Please let us know if you have any additional resources you think we should promote – Leave a comment or e-mail us today!

Instead, take three simple steps to ensure that people can find the right document at the right link every time:

• Establish an detailed but inspecific name for your document that identifies what it is without including information that will inevitably become out of date (studenthandbook.pdf instead of studenthandbook1112.pdf)
• Keep only the current copy online. When the time comes to update your document online, upload the new version with the same name as the previous one. This will overwrite the old version with the newer one, ensuring that links to the document continue to work and cutting down on the confusion of multiple versions of the document floating around online. If you need to keep the old version for archival purposes, download it to a network drive.
• Do not include spaces in your document name. Spaces are replaced by most browers as “%20″ which makes your document name practically unintelligible. Instead. consider skipping spaces altogether, or replacing with dashes or underscores (studenthandbook.pdf or student-handbook.pdf vs.student%20handbook.pdf)

If you’re creating a newsletter, a brochure or any other publication that references a website and want to include a unique, memorable website address, use our Web Tracking Form to request a “Go” address. We can quickly and easily create a custom URL for you that begins with “go.wlu.edu” and includes (gasp!) actual words!

Visit http://go.wlu.edu/webtrack to request one today.

Enter a new form! Beginning this fall, we ask that if you are interested in launching new website (or a significant redesign), you fill out our Web Project Intake Form.  The form will give us basic information that will help inform our initial meeting as well as schedule your project for timely completion.

Prefer the personal touch? Feel free to give one of us a call to discuss your project in person. (But don’t be offended if we ask you to fill out the form anyway.)

As always, thanks for your cooperation and we look forward to working with you on your next project.

The workgroup began by considering the following questions:

• How do members of the W&L community get most of their information about what’s happening on campus?
• What are the major frustrations with our current modes of communication, and what’s working well?
• Are there ways in which we’re not communicating that we should be? (i.e. social media, online communities, portal/intranet)

One of the workgroup’s first actions was to design and distribute a campus communications survey, which was taken by over 275 members of the campus community.

Upon completion of the survey, members of the workgroup conducted focus groups with faculty/staff and current students, and presented the survey results to two Town Hall information sessions as well as the ITS’s Technology Liaison’s group, gathering additional, anecdotal feedback to augment the survey results.

After meeting to discuss the results of the survey, focus groups and information sessions, the workgroup made the following  recommendations:

Campus Notices:

• Better integration with online calendar
• Further segmentation of categories
• Allow opt in/out of some categories
• Standardize display text
• Better mobile display

Audience Dashboards

• Better promotion
• Redesign top tab section
• Expand/minimize sections
• List more events
• Add Custom Quicklinks
• Create mobile app/display
• Less “official” look and feel for student dashboard

Based on these recommendations, members of Web Communications and ITS will work this summer to create a new Campus Communications Hub (CCH) which will tie together the online calendar, campus notices, hours of operation and daily menus for on-campus dining facilities. Any information entered in this space will be distributed through multiple channels (online calendar, campus notices, audience dashboards, departmental websites, University homepage), which should both eliminate redundancies and ensure that the messages reach the widest audience. We hope to roll out the new system before the end of fall term.

Opportunities for Students: While the site officially launched last year, Associate Dean Alison Bell would like to make better use of our Student Opportunities site to promote grants, fellowships, internships and study abroad options for current students. If your department has information about a related opportunity and you’d like to get the word out beyond your website and a poster on a bulletin board, this is a resource you should consider. Details can be emailed to Michelle Rothenberger in the Dean’s Office. Your opportunity will be added to the database and you can simply link to it from your site in Ingeniux.

Academic Overview Pages: You may have seen the new Admissions site, which launched late last week. To complement the website your department already has and to drive more visitor traffic to it, we are creating a single page for each academic department or program that will be hosted on this new site.  These pages will have a consistent look across all departments at W&L, and each will introduce a department and its salient points to prospective students and their parents in a scannable, at-a-glance format. This is in no way intended to replace the detailed content on your department website, but instead to provide an overview of the department geared specifically toward Admissions visitors.

See an example of the Philosophy Department overview page.

We have asked department and program heads to provide us with a short list of content for these pages, including:

• A brief dept. overview/mission statement
• A list of program highlights (Bulleted list of 5-10 highlights)
• Common Careers/Outcomes for graduates (6-10 broad post-graduate fields)
• A list of related programs

The Web team will fill in all of the other information on the page, and going forward, you will be able to edit your department’s page in Ingeniux as necessary. We appreciate your help and support of this new initiative.

SiteCheck: Frustrated with spelling errors and broken links on your website? Never fear. We have recently signed up for a service called SiteCheck, which will help us to locate and correct these errors. Each department web editor will have an account to check their own pages, and we’ll have one of our Web Team work studies doing regular audits, as well.

Watch a quick (really–3 minutes) demo of the SiteCheck service. Training to come later this month.

Localist: Just when you were finally used to the new calendar, there’s a newer one coming down the pike, and quickly. We have contracted with Localist, an online event promotion service, to host and manage our online event promotion calendar beginning this academic year. We will do our best to keep the event entry process as similar to the old one as possible, and to integrate all of the features that you’re used to in our current calendar. More details and training to come later this month. Meanwhile, check out events.jhu.edu to see how Localist ties events to social media and shows calendar users what events are most popular on campus.

