Posts by Ian McBride

 
 
 

WordPress Updated to version 3.5

December 13, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

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:

  1. A new interface for media that makes organizing images and creating image galleries easier.
  2. A new default theme, “Twenty Twelve”, that features a responsive design to make your site look great on any device: desktop, tablet, or phone.

More details are available in the official post about this new version and the developer documentation for WordPress.

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November 2012 Web Stats

December 6, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

Traffic

  1. www.middlebury.edu: 484,592 visits from 277,343 people
  2. sites.middlebury.edu: 73,677 visits from 61,300 people
  3. menus.middlebury.edu: 34,571 visits from 21,135 people
  4. moodle.middlebury.edu: 33,697 visits from 24,944 people
  5. catalog.middlebury.edu: 30,328 visits from 26,732 people
  6. courses.middlebury.edu: 24,268 visits from 22,177 people
  7. mediawiki.middlebury.edu: 19,289 visits from 17,912 people
  8. portal.middlebury.edu: 14,211 visits from 12,053 people
  9. biblio.middlebury.edu: 13,395 visits from 12,008 people
  10. web.middlebury.edu: 10,959 visits from 10,319 people

Top Pages

  1. www.middlebury.edu: 276,399 pageviews
  2. catalog.middlebury.edu/schedules/index/catalog/catalog/MCUG/term/term/201320: 61,913 pageviews
  3. www.middlebury.edu/athletics: 45,022 pageviews
  4. menus.middlebury.edu: 36,887 pageviews
  5. moodle.middlebury.edu: 29,559 pageviews
  6. www.middlebury.edu/academics: 29,045 pageviews
  7. www.middlebury.edu/admissions: 22,153 pageviews
  8. courses.middlebury.edu/dashboard: 20,084 pageviews
  9. courses.middlebury.edu: 19,615 pageviews
  10. www.middlebury.edu/athletics/sports: 18,837 pageviews

Search Terms

  1. Search Midd: 752
  2. academic calendar: 338
  3. mojo: 180
  4. schedule planner: 172
  5. winter term: 133
  6. sites.middlebury.edu: 129
  7. course hub: 121
  8. distribution requirements: 115
  9. menu: 109
  10. registration: 89

Browsers

  • Safari: 39.51%
  • Chrome: 22.83%
  • Firefox: 18.11%
  • Internet Explorer: 17.22%
    • IE8: 9.35%
    • IE9: 5.54%
    • IE7: 2.19%
    • IE10: 0.07%
    • IE6: 0.06%

Platforms

  • Macintosh: 49.83%
  • Windows: 39.38%
  • iOS: 8.74%
  • Android: 1.17%
  • Linux: 0.34%
  • BlackBerry: 0.13%
  • Windows Phone: 0.04%
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HighEdWeb 2012 Conference Report

October 17, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

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.

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Showing Lab Availability in Drupal

July 4, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

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.

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WordPress Upgraded to version 3.4

June 26, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

The Middlebury and MIIS blogging communities are now running on WordPress 3.4. This introduces three new features.

  • A theme customizer that lets you change your site’s settings and styles in one interface.
  • Automatic Twitter embeds. Paste the URL of a Tweet into one of your posts and it will automatically show up in the post, like the example below.
  • HTML Image Captions. When writing an image caption you can include some HTML tags like <b>, <i>, and <a> to add information to your caption.

Here’s a video that highlights these features.

There is more information available about WordPress 3.4 in their official blog and developer documentation.

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Sit back and watch our homepage

June 5, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

For the last two and a half years, College Communications has picked a set of one to a dozen stories that are “featured” at any one time on our homepage. When you visit http://www.middlebury.edu, one of these stories will randomly open. Now, another featured story will open after eight seconds, until all of the featured stories have been shown at least once, at which point they’ll start over again.

If you would like to pause this and explore the stories on your own schedule, just click to open one of the story bars. This will stop it from advancing to another story, giving you time to read the title and caption.

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New Website for the Davis United World College Scholars Program

May 8, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

I’m pleased to announce the launch of a new website for the Davis United World College Scholars program. The site was designed by Mark Zelis in College Communications and much of the content on the site was updated for the new design by Regan Eberhart in College Communications and Maggie Paine in College Advancement. In addition to the new design, the site features a host of new stories about the program.

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