We got our comps this week from New City Media for our new campus map. This takes our existing water color map, and allows you to pan/zoom & click in flash to explore it. We are hoping that we will be able to update this much quicker, since each year we have a new map due to all the construction around here.
Check out the comps and let me know what you think!
Full map at 100% zoom.
Item detail.
Ever since we changed our people search to return results across all person types (student, faulty, staff, retirees), performance has been pretty poor.
I was able to use some of the built in Ajax functions of Coldfusion 8 to break up the processing and return results faster.
The old way:
1 - Get a result set
2 - Loop though each result and find the details.
The new way:
1 - Get the result set
2 - Create a div for each result, and do an Ajax call to populate the div.
The code:
<cfdiv bind=”url:results.cfm?id={idno}?affiliation={affilitation}“>
</div>
Now the page loads, and then it runs each div to get some results. Coldfusion automatically shows the loading animation.
Overall processing time seems to be about 75% quicker, since it runs each div as a parallel process.
Last week I took some time to automate twittering for Roanoke College – www.twitter.com/roanokecollege.
My basic approached was to scan our various XML feeds and databases for new items, and create a new database of “tweets.” These new tweets are then published throughout the day.
I have two programs:
One Runs at 6:00 am daily, and checks the news RSS feed, the Sports Press Release database, the Sports schedule and the photo gallery XML feed.
For each item it generates a “tweet” that is stored in a database.
The other runs every 30 minutes and checks for any tweet that hasn’t been sent yet, if it finds one it will post it using the Twitter API call, and then mark it as posted:
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
The CFM is:
<cfhttp
url=http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
method="POST"
resolveurl="No"
result="objGet"
username="#application.username#"
password="#application.password#"
useragent="ColdFusion/8.0">cfhttpparam type="formfield"
value="#qryTweets.strTweet#"
name="status">
</cfhttp>
Note: I made sure to not mark the record as posted until a successful submission with a try/catch block. This will prevent a twitter outage from loosing a tweet.
I ran it all weekend, and other than one hiccup on the URL that I was getting for our photo gallery feed (Picasa Web Album’s, by the way), it worked great.
So for all the latest news on Roanoke College, just follow Roanoke College on Twitter.
It seems that Twitter has taken quite a while to catch on amongst the masses. People, even seemingly techno-savvy ones, don’t really get it. But, we get it and we like it and think it’s really catching on. I like to think of it as a mini-blog broadcasting tool.
So, why do we Twitter? Here’s a few reasons.
Honestly, we haven’t been nearly as active as we could be. However, we’ve been amazed at the amount of followers we’ve gotten without advertising this at all. Also, there doesn’t seem to be that many colleges on twitter yet. Stay tuned…
Our admissions department has a vast array of applications, request forms, event registrations and contact forms. Despite efforts in the past to better unify these, we have made little progress in the last few years.
Over the next few weeks, I hope to develop a manifesto on how these can be dealt with. My initial thoughts are:
My next step is look at some oter institutions and see if I can find some good examples of what to do( and what not to do).
As this process gets more fleshed out, I will post my findings.
We’re in the middle of a mascot contest and are fortunate to have some good material video-wise. These videos are featured on our classiccollege.com website and YouTube.
We also recently updated our channel to fall in line with our brand and be a little more interesting.
Also, last month we were the #21st most viewed non-profit channel.
I am at the CF United Conference in Washington, DC this week. It has got me thinking of all the great ways I can use CF with Ajax and especially jQuery.
From some of the demos I have seen it looks like using CF to pull data in XML or JSON and using jQuery to display it should be a snap. I am looking forward to getting home and testing out some examples.
I know that many of my apps can use some more jQuery, but I’ve been too busy to get into it. So far this conference has inspired me to start hitting the jQuery books again.
I look forward to producing some hot new apps!
We are one week post launch, and I can finally start to breath easy.
The launch went better than expected, but was much more work that I ever thought it would be.
There are many great new features, we have a lot more flexibility in the design now, and we can create much more interesting page types.
We ended up getting really behind with our vendor, and I had to go Blacksburg, VA for about 10 days. We have spent the last week tuning and bug fixing and we think that things are working pretty well now.
Anyhow, the site is done, and now I should have more time to blog and discuss the great new features of the wonderful new site.
I know, it sounds like a space launch. But, no, it’s a website launch. Even though there are no rocket ships involved, it’s still pretty exciting.
Things have been a little crazy around the office lately, but we’re hanging in there. We are planning to publish the site tomorrow, barring any major setbacks. Not everything is 100% done, but it’s certainly done enough to launch and then we can keep working on it.
Nick from New City Media came onsite today to work with us and we (by we, I mean Nick) got our Quicklinks drop-down menu working, a new feature story component set up, our News Release schema completed, and fixed some navigation issues. So, we had a pretty productive day.
The virtual tour is complete minus the videos, so that will launch tomorrow as well. I’m very excited about that and proud of what we’ve done. Even though it’s just a glorified photo/video gallery, I think it’s really user-friendly and very helpful for someone to get a sense of the college and area. I’m not a fan of the map-based tours or the “guided” tours - I get bored and click away.
I’m really excited to get this thing published and out there, and I know Michael is too.
We are in the final phases of getting the new Web site launched (which is why this blog hasn’t been getting updated). Our new launch date is June 9. And as we careen towards that date, I feel like we are trying to put together a 10,000 piece puzzle.
Overall, things are going very well. I have spent the last several days at New City Media working with our developer, checklist in hand, just plowing through all the things that still need to get done. We have made major progress, but I know there will continue to be stumbling blocks, and of course we keep finding bugs.
So far the biggest benefit is that the new site design is so much more flexible. We have dozens of new widgets that we can add all around the site. And since we are making extensive use of XML feeds from various SQL databases, we are able to make the site much more dynamic.
I’ll try to post more as launch day gets closer!
