About
This page contains more information about the UIUC Graphical
Class Schedule Generator
About
The UIUC Graphical Class Schedule Generator is a simple utility for converting
the text class schedule e-mailed out by the U of I Direct system into a pretty
web page which can be saved for posting to personal webspace or printed out.
-
Features
- Graphical layout
- The color-coded graphical layout makes it easy to view class times for the
entire week at a glance.
- Links to releveant web page
- The generated schedule contains links to both the timetable descriptions
of the classes listed and a map displaying the location of each building the
classes meet in. Also includes links to the UIUC phonebook entry of the schedule
owner and the UIUC homepage.
- Schedule statistics
- The UIUC Graphical Class Schedule Generator reports a number of simple statistics
based on the input schedule including: credit hours, class hours and efficiency
(credit hours per class hour)
Privacy
No information entered into the forms of the UIUC Graphical Class Schedule Generator
is copied to or recorded by any computer other than the temporary memory and
disk cache of the user agent (e.g. web browser) used to access the page.
Compatability
The UIUC Graphical Class Schedule Generator was developed on Microsoft
Internet Explorer Developer Preview Release 2, but has shown moderate success
on Mozilla (M14 or later). It's possible
the UIUC Graphical Class Schedule Generator may work on other browsers, but this has
not been tested.
Support
No support for the use of the UIUC Graphical Class Schedule Generator is provided
outside the content of these web pages.
Known Issues
- total class hours are miscalculated for any schedule with classes that meet
more than once per week (as they do most of the time)
- way too many significant digits in statistics
- output displays incorrectly in many browsers
- some schedules generate garbled output
- generated schedule may print funny
Version History
0.8 - 01 May 2000
- initial release
- bugs are legion, but it succesfully handles all of the test data (my past
schedules)
0.1
- text only proof of concept version, never release publically
Future Plans
- Better name
- In additon to being generally lame sounding, "UIUC Graphical Class Schedule Generator" is just too damn long. Hopefully, I'll come up with (or someone
will kindly suggest)
some kind of clever play-on-words recursive acronym or something.
- Standard complicance
- Ideally, I could get the generated page to be valid HTML
or XML and comply to the CSS
and DOM specifications. If I can find
any kind of (preferabbly XML based) calendaring standard, I'd like to implement
that so people can add their classes directly to their personal calendars.
- Reformat source code
- I'd like to reformat/rewrite the source using good coding practices so that
it's easier for myself and others (if they're so inclined) to edit.
- Better exception handling
- I've got a strong feeling the relatively vanilla schedules I've tested the
generator with aren't representative of all the various oddball schedules
out there. My roomate suggested what sounded like a pretty good technique
for tolerating more variance in the positioning of input based by looking
for the location of "CLASS SCHEDULE" in the input. This would eliminate
the need for the exact character precision needed when pasting the text in
presently.
- Intelligent day start and end times
- Currently the generator displays a schedule which starts at 7:00 AM and
ends at 6:00 PM. I'd like to change the code so the output schedule starts
with the hour of the earliest class and ends with the hour of the latest class.
- Display current time and class
- I think it might be a useful feature to output what class the schedule owner
is currently in based on the local time. This might be a bit of a trick to
implement though.
Bug Reports
Praise, criticism, bug reports, feature requests and unsolicited cash donations
may all be directed toward nick@wiseup.org
. No guarantee of reply is made, but I will read all correspondence.