and the title was blank
- The event times was incorrect
- Only a few of the events were being included.
Needless to say, quite a few issues. Further complicated by the fact that if we downloaded the events into iCal on my computer, or subscribed to them, things appeared to work, except the location was wrong. As it turns out, there were a few problems.
- Event locations were added after the calendar feed was added; so "Local community hall" was hard coded in the calendar feed. This was a quick fix.
- As per the iCal spec, the times were being incorrectly generated. Sort of. There are three possible formats that could be used, and unfortunately we were using the "date with local time." What that meant is that the feed would in essence say "October 10, 2010 at 10am." Which is fine if everyone is in the same time zone. Because 10 a.m. in South Bend is certainly not the same time as 10am in Essen. So to fix this, we set the time to UTC (Greenwich Mean Time updated with leap seconds).
- This left the mystery of an incomplete event list. A long story short, after some Google searches and reading of the iCalendar spec (not for the faint at heart), the problem was in sending HTML as part of the description of an event.
Football Season and Redirects
Have you seen the "Fighting For" ads for Autism and HealthCare? For each home game, a new Fighting For ad is produced and shown on NBC. Conductor hosts fightingfor.nd.edu and the homepage redirects to that week's video. The idea being that it is easier to remember fightingfor.nd.edu instead of fightingfor.nd.edu/healthcare/. Prior to Fighting For, we didn't allow a homepage to redirect to a subpage; other redirects were allowed, but not the homepage. So to work around this, we would need to update and reload the server that hosted Conductor. The reload was pretty fast, but it did mean just a bit of downtime. With this week's change that pieces can be maintained in the Conductor admin, so we can easily flip the switch to next week's video.