Managing Roles in a Multi-Author Environment

Posted by billyadams on November 4, 2010 None comments

As a part of my job, I maintain our prospective student blog site. We have around 35 current students posting about their experiences in college.

In the past, we’ve done all of this in-house, single page at a time posting using our CMS. Last year we finally took the leap to a real blogging platform and started to use WordPress. Part of the process of moving was figuring out how to best present the blog posts. Do we have individual blogs for each student blogger? Do we present them all on one page together? We opted for doing one blog with multiple authors publishing to the same space. We thought that this would allow us to present the most content to each student as they visit the site.

One big thing stood in our way. We needed to be able to manage when the blog posts were published. With the number of student bloggers we have and the format in which the blog is set up, we needed to ensure a consistent flow of posts. If the students published themselves, we’d get 10 posts on a Monday and nothing for the rest of the week. Consequently, the posts that were published first, would then also be lost down the page as new posts were published. (Wow, that’s a lot of “posts” and “publish”, sorry). But we still needed students to be able to upload pictures and to save drafts to come back to later.

The way we decided to do this was to not allow students to publish the posts themselves. Unfortunately, the built-in WordPress roles are not conducive to this, so we had to find another solution for defining roles.

We went with one plug-in for the first year. I found that it offered a lot of options that we would never use. We simply needed to edit the built-in WP roles, nothing too fancy. This plug-in worked for a while, until recently when inexplicably the plug-in started creating problems. So I was on the hunt for a new solution.

I found Capabilities Manager. It allows me to just go in and edit the pre-defined capabilities on the WP roles. Nothing too involved, just simple checkboxes where I can turn off certain capabilities in the individual roles. It does allow for me to create new roles that would allow even further fine-grain control. In the future, I might create a role for our staff bloggers that post from time-to-time that would allow a little more access.

Do you have any other tools or plug-ins that make your wordpress installs work better?

Quick Email Tips: Choose Your Colors Wisely

Posted by billyadams on October 18, 2010 None comments

This will be the first of many quick email tips. Normally, these will be gleaned from “bad” or “good” mass emails that I receive on a daily basis.

Choose your Colors Wisely

I just received an email from my local cable provider and while I appreciate them trying to “jazz up” their designs for their emails, I would much appreciate someone looking over the email before they send it. A quick glance at the email by a designer would not have allowed a bright pink on grey for their links. Check out the picture below:

By choosing to make their link colors pink, they’ve immediately turned me off in this email. It’s very jarring to look at and inherently unreadable. A better color for these links would have been a nice pale blue or really almost any other color.

When choosing your design scheme for a particular email campaign, remember to have someone fresh  (read: not involved with the email team/campaign) read over the email and let you know if there is anything that doesn’t work or is difficult to read. A 10 minutes process that will save your readers headaches in the long run.

heweb10 – Thoughts

Posted by billyadams on October 13, 2010 1 comments

I just finished up the last session at heweb10 in Cincinnati, OH. This is my third year at a higher education web conference, but my first at HighEdWeb. It was a great experience. One of the hallmarks of this conference is the quality of the presentations and this year was no different. In addition to some of the great sessions there were great networking opportunities. The people at this conference are the best in their fields and they want to share their knowledge. I came away from this conference with a little bit of information overload, but a good feeling of what’s to come. I’m excited about some of the tools that I think I’ll be trying to implement both on my personal sites and hopefully at work. But the thing that excites me the most is what I can see coming.

There were a ton of sessions dedicated to specific tools and techniques for getting the most out of them. But the most rewarding sessions were the more higher level sessions that focused both on how to get the most satisfaction from your job and also future-casting for what is to come in higher ed and the web in general.

I’ll be writing more soon about some of the things I learned and how I think I see them affecting the way I do my job and work and play in the web.

A first for all things…

Posted by billyadams on November 11, 2009 None comments

Yesterday was a first for me in my professional career. I presented at a conference. It was rather nerve-wracking up until I got up there. I was lucky to be a part of an all-star panel, so my part wasn’t significantly long. I spoke for about 5-6 minutes. About what you ask?

Our panel was gathered to talk about how universities can utilize social networks like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to attract students, keep them and stay in touch with alumni. This topic has been presented on and presented on at many conferences. This time was nice because we also touched on how best to control/influence your message once they’re out there.

I presented alongside Brad J Ward of BlueFuego, Scott Kilmer from Abilene Christian University and Andrew Meyers from Hope College. The session was at the AACRAO Strategic Enrollment Management conference at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas. Kai Drekmeier from InsideTrack.com hosted the session. So after we all spoke, we opened it up to questions.

Overall, I think it went pretty well. Especially for my first presentation.

After the session, Brad and Scott had to head out, but Andrew and I went to grab a bite and found an awesome place in Deep Ellum called Twisted Root Burgers. They had amazing burgers and house-brewed root beer. The flavor of the day was Champagne Root Beer. I was a bit skeptical at first, but it was pretty good.

