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High Ed Hangout episodes
- HEH 15: HighEdWeb Memphis
We delve a bit deeper into Daniel’s trip to the HighEdWeb conference in Memphis. He shares the take-aways, and we chat about how all of us can implement some of the things talked about (centralized web support across campus – pay vs. no-pay).
- Daniel sums up HighEdWeb in Memphis
- http://wso2.com/
- WordPress API being developed (very close to ready)
- Keeping yourself off an attacker’s radar
- Recon tools show everything it can figure out about your site so you can see what other people see and lock things down.
- Link.highedweb.org (highedweb magazine) – the entire conference was blogged.
- A large shift in using WP in higher ed
- WP Campus group of higher ed in WordPress
- No more HighEdWeb Regional Conferences, moving to smaller meetups around the country.
- Free vs. Chargeback model
- Consultants recommendations are used because they cost $.
- GVSU, UALR do not have chargeback models for IT/Web service.
Urban Dictionary Word of the Day: note to self
1 hr 3 min - HEH 14: The Conference on Conferences Conference (RIP SXSW)
This episode is all about conferences. How do we get funding? How often do we get to go? How do we select a conference? We also reminisce (again) about how great SXSW used to be.
- Daniel at HighEdWeb in Memphis
- Fienen’s Totally Topical, Terrific Tutorial to Tag Manager
- Double-ken
- What makes a good conference?
- SXSW with a lot of variety and a great social aspect to meet others and network
- UXDev Summit
- How are conferences funded in our areas?
- Iowa Libraries: a set budget that can be spent until it’s gone per person/year
- UALR: provides training to support services with one conference per year. The budget isn’t ever clear.
- Iowa Admissions: we have Admissions-specific conferences and maybe (based on funding) can go to a larger conference outside of higher ed.
- GVSU: gets one conference per year
- Many times the non-higher-ed conferences provide better information because they are working on a larger world scale, when we in higher-ed sometimes get lost in our higher-ed protected bubble.
- What is the best (non) SXSW conference you’ve been to?
- Smashing Conference – single-track conference with really great speakers
- HighEdWeb recommends to not stick with a single track aligned with your job
- SXSW has a voting system for picking their speakers. It just got too big for it’s pants! 2014, SXSW saw roughly 400,000 people attend official festival events!!!
- HighEdWeb Upcoming Tracks (looking forward to)
- Rest
- Slack Workshop
- Digital Signage
- Web Components
- Stop treating your website like it’s a project
Urban Dictionary Word of the Day: “Wake Me Up Inside” syndrome
59 min - HEH 13: How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?
How do we social? What channels do we all use personally and what do our universities use? How do we keep up on the current social trends and use social in a way that is befitting to an institution of higher education?
- Social
- Snapchat
- Is your school on it? How do they use it?
- My Little Sister Taught Me How To “Snapchat Like The Teens”
- The conversation is important and it’s not canned pretty pictures.
- You have to be able to speak the language of the particular network you are using.
- Twitter
- GVSU uses hashtags
- Iowa Admissions uses hashtags for visitors and awards prizes
- Iowa Libraries uses scavenger hunts
- Instagram
- Iowa Libraries uses “book facing” to put over your own face.
- What do we all use?
- Reddit
- What else?
- Flipbook, RSS Readers – how to ingest media
- Slack
- For work and for social
- UALR has integrations with calendars and Jira
- GVSU uses an integrated bug tracking and issue tracking system
- Facebook
- GVSU is very PR-related in page
- UALR tragedy or closings or big news gets the most exposure
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ele_dj3ud38
- Iowa Admissions uses groups to create a community for incoming students and doesn’t push stuff regularly to that group, it’s a place for them.
- Tumblr
- Iowa Libraries uses it for quick blogging with a low bar to entry. Special collections posts cool things. (lots of animated gifs!)
Urban Dictionary Word of the Day: Trumper Tantrum
50 min - HEH 12: You’ve Got (Custom HTML) Mail!
HTML emails are hard to make! We chat about the process we use to build and send email as well as how we track our users and advertise our schools. We also look into using students and classes for help.
