RodeWorks

Disk space is cheap these days, and that’s a good thing, right?  It was just several years ago that an annual ritual was to force all departments to go through their stored documents and clean things up to keep within the limited disk space on our file server.  In the last two years we’ve moved to an expanded storage device, and our usage has climbed over three years from 80gb to almost 800gb.  So gone is the ritual of the annual clean-up, but I don’t know that we’re any better off.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I am testing the ability to post directly from my new blackberry. The keyboard will take some getting used to, but the mobile connectivity is very nice.

It seems to me that in the higher ed tech world we often try to “do it all” ourselves — we want to own and maintain the hardware, we want to develop the applications, we want to run the training and support, and we want to host all the content.  And these aren’t all bad instincts.  It shows we want to provide a high level of service to our users and we place great value on the intellectual capital held in the stored information on our systems.  But the tech world is changing quickly (like that’s some kind of news flash!) and we can’t continue to control everything and still innovate at the pace our users expect and the technologies demand.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just got a new Blackberry, so I’m exploring the mobile-browser world — and it ain’t pretty. So I decided that at least my blog should be mobile ready. My standard practice is to say to myself “I bet someone has already done this for WordPress…” do a search and see what I find. And I’m not often dissappointed. I found a WordPress Mobile Plugin from Andy Moore that works very well — easy to configure with just one blemish. The default settings for the plugin feed mobile adds to the browsing sessions. I guess the deal is if you register with them you can get some click-through type revenue, but I HATE these types of adds. But its easy to remove by simply deleting the AD key that comes already configured in the plug-in. I certainly think Mr. Moore is entitled to credit for writing a very nice plugin, and if you don’t mind, passing some click-through ad revenue to him is fine, but its not for me.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure what this is good for, but its really cool.  A mashup of a google map that tracks the location of Wikipedia edits in real time.

WikipediaVision (beta)

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been using Googly Analytics on our web sites for the last year.  It works really well, I guess.  I hate to admit it, but the amount of information seems overwhelming, and I haven’t really taken the time to dig into the information very far.  There’s interesting tidbits in there, but overall I don’t find the information influencing how the site is developed.

Read the rest of this entry »