Would you like to add some seasonal cheer to your WordPress site? If you activate the WP Snowfall plugin, you’ll notice a virtual version of what we can all hope to see outside in the coming days. You may need to change the background color your theme uses to a darker color so that you can get the full effect.
Enjoy the break and see you in the new year!
The following stats refer to activity on the Middlebury College Facebook page, the Middlebury College Twitter account, and share buttons on the main Middlebury College website. The Facebook Insights and ShareThis data are for the period November 1-30, 2012. The Twitter stats are for the period September 17 – December 17, 2012.
“Reach” is the number of people who saw the post. “Engagement” is the number of people who clicked on the post.
ShareThis is a service that tracks the clicks on the sharing buttons on our website. These buttons are shown on news postings, which are primarily found in the News Room, Arts, Sustainability, and Athletics sections of the site. On November 1, we moved these buttons from the bottom of the news posting into the right hand sidebar in an attempt to increase their visibility. For comparison, we include the numbers from October, 2012 to see if this had any effect, though because we had a very high-profile story in October (the visit of the Dalai Lama), we may not be able to get meaningful information from this sample.
Top five clicks.
This will be an ongoing series of posts to highlight some of the features that we have installed in WordPress that you might like to use on your site, but don’t know are available.
The Co-Authors Plus plugin lets you assign multiple authors to a single post or page. Each of these authors will have access to edit the post. This makes it a helpful tool for collaborative writing or reports from group projects.
If you’re using a theme that supports it (which all of the Middlebury-produced “Translucence” family of themes do), each author will also appear in the byline of the post. If you’re using a theme that doesn’t support this, let us know and we can add it to that theme.
The newest version of Co-Authors Plus also lets you add Guest Authors to your site. This is helpful if you want to have a post appear from a guest blogger who doesn’t have an account in the Middlebury system, or to post primary source material in the original author’s name. This can also be used on department or office sites to have posts appear under the name of the group, rather than a single person. Guest authors don’t have any privileges on the site, the post simply appears as if authored by them.
The Co-Authors Plus plugin can be enabled if you are an Administrator of a WordPress site in the Plugins section of the dashboard. Guest Authors can be added in the Users section.
This site, and all the others on sites.middlebury.edu, are now using version 3.5 of WordPress. Here is a video introducing some of the changes and new features.
There are two significant changes in this version:
More details are available in the official post about this new version and the developer documentation for WordPress.
Last week I attended the HighEdWeb Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Much of the discussion I participated in at the conference was about how to make your website “responsive”, which means to adapt the look-and-feel of your site to work with different screen resolutions, important for supporting the growing number of mobile devices and tablets. There were excellent presentations given by the web teams from Notre Dame (click for video) and the University of Nebraska (click for video) on this topic and I was able to attend a meet-up of about twenty web developers to further discuss responsive design.
While setting breakpoints using CSS media queries and worrying about lazy-loading lower resolution images and content scrolls are endlessly fascinating to me, I know that these are issues of niche interest. For those interested in how mobile technology is being applied in the classroom, Kyle Bowen from Purdue (click for video) talked about their program to solicit questions during lectures through the backchannel. Students submit questions through their app or through Twitter, Facebook, or other streams, an algorithm determines which questions are the most pertinent and then gives the instructor a list of topics they may wish to clarify. There’s more information about this on the Purdue Studio site and this write-up for EduCause.
The Middlebury Campus, our student paper, covered three stories about LIS this week.
TV Advertising To Students Most Effective; Email Best Reach from a 2012 College Marketing Report from the Barnes & Noble College Marketing Division
You can now let people know how many machines are available in Middlebury computer labs in your department, building, or campus-wide. Add the following short codes to any content in our Drupal site.
| [labserver] | Shows the total number of available lab machines on campus. |
| [labserver 65] | Shows the total number of available lab machines in lab 65, which is LIB 105. |
| [labserver 65,43,58,15,13,14] | Shows the total number of available lab machines in multiple labs. In this case I’ve listed all of the labs in the Davis Family Library. |
To get the number for a lab, you can go to the main LabStats page and click on one of the labs. The URL will content some text like “id=65″ and that is the number to use in the short code. The LabStats site also has a lot of other information about our computing labs.
Thanks to Petar Mitrevski for helping out with some configuration on the LabStats site to support this new feature.
LIS Staff Middlebury Community MiddPoints