- React.js vs AngluarJS
- Using student/classroom work
- GVSU technical writing class
- UALR prototyping
- Working on mentoring program w/paid students to get them using actual university systems
- Student Workers
- GVSU hires multiple students and each student gets a mentor initially.
- These students many times move into full-time rolls
- What do you do with project sites that get created across campus?
- They might live on a college server if class-based.
- These project could be academic resources where the original author has left and nobody is around to keep it up anymore
- GVSU has a staff server and a faculty server for these random types of projects
- HTML emails
- Compatibility
- Services
- Tracking
- Tools to test
- https://www.emailonacid.com/
- https://litmus.com/
- Marketing and Digital Advertising (with our sites)
- https://css-tricks.com/inky-and-slinky/
Urban Dictionary Word of the Day: Pencil me into your Blackberry
1 hr 1 min - HEH 11: Talkin’ About Our Tools
We list the tools we use on a regular basis for various development tasks and general use, including coding, password management, utility/productivity, package management, and image optimization.
Coding/Development
- Firebug (Firefox Plugin)
- Chrome Developer Tools
- Firefox Developer Edition
- GIT and SourceTree
- Tower ($$)
Password Management
- 1Password
- Wiki for internal passwords
- LastPass
- mSecure
- Password Safe
Utility/Productivity
- To Do/Task Management
- 2do
- Google Tasks
- Google Keep
- “Inbox Zero”
- OmniFocus
- Wireframing
- OmniGraffle
- Balsamiq Mockups
- LucidChart
- Quick and Dirty Text Editors
- Fraise
- Cmd-Shift-V (strips formatting to paste)
- I/A Writer
- REAL Post-it notes
- Communication
- Slack (internal team communications)
- Google Talk/Chat or Lync/Skype for Business for campus communication
Package Management
- Homebrew
- MacPorts
Image Optimization/Design
- ImageOptim
- TinyPNG
- pngyu
Urban Dictionary Word of the Day: Shamecation
1 hr 6 min - HEH 10: Controlled Release
We talk about languages, which are the most popular, and which ones we like the best (and why). Iowa launches a new admissions website. How we use content types, and ways we could use them better.
- Why does Dan love (hate?) Cold Fusion?
- Why not just PHP?
- http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ (CF is not in the top 50)
- If we had to rewrite tomorrow, we’d go with something common since it’s easier to find developers – probably PHP.
- Scott launched a new admissions site admissions.uiowa.edu
- Generally positive response
- Just a design refresh (same structure, same links)
- We launched alongside alongside a transition to a centralized cloud hosting for Drupal (Acquia) on our campus which has had it’s own issues. That allowed admisisons to share the site with staff and partners early and get input for a week prior to launch.
- Content types and how we use them and tools used in our CMS
- UALR uses WordPress and has only 2 content types (posts/pages).
- Iowa Admissions has a lot of content types in Drupal (which is built around custom content types)
- Grand Valley only has pages as a content type in their custom CMS with a few extra modules for dates features etc.
- What do you do with pages that haven’t been visited in a year or two years?
- GVSU will approach high traffic pages, but not removed unused content.
- UI Library has an “out to pasture” are but keeps everything because they are a… library (servers: dim, dark, deep)
- Internet Archive is a good place for keeping that older content
- GVSU is rolling out a new version of their CMS and along with that providing an opportunity to sunset older pages.
- Daniel almost got shot! (might have been a door slam)
- Possible new content types for UALR that bubble to the top for similar pages.
- Policies
- Areas of study
- Staff/Faculty Bios
- What’s better, write your own CMS or use enterprise or off the shelf?
- You’re going to have growing pains and add customizations no matter what.
- Some off the shelf systems have communities
- Build your own allows you total freedom to do what you need
- Urban Dictionary Word of the Day: ybd, your baby daddy
1 hr 12 min - HEH 9: The Protein Situation
GVSU launches their new site and get a lot of comments (some good, some not). We talk about what went into the new site, and the process taken to launch. We also discuss how we use our CMS to assign rolls and edit across different audiences.
GVSU Homepage Launch (www.gvsu.edu)
- How did you launch?
- (this is the first time the homepage has been in git)
- What sort of feedback did you receive and how did you fix it?
