about this site...
Site design and layout
The site, as you see it today, is in its third major redesign. This latest revision was enabled by our move in 2004 to a new web host, who now supports Microsoft ASP.NET. ASP.NET technology, together with a Movable Type blog, allows much richer functionality, and a more dynamic experience for you, the site visitor. In addition, these technologies allow updates to the site with no XHTML or other coding skills, which hopefully will allow more authors to update the site more frequently. Technical issues will still be handled by the webmaster of this site, Mr Paul Immediato and Jim Custer. Mail to the webmaster @ this site ( webmaster@vikingsathletics.com) is delivered to Mr Immediato and Mr Custer.
Under the hood - coding and technology
The latest redesign of this site makes extensive use of ASP.NET and a Movable Type blog, as mentioned above. .NET is used to render the navigation menu and other common page elements throughout the site. This menu is maintained as an XML data file, and rendered via XSL transformation. This allows better control and more consistent delivery of the menu content (ie single source updates to the menu content).
.NET technology is also used extensively in the Vikings Event Calendar, and the online registration process has been extensively streamlined by making use of centralized configuration and server-side technology enabled by ASP.NET. The calendar has been greatly influenced by sample applications presented by ASP.NET resources Sitepoint, and 4 Guys from Rolla.
The Vikings AA web site has been built using primarily hand-coding using valid CSS and XHTML Strict, version 1.0. For most users, this will be invisible, as these languages are fairly well-rendered in the latest versions of Firefox and the Netscape and Microsoft browsers. The pages are designed to render well both on screen and in print through careful design of the CSS stylesheet used. In addition, the technology is designed to display well on mobile phones, PDA's or other future web technologies, although this has been neither optimized or tested. If you're curious, you may download this style sheet for review. Simply right-click on the link and save the .CSS file to your desktop.
One interesting note in the CSS implementation for this page occurs in the print-styling. When you click print on any page at vikingsathletics.com, the printed page is rendered using a different style sheet, which strips out much of the online navigational content, which is not necessary and makes no sense on the printed page. You may view this printed-media style sheet by saving the target of the link in this sentence.
The XHTML and CSS icons displayed at the bottom of each page are verification that these pages pass automated validation tests provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is the organization that 'invented the web' (sorry Al Gore). While some pages may occasionally fail validation, the goal is to provide a fully compliant site. In addition, we hope to submit this site for testing for Bobby AAA Cast Approval for accesibilty by the disabled.
vCalendar - What's this?
vCalendar and vCard (or iCalendar and iCard, alternately) are developing standards for the electronic exchange of Calendar / Schedule and Personal data. The standards are maintained by the IMC, the Internet Mail Consortium. These standards are young and still very much in development, but they promise some exciting usage. Support for these standards is just beginning to grow, but these files can typically provide a way to download and import contact and schedule information into Microsoft Outlook and some PDA's. The link to download the schedules on each the schedule portion of each sports' home page links to a dynamically generated vCal file.
These instructions are inteneded for users of Microsoft Outlook (version 2000 or better). Users of other calendaring and scheduling software should consult their documentation, help, or check Google. To use these files, click on the link. Your browser should prompt you to Open or Save the file. Select a location to save the file where you will be able to locate it later. In Outlook, select File, Import and Export... In the Import and Export Wizard, select Import an iCalendar or vCalendar file (.vcs) and click Next. In the Browse window, change the Files or type: dropdown to vCalendar Format (*.vcs), navigate to where you saved the downloaded schedule file, select the file and click OK. You can now look at your calendar, and see the events you have downloaded. Note: For PocketPC users, a bug exists whereby the dates are imported properly, but the date and time for imported events are improperly changed when synched with your PocketPC. If this is a bug in our implementation, this will be fixed when possible.
RSS - What's this?
RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs....
The technology behind RSS allows internet users to subscribe to websites that have provided RSS feeds; these are typically sites that change or add content regularly... ...Unlike subscriptions to pulp-based newspapers and magazines, RSS subscriptions are free.
The RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, RSS allows a website's frequent readers to track updates on the site using a news aggregator.
A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled webpages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major web sites, as well as many smaller ones.
Client-side readers and aggregators are typically constructed as standalone programs or extensions to existing programs like web browsers. Such programs are available for various operating systems. See one example list of news aggregators.
Web-based feed readers and news aggregators require no software installation and make the user's "feeds" available on any computer with Web access. Some aggregators syndicate (combine) RSS feeds into new feeds, e.g. take all football related items from several sports feeds and provide a new football feed. There are also search engines for content published via RSS feeds like Feedster, Blogdigger or Plazoo.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)
Next steps
The next step in the development of this site is the restoration of the photo album previously available here. The photo album
was a fun portion of the site where our athletes could see themselves on the web (subject to COPPA, FSGC, and privacy concerns),
and where parents, family, and fans can see some of the action. This photo album was previously implemented by a
brilliant
piece of Javascript and ASP
(Classic) written by yours truly. We are currently reviewing to determine the best way to present this content using ASP.NET.
RSS news feeds are a way that a publisher can allow site visitors to 'subscribe' to the content
of a site, receiving summaries of site content, and a link to view the updated content at their convenience.
Finally, many of the links to resources for the technologies used in the development of this site have now been moved to our links page for your further exploration.
