University Web Developers

University Web Developers

Michael Fienen

Michael Fienen's Blog (13)

Search Blog Posts

Book Review: Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig

"If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you might have caught on that I recently got into the book Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity by Lawrence Lessig, one of many that I’ve been meaning to check off my least of to-reads. Let me spoil the review by telling you not to bother reading the review, ju… Continue

Added by Michael Fienen on September 25, 2009 at 8:02am — No Comments

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

Added by Michael Fienen on February 23, 2009 at 8:00am — No Comments

User Experience and target=”_blank”

Despite how much people don’t want it to be true, using target="_blank" when coding pages is becoming less and less of an accepted practice. But don’t take my word for it. There’s a reason that strict (X)HTML has dropped the target attribute from valid specs, and really, it’s a good one: designers/coders should not be making decisions for the user as to how a page opens. We might not like it, we might not agree with it, but in the end we should cede behavioral attributes to the user, who should… Continue

Added by Michael Fienen on January 6, 2009 at 10:44am — No Comments

Web Marketing and the New School

Having been moved into the marketing department at our university, it has afforded me the opportunity to attack some different problems from a new angle, and it has also allowed me to engage some ideas that had been floating around that weren’t necessarily an appropriate goal while in the IT department. Something I am coming to realize is just how different web marketing is from the garden variety, and how it is viewed and approached by those who need it to be successful these days. The reason t… Continue

Added by Michael Fienen on June 2, 2008 at 1:18pm — No Comments

Using dotCMS: A Practical Example

Following up the completion of one of our first successful forays into using dotCMS on campus, I thought it would be time to discuss what we did and how we did it, to give you an idea of what is possible within the platform. I mentioned in past articles that dotCMS is a powerful CMS framework, you just have to assemble the pieces. Think of templates, structures, containers, and content like Lego blocks. You can have tons of them, different shapes and sizes, and depending on how you assemble them… Continue

Added by Michael Fienen on March 11, 2008 at 3:27pm — No Comments

Social Web: Gearing up without burning out

The Experiment: Do more with less. Could I increase my “presence” within the “social web” without increasing time or labor to do so, and without having to navigate through a dozen sites a day in order to keep up?... [Read the rest at SuperSatellite.com...] [Subscribe to RSS] Continue

Added by Michael Fienen on March 7, 2008 at 12:14pm — No Comments

Live from Open Minds 2008 Conference

Hey all, I was fortunate enough to be at the dotCMS Open Minds 2008 conference this past weekend, and was blogging from the event. It was a good time, and an excellent event. Reports are broken up by the day, and I del.icio.us'ed several URI's from the event. Enjoy!

Day 1
Day 2
… Continue

Added by Michael Fienen on February 11, 2008 at 8:05pm — No Comments

Secure OpenID with MyVidoop

The other day I started talking a little bit about my experiments with OpenID, a new, portable, and universal authentication scheme for web sites. I’ve been continuing this since then, and have some newer information I want to share with you. Originally, one of my primary concerns was that of security...

[Read the rest at SuperSatellite.com...]
[Su… Continue

Added by Michael Fienen on January 30, 2008 at 12:37pm — No Comments

dotCMS: An Introduction

I felt it was time to take a closer look at a content management system I am getting very involved with. One might say I’m drowning in it. I prefer to think of it as being choked by it, heh. Really, it’s a very interesting system, and a fantastic tool for the price. I have worked with a number of CMS's over the years: Coranto, e107, Joomla, Mambo, Wordpress, Drupal, and a few others...

[… Continue

Added by Michael Fienen on January 29, 2008 at 11:43am — No Comments

Don't Contribute

Why isn’t Contribute equipped to handle large scale (~10,000+ pages) sites? Contribute doesn’t really have the tools to do anything with regards to content reuse across a site. So as a result, there’s no way to develop interactivity (well, really, you can’t develop anything with it, it’s not a developer tool).....

[Read the rest at SuperSatellite.com...]
[Subs… Continue

Added by Michael Fienen on January 24, 2008 at 3:38pm — 4 Comments

Getting into OpenID

I spent last night doing some research that I believe to be worth sharing for those interested in the subject. In an effort to improve flexibility of this blog, as the announcement above mentions (at least at the time this was written), I now support OpenID. OpenID is a neat new technology that serves as a universal login among sites that support it. Believe it or not, that is more and more places: AOL, LiveJournal, Wordpress.com, and… Continue

Added by Michael Fienen on January 23, 2008 at 5:18pm — No Comments

Creating a profanity filter

So, today I wrote the dirtiest function I have ever written in PHP. I typed more profanity at once than I think I ever have in the past. As part of a new AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) live search query displayer I wrote for our Google Mini, I had to do some...

[Read the rest at SuperSatellite.com...]
[Subscribe to RSS] Continue

Added by Michael Fienen on December 14, 2007 at 2:28pm — No Comments

Social Education

In the field of higher education, universities have a unique roll in terms of their web site and the services that we provide to visitors and users. Because the landscape of a university is so expansive, it can be easy to get caught up trying to showcase and provide for many different fields...