- Link color
- Font weight didn’t display correctly on Windows
(self-hosting google fonts tool)- Too “zoomy” & Too “big”
- Favorite “fun” quotes:
- FEELS LIKE A CHEAP HOME PAGE WITH LITTLE EFFORT. WAY TO MINIMALISTIC
- I Really do not like it. It’s too plain. Not enough blue. :/
- More stuff needs to be added
- The feedback has generally been good when it comes to the main goals for the new site.
CMS Users/Editors: Are more editors/voices better?
- One person who knows their stuff writes really well and does a nice job.
- Multi-editor group who collectively determine the voice works well too.
- Don’t smack down that initial creativity even when a user is a kid in a playground.
- People are emotionally attached to their words/content.
- All the way open or all the way locked down doesn’t provide a good user experience for your audience.
1 hr 3 min - HEH 8: FIEEEEEEENNNNNEN!!!
We add our comments to an article criticizing university websites, and then add even more comments to a response from Michael Fienen to the original article.
Original Article:
University websites: The so-so, the bad, and the egregiousMichael Fienen Response:
Dear Higher Ed AdministratorsUrban Dictionary: ParaText
1 hr 3 min - HEH 7: All the Link Colors of the Rainbow
School colors and how they’re used on the website. What does that mean for link colors and accessibility? What sort of branding policy is in place? How does it work. The guys take different stances on the best way to brand a university website.
- What are your school’s colors, and what issues do you run across using those colors on the web?
- Accessibility
- Color contrast
- Is one of your colors blue, which looks like a link? What colors do you use for links?
- Use link description for link text (WCAG) – don’t use “Click Here”
- Rules for using them?
- Colour Contrast Analyser
- University-wide website branding
- Do you lock into a hard university branded template, or do you allow for the wild west, or somewhere in the middle?
- Style Guides? (Web? Print?)
- GVSU Identity Guidelines
- UALR Brand Guidelines
- UIOWA Web Guideline
- Pattern libraries?
- Urban Dictionary: Group Chat Phobia (Latin: Coetus Timore Disputatio)
58 min - HEH 6: Apple’s Hush Money Went Towards my Squatty Potty
How we got into tech (and our embarrassing first websites). Some Hangout members purchased the Squatty Potty and they want to talk about it. Plus the first ever HEH topic lightning round.
- Intros: How we got into web/tech/job (our history with tech)
- Our First Sites:
- Dave: https://web.archive.org/web/20000229152442/http://www.greedyfly.com/
- Dan(iel): https://web.archive.org/web/20010802034103/http://www.geocities.com/pokemon_games/index3.html
- Scott (high school site): https://web.archive.org/web/19961223105333/http://www.netins.net/showcase/ahschool/
- Squatty Potty (a commercial break?)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q
- Lighting round topics (timed, X minutes each. Dave will set audible timer). Go in same order as Intro’s.
- IDE’s (integrated development environment)
- Daniel: Coda, vim, Notepad++
- Ken: SublimeText, Atom
- Dave: Coda
- Scott: Coda, Atom
- Dan(iel): Coda
- Honorable Mention: Brackets
- Versioning
- Daniel: Subversion, Git
- Ken: Git, SourceTree
- Dave: Git, BitBucket, SourceTree
- Scott: Git
- Dan(iel): Git, BitBucket
- Learn More: Lynda.com Git Videos & Codecademy
- People Directory Listing (Search)
How do you look up people at your university to contact them?How do you deal with spam scraping that source?
- Daniel: ualr.edu/azindex
- Ken: Library-only – WP custom content type
- Dave: People-finder telecommunications table from IT
- Scott: Iowa *might* use LDAP
- Dan(iel): Central table managed by IT for fac/staff, students come from banner
- Which social media is your University most active on?
Who is in charge of it?
- Daniel: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram; MarComm
- Ken: Tumblr (WTF!), Twitter (LIBRARY WARS!); Library
- Dave: Facebook, SnapChat (Takeovers); Public Relations
- Scott: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook; Admissions
- Dan(iel): Tap into API’s to pull in content
- What new tech do you want to get into?
- Dave: eye trackers for usability
- Scott: 360 virtual tours (need interstitial video/shots between tour stops)
- Daniel: continuous deployment, microservices
1 hr 1 min
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