Michael Fienen's Blog (14)

"For 2010, it is safe to expect that Twitter will not see a diminished roll in university marketing and admissions strategy plans. However, it’s hard to avoid that some people will be coming to the web guys to have them set up their admissions office with Twitter (or will do it themselves), but then will do very little with it, feeling like they ‘just need to have it to be current.’ Should that happen to you, I wanted to share some of the best uses of Twitter that universities are doing… Continue

"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,… Continue

"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… Continue

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

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… Continue

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… Continue

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?...

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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…

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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...



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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...



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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).....



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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:…

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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...

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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...



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