Today was another mixed day. We deployed out the trial library mobile application ahead of the system management committee (SysManCom) meeting. It is available through the USQ Library homepage and is still in trial (we found some more bugs so we’ll get that sorted). SysManCom progressed with a reasonable reception of the mobile application which is nice. Some tasks to follow up on from the meeting which is always fun – some writing to be done about eBooks in the library for users. This should basically amount to because publishers don’t give us the tools students can’t put the “ebooks” we subscribe to on “ebook” readers. Yay for DRM.

After the demo one of the most painful parts was the fact that we rely upon the CMS for a significant amount of content. The main problem with the CMS is that it is horribly unfriendly for mobile devices. At one stage the home page had a Flash banner which didn’t degrade properly which left a frustrating image that said “click here” but wasn’t actually linked to anything. So I spent the middle of the day working out how to strip out the USQ home page template so that we can embed it else where. I managed to get it sorted mostly though as I’m abusing an XML parser it’ll barf on poorly formatted pages or with HTML entities not in XML. Most of the CMS pages are fine but some legacy ones aren’t so lucky. I’ve put in some minor checks to clean things up but hopefully it isn’t too much of a problem.

The afternoon rounded out with a meeting before leaving early so that I could return for my evening of debates. Life in the fast lane.