Overall, great trip. Although 6 hours on the road for 3 hours in Dallas was pretty harsh.

eduWeb 09 – Higher Style for Higher-Ed Web Design

Posted by billyadams on July 20, 2009 None comments

Stewart Foss – President, eduStyle.net

What is the purpose of your homepage?

the primary purpose is to help users find the information they are seeking.

Does it look good when it’s doing that?

Re-Designs don’t need to be a tear down situation. In the vast majority of cases you can fix the specific problems.

Incremental ReDesign – Research, Tweak and Repeat.

Read more »

eduWeb 2009 – Opening Keynote

Posted by billyadams on July 20, 2009 None comments

Dmitri Glazkov from Google presents The Next Big Thing

“I don’t know what the next big thing is…sorry” – Dmitri

You can help but get inspired by the things that are done on the web. The Iranian election, how we all came together for a common cause. When Michael Jackson died, the web basically slowed down because we are operating as fast as we can, at a high demand.

Why is the web broken? The technology is the triggering force. But people also are the force. it’s a chicken and egg situation.

Technology means different things to different people. It’s really a supply chain. One person builds something that then enables further development.

There is consumer facing technology - flickr, facebook twitter

Developer facing – javascript, css, ajax, etc.

The browser is the invisible technology.

Read more »

Facebook: Now with New Vanity URLs

Posted by billyadams on June 9, 2009 2 comments

What I would call one of facebook’s biggest faults is going to be remedied by what many are calling the “facebook Land Run.” (nod to @mkokc) Beginning at 12:01am EST, Saturday, June 13 users of the popular social network will be able to claim their username as a “vanity url.” What this means is that the web address of your facebook profile will no longer be a series of odd punctuations, numbers and equals signs, but will now be simply www.facebook.com/username. The caveat to this is that you will be the one coming up with the name for your facebook vanity url. Read more »

Twitter: How to listen to your users

Posted by billyadams on May 13, 2009 1 comments

Yesterday, the folks at Twitter made a big change to the way their users get messages. See my previous post for details. After a rather large uprising in their users (a la Facebook), they have gotten the message. @Biz posted this message today on Twitter.

Hey folks—thanks for your feedback, here’s a plan for #fixreplies http://bit.ly/6cSnh

The blog post linked states that while totally replacing the feature they removed is not possible due to scaling, they are working on a new feature set that will give users more control over how they see messages containing @ replies. He also allayed some fears with this part of the post:

First, we’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account.

full post

This will still allow users to put another user’s name at the beginning of a post without fear that the message won’t get out. This is great for when people intentionally put someone’s name in a post to tell someone about them, however, this does little to replace the serendipitous nature of conversations on Twitter.

The way this will now work is that when someone simply types “@username” in a post, everyone will see it. But if they use the “reply” button on Twitter.com (or possibly in an API program like tweetdeck or tweetie), no one but those following both the sender and the user they are replying to will see the message.

The new feature set that @Biz has promised might fulfill that part of it, but if I’m reading his post right, we’ll have to change this on a user by user basis. It might get a little klugy for people following more than a few people to have to in to each one and set it up to receive those messages.

I’ll wait and reserve judgement on the new feature until it’s out and ready to go. But I’m hoping that they at least include some sort of batch setting process for this rather than only on a one-by-one basis.

Twitter Assumes Too Much

Posted by billyadams on May 12, 2009 8 comments

UPDATE 10:41pm: @Biz has updated the blog post about the updates to say that when someone is mentioned in a tweet, you still get those updates even if you don’t follow them. This would seem to keep things like #followfriday in place. I’m waiting on information regarding how the placement within a post effects if people will still see the update. (ex. if I put @username at the beginning, does Twitter think this is a reply)

The powers that be at Twitter.com have now decided that if you aren’t following somebody, you don’t want to see when someone you follow @ replies to them in a post. They will now remove that tweet from your stream.

We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies…However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option…

full post

Note that they call this a “small settings update”

On the face of this, it would seem to be a logical update. If I’m not involved in a conversation, there isn’t much need for me to see that tweet. But what this really has done is eliminate any chance of discovering new people through followers. The biggest example of this is in the #followfriday phenomenon. Every Friday, hundreds of twitterers will post the names of several people they think that their followers might want to follow. Whether that’s interesting people, people that post funny tweets or most useful in my case, people in the same industry that you might not be following. I have begun to follow several people on the basis of #followfriday. I’ve met many interesting people who work in higher education because I’ve either seen them in a #followfriday post or seen a person I follow reply back to them.

What Twitter has really done is once again, misunderstood the way we use the @ system. I’m sure they really meant to it be a true “reply” function, but it has turned into much more than that. Your users utilize the system in ways you couldn’t imagine and made the service truly useful. But now, you have broken what made it special. You have broken the system by which you find new people to follow.