Publish Schedule: We have recently moved to a less frequent publish schedule, to allow windows where important content can be published off-cycle. The new publishes will take place at 10 am and 3 pm daily, as well as 3 am. If you need content published and can’t wait for the next scheduled publish, please contact David, Eric or Jessica.

Training: With a new academic year comes new Ingeniux users. If you are a new user or need a refresher in Faculty/Staff profiles, basic Ingeniux or image editing, please fill out a training request using our Web Tracking Form: http://go.wlu.edu/webtrack

We will let you know of upcoming training opportunities for Localist, SiteCheck and Ingeniux. Look forward to seeing you at one of them.

Well, we’ve come up with a pretty cool solution to use the standard Ingeniux style selector in the content editor and the alternate text of a specified image to create cleanly captioned images.

~~

How To

Step 1: Create CSS Classes in the Editor:

To enable inline image captioning, you first need to add two styles to the “localstyles.css” file. The file can be found in your main XML directory under Custom > Editor. Add the following CSS references:

.caption_left {}
.caption_right {}

These are just placeholder classes, so there are no CSS attributes.

Step 2: Insert an Image in Ingeniux:

To insert a captioned image in the HTML editor, select the image as you always do using the built-in image selection tool. Make sure you give your image alternate text — this will become the caption. For the purposes of formatting text and images within the editor, go ahead and select an alignment for your image — either left or right — and, to make it easier to view in the editor, put in a border of 1px and vertical and horizontal padding of 5px. Click the insert button to add your image to the HTML editor.

Now if you want to add a fancy caption to this image, click on the image in the HTML editor and make sure the select handles are visible in the four corners of the image. With the image selected, choose from your styles dropdown list in the editor toolbar “caption_left” for images that should be floated left or “caption_right” for those that should be floated right.

IMPORTANT: Nothing will happen in the editor! Your image should look exactly like it did when you first inserted it. The magic doesn’t happen until you view your content in a browser.

Step 3: The Magic

In your default XSL stylesheet, add the following <script> tags:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js”></script>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function() {
$(“img.caption_left”).each(function() {
$(this).wrap(‘<div style=”width:’+($(this).width()+10)+’px”></div>’)
.after(‘<p>’+$(this).attr(“alt”)+’</p>’)
.removeAttr(‘alt’);
});
});
$(document).ready(function() {
$(“img.caption_right”).each(function() {
$(this).wrap(‘<div style=”width:’+($(this).width()+10)+’px”></div>’)
.after(‘<p>’+$(this).attr(“alt”)+’</p>’)
.removeAttr(‘alt’);
});
});
</script>

The first <script> block allows for the use of Google API’s JQuery library. The second block taps into that library to quickly scan the page on load and find any images that have been given the class “caption_left” or “caption_right.” For each such image, we’ll add some code before, after and around the image to build a nice little <div> that looks like this:

<div class=”figureRight” style=”width: 190px;”>
<img src=”images/news/graduate.jpg” style=”float: left; border: 1px solid black; margin: 5px;” width=”180″ height=”250″ />
<p class=”capText”>Cool Image Captioning</p>
</div>

The <div> is given a set width, which comes from the specified width of the image plus 10. The paragraph text (the caption) is pulled from the alternate text attribute of the image.

Step 4: Make the Magic Pretty

Earlier you created empty classes for use within the editor. Now you need to create the real CSS styles for the captioned images. The following CSS references need to go in the cascading stylesheet linked to your default XSL stylesheet:

.figureLeft {
position:relative;
float:left;
margin:0px 10px 10px 0px;
padding:5px;
background-color:#f1ece1;
border:1px solid #e3dac7;
visibility:visible;
text-align:center;
-moz-border-radius:5px;
-webkit-border-radius:5px;
}
.figureRight {
position:relative;
float:right;
margin:0px 0px 10px 10px;
padding:5px;
background-color:#f1ece1;
border:1px solid #e3dac7;
visibility:visible;
text-align:center;
-moz-border-radius:5px;
-webkit-border-radius:5px;
}
.figureLeft img, .figureRight img {
padding:0px;
}
.figureLeft p.capText, .figureRight p.capText {
clear:both;
display:block;
margin:0 auto;
padding:5px 5px 0px 5px;
color:#524833;
font-size:9px;
font-style:italic;
font-weight:normal;
text-align:center;
}

These will float the container <div> left or right, as appropriate, provide the soft background color and padding, and the font styling for the caption text. These styles will also round the corners of your container <div> in most non-IE browsers. These can be changed to better suit your site’s look and feel.

That’s it. You can create as many captioned images on a single page as your good taste will allow. I hope someone else finds this trick useful.

