WRMC’s Stacks & Tracks is back! With guest DJ, Prof. Christopher Star

We’re back. On the air, and live streaming, at a new time.

Wednesdays, 12p-1p

Tune-in during your lunch hour to the radio show that reveals the secrets of special collections.

This week we’ll be joined by guest DJ, Classics Professor Christopher Star for Episode #12, featuring music and talk inspired by the thought, art, and life of ancient Greece and Rome.

Mozart to Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash to The Doors. Be there. And be enlightened. With a soundtrack.

91.1FM | iTunes radio | listen online | on your phone

Stacks and Tracks

WRMC Studio, 1970. From the Middlebury College Archives.

Weekly Web Updates – March 7, 2016

You No Longer Need to Wait Five Minutes to See Your Drupal Changes (Most of the Time)

When you save content, save page settings, or create new content, that change will now immediately appear for everyone browsing the site, whether they are logged in or not. We use a caching service named Varnish that takes the rendered output from Drupal and keeps it in memory for five minutes. Everyone who is not logged in visiting the site (if you’re logged in you will always get an un-cached copy) will get the copy of the page from Varnish within that five minute window, meaning Drupal doesn’t need to use resources recreating the page for each visitor. After five minutes, the next person to request that page will get it from Drupal and Varnish will update its cache with the new copy.

Now, when you update or create new content on many of our Drupal sites, Varnish will be notified in the background that it should clear its cache and get the new copy of the page. So even if it’s only been a minute since the page was requested when you click the save button, the next visitor will get a fresh copy of the page from Drupal with your latest changes.

Unfortunately, this does not work for content displayed in page regions other than the main content area. If you update a sidebar item on a department homepage, the cache will only clear for that homepage, not all of the sub-pages on which the sidebar item might also appear. You’ll still need to wait the five minutes for that to happen.

We have only made this change to the Drupal sites where we run Monster Menus. Right now, that includes:

  • www.middlebury.edu
  • www.miis.edu
  • forms.middlebury.edu
  • forms.miis.edu
  • courses.middlebury.edu
  • courses.miis.edu
  • museum.middlebury.edu
  • www.davisfellowsforpeace.org
  • www.davisprojectsforpeace.org
  • www.davisuwcscholars.org

We will roll out a similar change to our other Drupal sites soon.

Updates

Fixes & Tweaks

  • We’ve corrected several JavaScript errors that were preventing the footer from appearing correctly on the L&ITS Wiki.
  • The Audio Player plugin for MediaWiki now works as intended.
  • Drupal webform radio and checkbox lists that are marked as required will now correctly show the red asterisk next to their field label when the field allows “Other…” as an option. It was missing, previously.
  • The Site Editor Log In link on the Middlebury Drupal site now appears in bright green on blue backgrounds, making it visible.
  • We have removed the WordPress Simple Footnotes Editor Button plugin, which no longer works.
  • We have removed the Pinterest link from the MIIS site footer.
  • The Varnish 503 Error page has been re-themed to provide better messaging during an error or widespread downtime.

@MiddInfoSec: Beware of Presidential Election Related Phishing Emails

Every election year we find our senses pounded with propaganda from pundits and candidates trying to sway us to one political camp or another. Computer attackers are leveraging our curiosity, and perhaps desensitization to political messages to launch attacks with purportedly political themes.

Recent phishing attacks that have been reported by security firms such as KnowBe4 include:

  • Trump Withdraws from Presidential Race
  • Sanders Withdraws from Presidential Race
  • Update your voter registration
  • Hillary Clinton Indicted by FBI on Email Scandal

Watch for these and other email phishing attacks. Know how to spot a phish. Learn more at http://go.middlebury.edu/phish.

Weekly Web Updates – February 29, 2016

Updates

Fixes & Tweaks

  • The MIIS Course Hub now has a print stylesheet so that the course photo rosters can be printed off without cutting people’s faces in half on page breaks.
  • Vimeo embeds in our Drupal sites now have the “allowfullscreen” attribute, so people can watch them in full screen mode, if they wish.
  • Shows that overflow into the next day on the WRMC schedule will now just appear on the day in which they begin.
  • Our CategorySuggest plugin for MediaWiki now has a Spanish translation and can allow categories beginning with lowercase letters, if those are configured for the MediaWiki site.
  • Recycle Bins will no longer appear in the drop down navigation on the MIIS site.
  • Fixed an issue that was preventing the sidebar navigation from working on some MIIS sub-sites like MonTREP.
  • The MIDD and MIIS Course Hub’s now use Drupal’s Batch API to handle course builds, which helps prevent page timeouts and keeps the build interface consistent.

Work Study – a poem

Thanks to poet Gary Margolis for sharing this library-related poem.

