So, I have been working at the Tech Bar over the Summer again, and it has been about a month. Once again, I have been quite busy. My first week was spent essentially cramming in the graphics work before the budget deadline of June 1. I produced stickers, a roll-up sign, and a flag for the Tech Bar Studio. I consider this kind of work my strength and I am glad that I am given the opportunity do it. Being able to develop a brand and design language for the Tech Bar, one of whimsy and simplicity is something that I love.
After I had to move quickly through the graphics project, I transitioned into a long-form project which will take much more time, the Syllabus Scraper 2.0. Nick and I started this project a year ago, a program that will scrape Canvas, our LMS for syllabus files from each course and organize them into a Google Drive for academic administrators. This worked with limited capability last year, being able to create a simple csv and create the Google Drive. This year, we wanted to expand on it. Nick and I compiled a somewhat lengthy list of functionalities to add, and I got to work.
The first thing that I got to work on was a simple thing, apparently the Art discipline was not being placed into its own folder in the drive, instead it was placed into a folder named () (catchy, right). This was because we were hard-coding for the name for the folders to be built with specifically 4 letters from the course code. Since every discipline shortcode was 4 letters, this was fine. Except ART. So what I did was account specifically for ART by making it its own separate case, handled individually. Another thing that I implemented, was having the CSVs written to a specific location instead of just writing it to wherever the script is held, it is now written to tmp or opt, depending on the user’s root privileges. The courses CSV also now displays whether a syllabus had been grabbed, and the audit CSV now displays the download link for each courses’ syllabus. I then also added another CSV onto the pile, the Delta CSV, a CSV which lists all of the courses which have yet to have a syllabus. Currently, as of June 16, Nick and I are trying to fix a particularly nagging issue which has cropped up, in which the files, you know, the syllabi themselves are not being grabbed properly. Instead of having the proper file extension (.pdf, .docx) they have our placeholder that signifies that something went wrong. They all have this. Currently, it seems that the detection of the most recent syllabus is a little bugged and is causing everything down the chain to be empty. yay.
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