New Media Initiatives

Robin and I were just working on the Hennepin Avenue Projection yesterday so we got to walk right by the new offices under construction. Here is Robin the Director of New Media Initiatives in her future space.

Please join me in welcoming an updated homepage to the Walker’s site. The homepage incorporates the Walker’s new identity system and shows rotating list including highlights and upcoming events. We’ve also updated the first row of annoucements under the Flash movie to more prominently feature the blogs and give a short list of important links.

Here is a screenshot of the new front of walkerart.org

and for archival comparisons here is the old one:

UPDATE

For further archival reference I posted a list of links to the homepages of years past on our NMI page.

CultureGrrl gives Art on Call a try and writes a review on her blog. I’m not sure when she actually used the service, but we’ve just recently installed a nifty cellphone signal repeater in the space deepest in the galleries that previously got terrible reception – right next to the Burnet gallery. It’s possible her carrier simply doesn’t benefit from the frequencies we’re repeating (it doesn’t cover them all) but I’m hopeful it was just a matter of timing and the repeater hadn’t kicked on.

As for her other comments, I think some of them will be addressed in the near(ish) future as we start incorporating feedback into the menu prompts. For instance, many people don’t realize you can interrupt the initial prompt by typing in the 4-digit code, effectively skipping right to the artwork you’re looking at. Hopefully that will take some of the hassle out of repeated calls if you can just hit redial, wait for the answer, and then just punch in the code. Much faster.

Anyone else lurking on the blogs have an experience with Art on Call (web or phone) they’d like to share? Leave a comment or link back to this post and we’ll pick it up.

One of the projects Brent and I are working on lately is a facelift to the AOC site – as the number of artworks in the system has grown, the page has become more and more difficult to navigate. Keep your eyes peeled for some fun AJAX paging, better layout, and (finally) a search function.

The biggest problem – and one of the most useful pieces, so we had to solve it – was how to get a single search to look for a keyword in the AOC data as well as the associated Walker exhibition data. Up until now I’ve been using very awkward separate connections to each database to integrate their data, and finally today I stumbled on dblink. Now I can keep the two databases separate but allow them to share queries and data. AOC and Walker, sitting in a tree…

Art on Call also has some upcoming enhancements for the phone-based side of things: a few “interactive” features we’ve been planning since the beginning but only now have time for. Should be really cool.

[Now that our main blogger is leaving, we've got to start picking up the slack and posting. I promise eventually to not just post about hardware and software bugs, but today that's what I've got...]

Porter continues to be a rockstar hardware-wise, but I’ve been having some trouble with the proxy/caching webserver running on it. Sure, it’s caching, but every so often it would grab a version of page and decide to keep it for 3 days instead of the directed 1 hour. At first I thought it was a one-time deal from switching some cache settings on the server, but it kept happening… Walker staff would make a change to some content, wait, but it would never show up on the live page. Trouble.

The problem was caused by a line stored in the cached HTTP header: Cache-Control: max-age=259200. (that’s three days worth of seconds) (I’m including details so google can pick this up and hopefully save some poor guy a frustrating morning.) After some serious digging it appears the mod_cache module we’re using was taking whatever Cache-Control header was being sent by the browser and saving it in the cached header! In other words, I had configured the server to cache things for a maximum of 1 hour, but all it took to blow that up was a browser (or spider?) sending a request saying it didn’t want anything older than 3 days. Our caching server held on to that “3-days” part and decided the whole page should be valid for that long. Totally. Wrong.

I debated making changes to the mod_cache source and recompiling, but I finally found an easier answer: “CacheIgnoreHeaders Cache-Control". This tells the caching module to ignore the problem lines, and it seems to be golden. I’ll let it run for a while and see…

[In further bad news, the US got creamed 3-0 by the Czech Republic in their World Cup opener. Not unexpected, but it doesn't bode well for getting past group play...]

I would like to be the first to publicly welcome “Porter” to the Walker’s family of webservers! Porter was, to be honest, long overdue – and to continue the awkward metaphor, it was a difficult birth. Maybe next time a C-Section. (ok, I’m done.)

The problem was obvious to anyone who’d used our website for any significant amount of time in the last year or two: as our technology on the backend increased, as new features and sites were added, the existing server was crawling to a slow and painful death. Frequent reboots (reboots! On Linux! The horror!) were required, and working in the CMS admin system was nearly intolerable. You could literally go get a drink of water while loading certain pages.

The solution was equally obvious: upgrade! But the execution proved quite labor-intensive – lots of tightly integrated bits and pieces that had to be unravelled carefully and put back together to create a semblance of a whole. Really.

My goal was to transition to the new server without any noticeable downtime, and it went as well as I could have hoped. There were some tense moments at the end – there’s really nothing like the feeling of pulling the plug (metaphorically) on an entire institution’s website and crossing your fingers you didn’t miss something when the new one comes up. Then a big sigh of relief when you realize of course you did, but it’s pretty minor, and wow! Look how much faster it runs!

So, welcome, Porter! You make your daddy proud. (ok, now I’m done.)