Work Study

Memory requests a title from the closed
stacks. An exchange student is sent
into the basement to retrieve an available book.
Downstairs he remembers he saw a couple

of co-eds making love in their end-of-semester
carrel. They didn’t look up. Never asked
if he wrote his mother in Ethiopia. They just
kept going at it. A phrase he learned

in his ESL class. Perhaps one day he’d recall
in his home-at-last house. Retrieve a fact
he learned for a test. Memories aren’t stored
like books. What we feel and smell and see,

what we touch, chapters it wouldn’t be wrong
to say, kept separately in the brain’s foreign
places. Experienced pieces of love and near-love.
We can retrieve if we remember to ask. Even

when they’re found where they’re supposed to be.
Next to another story, a text, an oversized
compendium of maps. And carried, close to the chest,
floor by floor, up to the circulation desk.

-Gary Margolis

Large Format Poster Printing

Updated as of Fall 2019: Everyone loves the ability to create and print large scale graphic representations of our work but we hate the error messages, ink stripes, and “Plotter is down” signs on the doorway to the lab.

Finals week spring term 2014. Not a pretty day for the plotter.

Finals week spring term 2014. Not a pretty day for the plotter.

Like any piece of mechanical equipment that is heavily used, the plotter will occasionally break. Although we usually have no warning when this is about to happen, there are a few things that everyone can do to help us tame the plotter.

Professors –

  • The large format plotter printer is now located in the Davis Library at the print station near Circulation. See the ITS for more information about printing, including information about the plotters.
  • The plotters will only be available when the libraries are open. There will be staff at Circulation that may be able to offer printing advice, but most likely the best choice is to contact the ITS HelpDesk if your students have issue printing their posters.
  • Be sure your students know how to use the best tools to create a poster. (A lot of students use PowerPoint files that can be challenging to scale correctly. We recommend using Illustrator and provide docs for how to do this too!) Faculty can also request a poster tutorial session for their class by submitting a helpdesk ticket here.  
  • If you are requiring posters for your class and want your department to cover the cost of poster printing follow these instructions early in the semester.

Students –

  • Don’t underestimate the amount of time it takes to create a visual piece of work. It might seem like it will come together faster than a paper, but often there is just one component that you can’t get to look just right, or a feature in Adobe Illustrator that is not working the way you expected.
  • The Office of Digital Learning & Inquiry has some resources to support large format poster creation on their Toolshed & Tutorials site, scroll down and search for “Creating Posters with Adobe Illustrator”
  • More in-depth tutorials for Illustrator are available with your Middlebury subscription to Linkedin Learning. For example, see: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training (login with your Middlebury network email and password to access)
  • Make an appointment with a DLINQ student intern to review poster design tools and your project plan.
  • Fully proof your poster on the screen before sending the file to print on the plotter.

Everyone

Recycle your scraps and remember that advanced planning is often the key to success!

Weekly Web Updates – February 22, 2016

New Features

The Middlebury Institute homepage received a new design. This features three content regions (the slideshow, Important Dates, and Academic Highlights) that can be edited by the Communications team at MIIS in the admin interface directly, giving them more flexibility in ensuring timely content appears on their site.

As part of an update to the WRMC website, we’ve added the Chat plugin to WordPress, which you can now activate to add a chat box to your site. You can try it out by chatting with the WRMC DJs.

At the request of several MIIS programs, we have added a WordPress plugin to that embeds appointment booking from the Simplybook.me service.

We added a block to the Middlebury Drupal site to display tweets from @MiddInfoSec.

Updates

Tweaks and Fixes

  • We made many updates to improve the WRMC site, at the direction of their board. The weekly schedule now starts the day at midnight, rather than 5am. The “On Air” section only shows up if a show is in progress and the current playing song will be shown based on the DJ playlist and the duration of the song, according to Last.FM. In addition to many other small stylistic tweaks, we’ve fixed a performance issue that caused very long page loads.
  • The Quick Chat plugin was replaced with the Chat plugin in WordPress and the former is no longer available for use.
  • The Arclite WordPress theme only allowed network administrators to access its settings form. It may now be access by site administrators.
  • If you try to view a syllabus on the Course Hub that is private and you’re not logged in, you will now see a “not authorized” message rather than a “no syllabus added” message.
  • Fixed an issue on the non-flash version of the MiddMedia uploader that was causing problems.
  • The MIIS forms site is now included in the weekly SiteImprove index.
  • Navigation for the “Giving” sub-section of the MIIS site was updated in GO, the Course Catalog, the MIIS forms site, and the MIIS Directory.
  • The CSS file for the Drupal “Edit Console” is now loaded in a way that allows it to be merged with all the other Drupal CSS files, saving your browser having to issue a separate request to download it.
  • We have removed the “Location Type” taxonomy and the “Location” content type from the Middlebury Drupal site. These were used for an older version of the Campus Map. The current campus map is hosted externally.