Webmaster’s Log

I mentioned that I purchased a laptop. Great laptop, poor operating system. Windows Vista has serious problems with wireless. Connections are extremely difficult to establish, and it is even more tricky to keep those connections from dropping. The odds are better of going to Vegas with a dollar and walking away a millionaire than they are of having wireless play nice on Vista.

Part of the problem could be the layers of “Advisors” that HP generously provided with the laptop. I’ve since turned most of them off and done all of the configuration by hand. (Or as much as Vista allows to be done by hand. Let’s face it, the easiest way to complicate and kill a working process is to put a “user-friendly GUI” in front of it.)

Anyway, I switched from a Buffalo router to a new Netgear. While the wired connections are much faster, the wireless (which was the whole point of the new router in the first place) is about as reliable as a coin flip. Maybe even less so, since a coin gives you a 50/50 chance of success. Vista is more like a twenty-sided dice roll.

It seems I am not the only person experiencing these problems with Vista. A quick Google search of “Access: Local only” (meaning I connect to the router, but Vista doesn’t request an IP from the DHCP service running on the router) reveals thousands of others having the same problems.

If any Vista gurus know a fix, I am all ears. Email any suggestions to webmaster@tusculum.edu

I took advantage of one of the smartest things our state has done in years: the tax-free weekend. Computers under $1500.00 are sold without sales tax, which can add up to a potential savings of $150.00. That’s right, the rest of the year, the sales tax in Tennessee is nearly 10%. Anyway, I found a great deal on an HP laptop.
It will be doubly employed, as my take-home-and-anywhere-else webdev machine and as a school laptop. You see, I plan to go back for a Masters and potentially a PhD. Not exactly sure where, when, what or how much, but the new laptop now makes it much easier for me to pursue a degree.
And, once I get accustomed to the new workflow, I see my productivity increasing at the College.
I had been using thumbdrives to take work home, but I got bogged down in what file is current, where is it?, etc. (Pardon my punctuation!) You get the picture. Thumbdrives are great for some things, but webdev is not one of them, at least for me.

In other news, there are lots of new things on the website. I’ll run down all the new stuff in an upcoming update. Stay tuned!

So this is the first time this year that I have written an update. I doubt anyone but me regrets this, since I had planned to use the blog to help keep track on my on-going projects. There are many going on concurrently. Right now, I have on-going projects for

• Graduate and Professional Studies academic advising
• the Tusculum bookstore
• the CCA (Center for Civic Advancement)
• Tusculum athletics
• Institutional Advancement
• residential admissions

The project for TC Athletics will be a big leap forward for the athletics department and the SID. Right now, one person is covering 14 NCAA Division II sports for the college. I don’t know how he does it. Hopefully, when everything is said and done, he will have a tool to help him maintain the website from anywhere.

There are many other “smaller” projects going on, plus the daily content updates, so it would be helpful if we could squeeze a few more hours in the day.

Just before and just after the new year, look for many updates and some entirely new features to the Tusculum College website. I’ll list a few of them and mention some details about each one.

• Home Page design - This has been, obviously, the most noticable update. Anything that impacts the home page is a big deal, since it impacts both our off-campus visitors and prospective students and our on-campus community and current students. I’m pleased with the reception so far. And I’m even more pleased that the TC home page (as well as more and more of the web site) has moved away from table-based design to XHTML/CSS. The load time has decreased significantly, and the navigation on the home page has also become much simpler and hopefully more intuitive. I’m also happy that we now feature more TC students (past and present) on the page.
• RSS Feed - At the suggestion of a web-saavy faculty member, I created an RSS Feed for our News & Information section. It’s nothing fancy, but it helps those who use Newsreaders to know when new and interesting stories are posted on the site. It’s RSS 2.0 for those that care, and it is validated everyday by the W3C RSS Validator — sorry, no link.
• The Tusculum Review - The entire site has a new look and structure. It, too, is XHTML/CSS, and it was a sort of pre-cursor to the other XHTML pages going live. The site gives the Review a look and identity unto itself; however, a certain amount of branding makes it obviously a TC site (and the URL helps, too!)
• TCWEB - It is still not ready for prime time, but I have to mention it because a lot of work has gone into it (and will continue.) TCWEB is a collaborative effort between the web and the SIS (TCNET) at Tusculum. Once completed and online (soon), it will allow currently enrolled students to access directly one of three reports in TCNET: grades, schedules, and status reports. The really nice thing about TCWEB is that the reports are spawned from TCNET in real time. The web really does not process nor store any of the information. I’ll talk more about TCWEB when it goes live.

There are other projects on-going that are in various states of completion. We’ve got a couple of different surveys being prepped to send out. We are moving toward a web-based model and away from paper. Hopefully, this will allow us to realize savings not only in the cost of the paper but also in the number of man-hours it takes to interpret the survey results.
Big changes are also coming for a number of other departments. One of those changes, in particular, will dramatically alter the way a department uses the web. I’m not mentioning any names, though, because I don’t want to spoil it.
The web, though, is always a work in progress. It will never be “done” the way we traditionally think of projects. There will always be room for improvement. I don’t know if that is a PRO or a CON, but I sort of enjoy it nevertheless.

Two very interesting developments today. First, I previewed two new calendaring systems for the school. Both free. Both open source. The calendaring system we were using wasn’t really a big hit with the college community, so although it was free and very extensible, it wasn’t worth the time investment if it wasn’t being used by anyone but me. So, the new search began in earnest this morning. I’m pleased with both trial systems so far, and once I’ve investigated two others, I’ll single it down to one, customize it and fill it in with the campus calendar events from the old one and then introduce it at a future TUF (Techology Users Forum) meeting. Hoping this one meets with approval!
The other development involved a meeting with career development and adult career advancement. Looks like Im going to develop dual surveys for them. One for currently enrolled students (both programs) and the one for grads, one year out of school. I’m pretty excited about this because we’ll be incorporating the web in a new way. It’ll help both career services (residential and graduate and professional studies) better define the services that current students want and then track the success of those services among recent graduates. It’ll will benefit other areas of the College as well, from admissions to alumni relations to even academics and institutional research. In fact, I am fortunate that institutional research will be interpreting the raw data collected via the web. It’s better to have a pro do that than for me to try to do it, so I am very happy that they are on-board from the beginning.
Those are certainly not the only web projects. In fact, I’ve got about five other major projects already in development. But those are the two newest ones, so they are the most fresh in my mind, and I thought I’d mention them while my enthusiasm level is so high.

Developed two new blog templates that are specific to Tusculum College. I’m working on two more at the moment. Will try to standardize the “core” departments on the normal templates (Financial Aid, Admissions, etc.)

After losing the weblog server over the summer, the College has been without blogs for a few months. Some people missed them, and others were glad to rid of the comment spam.
We’ve got new hardware, a new blog system, and a new mission. We are going to attempt to do a better job of integrating the blogs into the College community.