Demonstrating P2 as a potential emergency notification theme. Just throwing ideas around…
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Jared Smith
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Jared Smith
School of Humanities and Social Sciences retrieved training in the content management system and WordPress MU this morning. We’ll be using WordPress MU to power the news portions of the school and departmental websites; in addition to being a great user-friendly timesaver, WordPress MU gives significant flexibility in allowing schools and departments to have a more free-form conversation with constituents.
Additionally, John and I have been working on the new Information Technology website for most of the day. We’ve received a lot of feedback over the past two years from those of you in the trenches and are putting that feedback into practice in many instances. The end result will be an easier-to-navigate IT site dedicated to getting you in, out, and on your way. We’re also using WordPress MU to power IT news, IT outage information, and tips, tricks, and news from the folks manning the Faculty/Staff Helpdesk.
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Jared Smith
Crunch week for the Web Development Project is in progress. I’ve used this morning primarily for triage of all remaining issues to pound through and fix, aiming to get the new cofc.edu out the door in the first part of next week. We’re nearly there, but there’s still some infrastructure adjustments before go-live.
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Jared Smith
Day 2 of training the School of Business in Cascade. Later today, we turn our attention to infrastructure as we’ll be working out the load balancing for the frontend webservers. My life is glamorous — MLIG?
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Jared Smith
Trying something different with the work blog — after seeing this theme, P2, demonstrated at WordCampRDU this weekend, I felt as if this could be useful as a pseudo-Twitter to better document what I’m up to. Hope I can stick with it.
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Jared Smith
Busy week ahead. Look-and-feel work on the MyCharleston portal continues, Cascade Server migration continues, and a lot more. We’re training the School of Business web maintainers this week in the Cascade Server system. School of Business has been working very hard on redeveloping their site from the ground-up, and it will be the force of a combined effort that will get this thing done.
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Facebook Connect!
Jared Smith
We’re testing out Facebook Connect on College of Charleston Blogs, so you can comment using your Facebook account. Awesome, no? I thought so.
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Forward Progress
Jared Smith
Lots has happened since I last blogged here:
- I went to the Cascade conference and did indeed survive the return trip (those who may have been following me exclusively by way of my work blog would have likely concluded that I met my demise somewhere on I-85 based on my lack of posting). More importantly, I’ve been able to implement some of the strategies I picked up at the conference in our own CMS implementation.
- Web Strategies added a new member to the team — John Turner. He comes to the College from several Web startups and is serving as a Webmaster alongside me. You may have already worked with John on a few things. He’s a bright guy, with lots of WordPress background, and that’s already been instrumental in several improvements to the blog server that are in the works. Please note that with the addition of John to the team, it’s imperative that any Web service requests be directed to webmaster@cofc.edu to ensure that we both see them.
- We moved. (Yes, again, for those keeping score at home. ) We’re on the second floor of Bell now, in the 203 suite. Our previous location on the third floor, while easily accessible, was also not ideal for housing a team of more than two people. We’re now all together again (John spent his first week and a half or so on the fifth floor) and reasonably settled in.
- I went to ConvergeSouth in Greensboro, NC last weekend and learned of a number of cool tools that we could potentially use at the College to further project our image, as well as enable a number of interesting educational opportunities.
We’re plowing ahead with the Web Development Project. In case you missed it, check the Web Development Blog for a video of mStoner’s most recent visit to campus, where the new templates were revealed. (Note that these templates were in a bit of an earlier phase of development; there have been visual tweaks since then.)
There’s definitely more down the pike. Besides the Web Development Project, we’ve been busy with a searchable course catalog, as well as maintaining the site for educational outreach for NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, which just launched aboard India’s first moon mission, Chandrayaan-1.
Things will be ramping up soon — just stay tuned…things are about to get really exciting.
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Off to Atlanta
Jared Smith
I’ll be in Atlanta, GA for the next couple days for the Cascade Server Users’ Conference. Cascade Server is, of course, the content management system which will be powering the new-look College website next year. (Read more about that project at webdev.cofc.edu, our Web Development resources site.)
I’m looking forward to bringing back gobs of information to help make the College’s content management system really rock out in the coming months. I’ll be blogging the conference here, so stay tuned!
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Inaugural (Or, Here Goes Nothing)
Jared Smith
This is a blog about work. No, not one of those blogs about work that spread gossip and thus are warned against from many corners of the Internet. (Sorry
) When done right, a blog about work does wonders for building a culture of transparency and trust in an organization. That’s the goal here. That, and I like to show off cool things we’re doing in IT Web Strategies. People often ask me what my job’s really like. I figure the best way to answer that question for one and all is to start a blog that gradually attacks that question. Life as a webmaster is an ever-changing thing — there’s some new technology, challenge, threat, you name it — EVERY DAY. So, this is where I’m going to chronicle these events, with tips and tricks and some fun anecdotes along the way.
Comments are wide open and will be wide-open throughout. Blogging is a two-way street, and it’s nothing but a broadcast if you’re not interacting.
So, without further ado…here goes nothing.