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University Web Developers

Michael Fienen 27, Male
Pittsburg, KS
United States
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My articles @ .eduGuru

How Serious are XSS Threats for .edu’s?

Well, thanks to the keen eyes of fellow higher ed tweeter @gilzow for spotting the article, plenty of these guys could tell you just how frustrating XSS attacks can be.  There’s simply no avoiding the fact that the more dynamic and complex our higher ed sites get, the more prone we are to these exploits.  [...]

Don’t Forget to Vote for the eduStyle Awards!

Voting for the second annual eduStyle awards closes in just a couple of days, and we wanted to give you a reminder to drop by and vote!  Not only that, be sure to drop a checkmark down for .eduGuru for the best higher ed blog.  Just in case you need some more convincing though, I [...]

Talkback: Successful Higher Ed Branding for the Web

Hopefully, when I mention the words “branding” and “print” in the same sentence, every web developer out there reading this cringes.  So, with that in mind, how many of you have web branding guidelines that grew from print standards?  I hope the number is very few, but I suspect that there are a lot of [...]

Put a Fork In It, It’s Done

When do you kill off support for IE6?  As designers and coders, most of us probably wish we could have done it two or three years ago (or more).  On your own personal sites, or corporate type sites, you may have already cut the cord (many already have).  In reality, for many campuses ending support [...]

Michael Fienen's Discussions

Course Catalogs, print, online, and content management
7 Replies

Started this discussion. Last reply by Larry Stroud Jun 24.

 

Michael Fienen's Page

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John Loy, Earl H Thomas III and 16 other members joined Michael Fienen's groupJune 25
How are you using it? Where are you using it? How are you making it degrade gracefully? What are you doing to make sure applications remain accessible?
We too are feeling the crunch of allocating funds where they are needed most. We're printing less this year and making more use of our web site. We're encouraging students to download the catalog and view it on their computers as opposed to gettin...
Hi Ed! Ouch. That stinks. If you could go back and start over, are there things you'd have done differently? Why do you think folks are reluctant to keep their portions up to date? Is it frustration with Cascade, or is it an insistence on doing i...
We had a similar problem - 100's of independent word files, often multiple copies of the same course in different files, and a complex workflow. We re-engineered this over the winter and for the most part have removed MS Word from the equation. A...
I had someone trained to maintain the online catalog w/Cascade Server, but we're looking seriously at having her continue to maintain it via Word, then distill the sections to pdf, where they will be posted on the web and I will maintain the links...
We're discussing something similar here, and came to an identical workflow. Did you consider the possibility of allowing the departments to edit directly in Cascade? We looked at it, and decided they were better off in Word docs too. (training + ...
One other thing -- by breaking down the content into smaller pieces we can use the content in other websites. Each department and program site can have the major requirements and courses listed -- we're just including the content from the catalogu...
Up until this year our process is quite similar to yours. The change we made this year was to put all those Word documents into the CMS (Cascade) broken down into one page per section and one page per course. The catalogue website then uses PHP to...

Profile Information

Employer?
Pittsburg State University
Website:
http://www.pittstate.edu/
Personal Website:
http://www.fienen.com/
List three areas of expertise or specialization.
XHTML/CSS, Accessibility (508), dotCMS
What CMS are you using?
dotCMS at the college, and using WordPress and Joomla for other stuff
What department or office are you in?
Marketing (Web Marketing Office)
Primary Job Responsibility
I run and coordinate usage of our Watchfire WebXM web health monitoring software, and administer our Google Mini search server. I will also be the admin for our CMS, once we launch in 2008. I am the code monkey half of our web team, however full-on programming is not a primary responsibility. I do write some PHP scripts when needed though, and try to oversee the creation of clean and standardized HTML and CSS for the site. I'm also the primary contact point for 508/1210 compliancy issues. I also tend to stir the pot if I think something isn't being done in a relatively efficient manner.
Number of students at your institution
~7100

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Michael Fienen

Large Sites and Information Architecture

"I apologize in advance, because this is going to be more of an article of philosophy, than a technical how-to. A while back I wrote a piece on the subject of breadcrumbs. In it, I made a comment about how breadcrumbs are a tool that helps expose the information architecture (IA) of a site to a visitor. A discussion ensued where a rebuttal was offered that visitors simply don’t care about a site’s IA. David Poteet said about IA (or rather a breadcrumb’s effect on IA) that certain ideas “…make th… Continue

Posted on February 23, 2009 at 8:00am —

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At 10:38am on March 5, 2008, Mike ... said…
Mike ... I cleared out the old post and made a new one since I spelled athletics wrong ... do have any info for me on the dotCMS and athletics (I you want to repost it or tell me directly that be great)... I see you use it now ... any help would be great ... thanks!!
 
 

Elsewhere

Latest Activity

Shana Kluck, Anthony White, Michael Irizarry and 8 more joined University Web Developers18 hours ago
Daryl Zamora added a discussionyesterday
We have just begun using Google Apps. One of the application's services is Google Sites, which allows members to create even sufficiently sophisticated websites. Has anybody explored the possibilities of Google Sites in university online networks?...
Fantastic! Yes. lets meet up. 12th or 13th works for me. Let me know when and where is good for you.
Hey! Just realized I'll actually be in LA on the 12th and 13th for a client!! Let me know if you want to meet up. I'll be in South LA area.
Wow, this is exactly what I wanted out of this discussion...thanks, Susan and Jim for your comments. Jim, I'm sorry I missed you last time you were on campus. I want to give a full description of our environment (for a redesign) and why taxonomy ...
Hi Michael, thanks for that! Would be great to hear from Pepperdine Uni. Cheers
Hey, that would be great! Can't wait to be in the northern hemispehere.. winter in NZ is not the greatest! :-)
Michelle Vasquez joined Paul Branham's groupyesterday
Discussions and such pertaining to the unique situations that present themselves to Community Colleges.
Hi Hariet, If for no other reason than to simply see the campus in Malibu, I have let the marketing pros at Pepperdine University know about your request. I'm confident it would be a productive meeting.
Colin’s question is an interesting one. The notion that organizations may want to use a taxonomy to not only categorize content but to organize it for presentation is something that we’ve run across in the past. One of our early customers, the Un...
Hi Hariet, I live in LA and work at UCLA's Office of Media Relations. I'm involved in many of our online marketing efforts and would be happy to meet up. Let's connect over email! Seth seth.odell@gmail.com
I just launched another 'unblog' use of WordPress - this time I'm using it as an online version of a course catalog: 2009-2010 Catalog -Department of Graduate and Professional Studies (http://content.nichols.edu/course_catalogs/gps/) It's actuall...
Well, I think it might be as simple as a nightly XCOPY of the XML folder (assuming the log file locations in the settings.xml are the same). Alternatively, I'd love to have a way of source controlling CSS and XSL files.
@Colin - I'd like to get a bit more on your issue too. Actually. Perhaps we should move these types of comments from the Wall and actually start forum discussions to preserve topics and for better reference.

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