During the past few months we have been seeing an increased amount of comment spam coming into WordPress (sites.middlebury.edu) that follows a distinctive pattern: the comment text is useless, but unoffensive and contains no links itself, while the Comment Author Website field contains the URL of a commercial site. Because the comment text doesn’t contain any links, the comment doesn’t get picked up by WordPress’s existing spam filters and until now would be held for moderation. More
I’ve added 132 new themes to our instance of WordPress that can be used for your department, course, and personal blogs. The eight themes that we previously had have been renamed #1-8 so that they show up first in the list, followed by the new options. If you need a theme with a particular color, layout, or features, click the “Feature Filter” link on the right side of the Themes page and check the boxes that apply to your needs.
You can click on one of the thumbnails in the Themes page to see a preview of your blog in the new theme.
If you want to blog, but the Middlebury blogging network is lacking something you need, let us know.
I’ve added two new plugins today that you can use to connect your blog on sites.middlebury.edu with people through social media. In this post, I’ll describe what they do as well as cover a couple of options we’ve had for a while that you might not know about. For official organizational blogs, like this one, I’ve got an officially-ish Facebook app and ShareThis and Disqus accounts ready to go, so talk to me first.
As of today, instructors can create Course Hub sites for lab, discussion, independent study, and other section-types that do not have Course Hub sites automatically created.
Lab/discussion Course Hub sites are not needed for the majority of courses as the lecture/seminar sites usually suffice. However, they may be useful in the following cases:
I’ve been working with staff in College Communications, College Advancement and the office of the Vice President for Administration to develop a coherent strategy for managing the College’s social media networks and engaging with people through them. I’ve been asked to update you on our progress so far and where we hope to go from here. We have some exciting work ahead of us in the Spring and are always looking for new ideas and inspirations, so please feel free to ask questions and make suggestions about any of this.
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On November 22, I added some code to our homepage that tracks when someone clicks on one of the waveform bars to open a story and when they click on the links within that story to read more about it. This doesn’t count the story that is initially open when you load the page. This tracking is done using the Google Analytics* Event Tracking code, which we can use to measure user interactions with the site. If you have suggestions on other activities that we can measure, please let me know.
Since November 22, 67,888 story bars have been opened on the home page, 20,973 of which have been “unique events”. Unique Events is the number of visits during which one or more events occurred. This means that an average visitor to the site who opens at least one story will open 3.24 stories during their home page visit. The people who use the waveform, like to click around and view multiple stories.
Around 1,000 stories are opened every day on the site. The day with the most opened stories was January 9 when 1,457 stories were opened. The day with the fewest opened stories was December 25 when only 461 stories were opened (Thanksgiving was a close second here with 464 stories opened). The most opened stories was A Green Tour of Campus which was opened 1,641 times since November 22. The least opened story (7 times) was Field Hockey Falls in NCAA Title Game, though that story was published shortly before we began tracking and may not have been featured for very long.
The average story was opened 411 times. In all, 161 different stories were opened on the home page. This is significant because, we generally have around 100 stories on the homepage at any given time; currently there are 90. This means that every story in the waveform is getting attention from some number of people visiting the site. There are usually a half dozen “featured” stories that are in the rotation of stories which will automatically open when you visit the site. These are always in the center of the waveform. The position of the remaining stories is random, changing once every five minutes or so when the cache for the homepage is regenerated.
One thing to note is that the waveform serves the primary audience of the homepage: external visitors. Of the 67,888 stories opened since November 22, only 12,491 were opened by people browsing on the Middlebury campus. Local users are better served by the new portal, which contains these stories alongside other information we hope is useful to the community. Also since November 22, the average time on page for an external visitor** was 3 minutes and 7 seconds, showing that visitors do stay and play with the waveform feature.
Of the 20,973 visits where someone opened at least one story, 8,344 resulted in the person clicking to read one of the stories they opened. The most read story was an AP article about a Middlebury alum winning Survivor: South Pacific. Other popular stories were A Green Tour of Campus, One Thing to Remember for Finals Week, and a Thank You to Donors for the Holidays.
These are my conclusions from this data:
* See the Middlebury Privacy Policy for our data collection policy. The Middlebury website does respect the Do Not Track header, if you have that turned on in your browser.
** The average time on page for an local visitor was 5 minutes and 43 seconds, but these stats get skewed by lab and walk-up machines where the homepage is their default page in the browser and are left on all day.
All 316 records from the Digital Lecture Archive are now available for browsing in MiddLab where they can be browsed with the subject tags assigned to them, commented on, and shared with others using the social media links in MiddLab. As new recordings are adding to the archive, they’ll be automatically added to MiddLab, making this a great way to find new content.
One of the original goals of MiddLab was to increase the visibility of Middlebury’s many academic projects and resources that would otherwise be buried within the site by giving them a central site accessible from the main site header. Adding the Digital Lecture Archive is just one of many such planned additions to MiddLab.
If you have other suggestions, please let me know and remember that it’s easier than ever before to tell the world about your research through MiddLab.
You can also follow MiddLab on Facebook and Twitter.
I was in New York City on Monday at the CASE D1/D2 conference to present MiddSTART with colleagues Maggie Paine, the Director of Advancement Communications, and Molly Sullivan, the Assistant Director of Donor Relations. My role was to speak briefly about the technology behind MiddSTART and answer any technical questions that came up. You can view the slides from our presentation in this PDF.
MiddSTART went live in September 2010, but it wasn’t until March 2011 that we’d finalized the site, added student projects, and begun advertising it. Since then, MiddSTART has raised $58,955 from 380 donors in FY11 and an additional $26,183 from 214 donors in FY 2012. The average gift size as $155 in FY11 and $122 in FY12. Between the two fiscal years there have been 50 repeat donors.
On the technology side, MiddSTART is a WordPress blog, on the same server as this LIS blog, just with a custom theme. Each post on the blog is a different project and is linked to a different form that Advancement staff create in our Harris Connect Alumni Community. Each of those donations forms has a unique code, which can be seen in the nightly reports that we fetch from our credit card processor. Those donation amounts and the names of the donors are added to a custom database table in our WordPress site and used to calculate the donation totals for the MiddSTART projects.
Most of the questions at the conference had to do with concerns from other schools about this taking away from undirected giving, but we’ve seen that a large number of the donations (187 in FY11, 109 in FY12) were from people with no previous history of donating to Middlebury. Many also give to multiple projects and like the experience of communicating directly with the student(s) using their gift to carry out the project work.
Just last week we set up MiddGOAL, a copy of the MiddSTART site that is solely focused on Athletics fundraising. Right now people can fund the teams’ training trips through the site, which you’ll see has already brought in over $10,000 in a little less than a week.
Segue from Segue Teaching with Technology LIS Staff Middlebury Community MiddPoints