[Read the rest at SuperSatellite.com...]
[Subscribe to RSS]… Continue

Added by Michael Fienen on December 13, 2007 at 10:15pm — No Comments

Latest Blog Posts

Most Popular Blog Posts

Blog Topics by Tags

Monthly Archives

2009

2008

2007

Elsewhere

Latest Activity

Russ Wright replied to Chris Lewinski's discussion 'Web Hosting: In house or External?'
Our Website is hosted internally. We have an IT person who maintains it, but I help occasionally with troubleshooting etc.
26 minutes ago
Chris Lewinski added a discussion
Web Hosting: In house or External?
Hello all, Wondering how many members host their college web sites in house and how many contract the services of an external host? What factors lead to your decision? If you host your site in house, who does the server maintenance- yourself/someone…
55 minutes ago
Rachel Reuben replied to Mark Greenfield's discussion 'Transitioning Accepted Student Social Networks'
We've been exploring SocialEngine for the last few weeks and just made the purchase this morning. It has "subnetworks" within your installation, which I believe will help you keep folks separate and achieve what you're looking for. We bought one lic…
1 hour ago
Peggy Kapusta joined Mark Greenfield's group
Drupal
1 hour ago
Michael Fienen added a discussion
Shameless self promotion
Hey everyone, just wanted to toss out some shameless self promotion. My .eduGuru blog posting about the #heweb09 Great Keynote Meltdown of 2009 was nominated for the Edublog Most Influential Blog Post of 2009. We'd love it if you'd take a second and…
2 hours ago
Dan Demmons replied to Dan Demmons's discussion 'That time of year- Christmas/Holiday greeting ecard/flash messages...'
Couple more- from my alma mater- Keene State College - This year's card from Providence College - I'd love to see what else everyone is doing if you care to share... Happy Holidays! -Dan Web Developer Providence College ddemmons@providence.edu
3 hours ago
Paul Otteson replied to Mark Greenfield's discussion 'Transitioning Accepted Student Social Networks'
Same story at SUNY-ESF -- Ning network for accepteds rolled out 1/08 with a plan to 'retire' it, well, now actually, and then to relaunch for the next class. The network had student ambassador and admissions staff members, and it included dedicated…
4 hours ago
stephen mosley, Mali Sauntry, Larry Hackman and 3 more joined University Web Developers
14 hours ago
Anika Van Wyk replied to annalisa's discussion 'Social Media books/papers'
Groundswell is great
18 hours ago
Heather Jackson added a discussion to the group Canadians
Canadian Email Marketing providers?
Hi Fellow Canadians, I'm looking for recommendations on email marketing providers that are based (or at least their server is based) in Canada. I've been using MailChimp out of the US, and it's great, but because of BC's privacy law I can only gath…
18 hours ago
Jeff added a discussion
Online Student Orientation
Hi all, We are looking into a tool, software or vendor that could help us develop an online student orientation. Which would include video and flash elements. We recently reviewed Comevo and was wondering if anyone knows of other companies/vendors t…
19 hours ago
Doug Thompson added a discussion
University Parent Connection?
This company (http://www.universityparent.com/edu) was mentioned at a meeting today, and I was wondering if anyone had any insights as to whether this sort of thing is commonplace, practical, useful, etc. Thanks in advance for any info, Doug Thomp…
19 hours ago
Davina Gould joined Mark Greenfield's group
Ning Users Group
This group is for anyone interested in how to use Ning
21 hours ago
Darren Ladner replied to Rachel Reuben's discussion 'Facebook: Pages vs. Groups & how many is too many (if possible)'
I work in the Marketing & Public Relations department. We started our first college Facebook page. We call it the official college page. Other departments have Facebook pages, such as the Library, eLearning, Student Services, etc. All Facebook pages…
22 hours ago
Kristin Greenberg replied to Kristin Greenberg's discussion 'Alumni/current student/employer networking platform?'
Thank you, everyone for your replies. The powers that be are asking us to test a new program called "Socialtivity" created by a local developing company. I'll let ya'll know how it plays out.
22 hours ago
Kristin Greenberg added a group
ActiveAdmissions
Group for users of ActiveAdmissions CMS
22 hours ago
Carol Clements commented on Lynn Zawie's group 'OmniUpdate'
OmniUpdate has completed end-user OU Campus CMS training for Sullivan County Community College – State University of New York. We anticipate great results from this great group of people, and look forward to working with them in 2010!
23 hours ago
annalisa replied to Kathy Barr's discussion 'Web Newsletter Packages'
Have you looked at http://www.thindata.com/ and http://www.campaignmonitor.com? Not sure if they offer everything that you are looking for but their emails are well designed in my opinion.
yesterday
annalisa added a discussion
Social Media books/papers
Anyone have any recommendations for books/papers on Social Media and/or "Web 2.0" Thanks very much, Annalisa
yesterday
RhondaK and Maya Chanthaphavong joined University Web Developers
yesterday

An adjunct to UWEBD. UWEBD has been in existence for more than 10 years and is the very best email discussion list on the Internet, in any industry, on any topic.

About

Mark Greenfield Mark Greenfield created this Ning Network.

© 2009   Created by Mark Greenfield

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Privacy  |  Terms of Service

Sign in to chat!