Casey Bisson at Plymouth State University up in central New Hampshire is working to make PSU an all WordPress environment.   Casey was a speaker at the WordPress Education I helped put together last year, speaking on his Scriblio library project (built on WordPress).  He recently sent an email on his latest work to move the school’s web content management to a WordPress MU installation, along with links to posts on his blog.  Hopefully Casey will have time to take a spot on the program for the April 2010 WordPress University workshop — in the meantime check out his blog posts for all sorts of good information and inspiration.

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Server administrators, web-application programmers, web site designers, help desk support, software companies, technology providers, government officials, and yes, even end-users — we are all responsible for information security on the internet.    We need to not fall for knee-jerk, and ineffective solutions — i.e.  strong passwords — or assume that certain technologies will keep us safe — i.e.  “I use a mac and they don’t get viruses”.  What can we do?  I am not a security expert with specific prescriptions to give — but remember, easy prescriptions don’t exist.  What is needed is an ongoing conversation — at my workplace the CIO recently held the first of a series of campus-wide forums to provide technology staff with information, and to gather ideas from all of us.  This is a good first step.  Here are a couple of other ideas: Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last 6 months my work environment seems to have gone poll-crazy.  Hardly a week goes by when some department on campus or some professional organization isn’t sending a survey invitation.  And I’m happy to participate, but it kind of stinks when you rarely see the results.  And from a technological reason there is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to see the results on-line — in fact I want to see the running results immediately after I finish the survey.  So let’s all start advocating for greater transparency in the poll and surveys we participate it.

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Looking for a quick development reference?  These pages from DZone might have what you are looking for.  I’m starting to look at some Drupal stuff are time away from it, and the Drupal Refcardz has some good information.  Unfortunately no WordPress card, but they do have NetBeans, and a fair amount of Java stuff.

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Andy Clarke, in a discussion of dealing with IE6, makes the really important point that a designer shouldn’t be required to make a web design look the same in every browser.  Let me expand that to statement to recognize that in addition to multiple browsers, we now need to be concerned with multiple operating systems, multiple devices (moble phone/laptop/desktop), and multiple distribution channels (Rss readers, newsletters, screen readers).   If we could once fool ourselves into thinking that we controlled how users viewed our pages, it is time to burst that bubble.

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An effective web application is more than just good coding — visual design is also a big part of making it usable.  This article from Smashing Magazine has some good suggestions.  There is even some useful javascript and CSS code to back up the examples.  Much of it is common sense, but a good reminder of what works.  Compare these two dialog boxes from the discussion on using verbs in labels:

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