• WordPress News Blog
• WordPress Status Blog
• Twitter Stream
• Custom Calendar Events RSS

Shortly after launching our new site, we met the infamous Twitter fail whale. Load issues with Twitter’s RSS feed ground the loading of our homepage to a halt. That’s when we decided to look into runtime caching. We implemented a rudimentary ASP script to seek out the Twitter RSS feed on a regular interval and save the contents of the feed to a local file. We then instructed our Ingeniux page to retrieve this local file. By doing so, we minimized the risk of hitting the fail whale and, to our delight, found that the entire page loaded more quickly. So, we extended the caching to our other feeds. The system is not without flaws, and there are areas for augmenting the script to catch a few other potential problems, but we’re sailing much more smoothly now.

Pros:

• Our homepage loads faster.
• We are less susceptible to periodic Twitter or WordPress outages.

Cons:

• We lost the “instant” update capabilities of RSS. We retrieve our Twitter and WordPress Status feeds every 10 minutes and our WordPress News and Calendar feeds every hour.

~~

HOW TO

On the runtime server, in the “custom” folder, we added a classic ASP file. This is the file that we indicate as the source of the RSS feed in Ingeniux. Let’s call this file “twitter.asp.” Here’s the code:

<!–#include file=”asp_cache.asp”–>
<%
If cacheFileIsExpired(“twitter_feed.xml”, 1, “hours”) Then
Response.Buffer = True
Dim objXMLHTTP, xml
Set xml = Server.CreateObject(“MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP”)
xml.Open “GET”, “http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/20787409.rss?count=2″, False
xml.Send
strPosts = xml.responseText
Set xml = Nothing
Response.Write(writeCachedFile(“twitter_feed.xml”, strPosts))
Else
Response.Write(getCachedFile(“twitter_feed.xml”))
End If
%>

The script first checks to see if the modified date of the local file has exceeded the specified interval. The name of the local file is “twitter_feed.xml.”  If we’re within the time interval, the ASP script simply returns the content of the local file as fully formatted XML. If not, it retrieves the RSS feed from the source and saves the XML to the local file. The time interval is specified in the first line as a numeral and a unit of measurement (i.e, 10 minutes or 1 hour).

The “twitter.asp” file includes an additional file called “asp_cache.asp.” This file declares a few key variables and routines, and, most importantly, specifies where you are saving and retrieving the local file. In our case, that’s a folder at “d:\WebSites\v6\Custom\cache\files\” on our runtime site. Here’s the code:

<%
Function cacheFileIsExpired(strFileName, cacheInterval, cacheIntervalUnit)
If cacheInterval = 0 Then
cacheFileIsExpired = True
Exit Function
End If
On Error Resume Next
Dim cacheFSO : Set cacheFSO = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
Dim cacheFile : Set cacheFile = cacheFSO.GetFile(“d:\WebSites\v6\Custom\cache\files\” & strFileName)
Dim strDate : strDate = cacheFile.DateLastModified
Set objFile = Nothing

Select Case cacheIntervalUnit
Case “minutes” : strUnit = “n”
Case “hours” : strUnit = “h”
Case “days” : strUnit = “d”
End Select
cacheFileIsExpired = (DateDiff(strUnit,CDate(strDate), Now()) > cacheInterval)
If err.Number <> 0 Then
cacheFileIsExpired = True
End If
Set cacheFile = Nothing
Set cacheFSO = Nothing
End Function

Function writeCachedFile(strFileName, strText)
Dim cacheFSO : Set cacheFSO = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
Dim cacheFile : Set cacheFile = cacheFSO.CreateTextFile(“d:\WebSites\v6\Custom\cache\files\” & strFileName, True, True)
cacheFile.Write(strText)
cacheFile.Close
Set cacheFile = Nothing
Set cacheFSO = Nothing
writeCachedFile = strText
End Function

Function getCachedFile(strFileName)
Dim cacheFSO : Set cacheFSO = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
Dim cacheFile : Set cacheFile = cacheFSO.OpenTextFile(“d:\WebSites\v6\Custom\cache\files\” & strFileName,1,False,-1)
getCachedFile = cacheFile.ReadAll
Set cacheFile = Nothing
Set cacheFSO = Nothing
End Function
%>

That’s it. Just remember to specify your “twitter.asp” page as the source of your RSS feed in Ingeniux. I hope this can be helpful to other Ingeniux users. If you have ideas to improve this utility or something else you’d like to share, please do so.

- Eric Owsley

• Web Site Corrections
• CMS Errors
• Page Display Errors
• New Content Requests
• Banner Ad Requests
• Photography Requests
• Friendly URL (Go Address) Requests
• Form Requests
• New Faculty/Staff Profile Page Requests
• Audience Dashboard Suggestions
• Training Requests

We regret that we will no longer be able to accept requests for help via e-mail or phone.

To log a help request, click on the Web Tracking Form banner ad on our Web Communications homepage, or use our Go address: http://go.wlu.edu/webtrack/

1. Log in as you do to Ingeniux, using ad\username and your regular network password.
2. Select the type of help you need from the dropdown menu
3. Click “Giddy Up”
4. Fill in the required form fields
5. Click “Whoohoo!”

That’s it. Your request will be entered into our system and assigned to a member of our team. We’ll fix it, and hopefully you’ll be a satisfied customer.

Thanks for your cooperation, and do let us know if you find problems or can suggest improvements to the form.