Modo Labs’ current offerings, Mobile Campus, and Kurogo, are being renamed as follows:

Mobile Campus -> Kurogo Campus Professional
Kurogo -> Kurogo Campus Community
and -> Kurogo Core

The latest version of Kurogo Campus Community, 1.8, was announced and released during the conference. The 1.8 version includes a number of new enhancements already present in Kurogo Campus Professional. Highlights include a desktop interface similar to our desktop portal view, as well as a lot of behind the scenes enhancements like better theming and config handling.

Modo Labs laid out a road map of Kurogo including the following information:

- Community Edition 1.8 out today!
- 1.9 (mostly updates for the Campus Professional version) 2013 late Q2
– Improved admin panel/self admin
– New templates
- 2.0 Q3 2013 for both Community and Professional versions.
– Revamped frontend based on UX widgets
– Data Retrieval via JSON, RSS, SOAP, which is attached to the widget, which is then attached to the module.
– JQuery bundled in project.
– Able to include an individual screen/page as a native app.

I attended the developer track session in the afternoon where we went over the creation of a custom module, in this case, to pull questions from Stack Overflow. The custom module included the creation of 4 main classes: Module, Model, Retriever, and Parser. This session helped me to better understand the current module structure.

I look forward to continuing to support our instances of Kurogo as the platform grows and develops.

- Accordion style dining menu. Based on user feedback we’ve made it easy to see the menu information all at once and to compare venues from a panel on the desktop Portal. Depending on the time of day, it defaults to expand a different meal category by default.

- Post module. This module presents avenues to post information to feeds that the Portal consumes. You are encouraged to contribute to these platforms with relevant content which will be featured in the Portal.

- GO module. This module is intended for mobile. It provides a text box for entering GO shortcuts so you are able to take advantage of GO shortcut redirection more easily on your mobile device.

Please visit: http://portal.middlebury.edu/ or http://m.middlebury.edu/ to use these features.

Many thanks to those who have provided feedback via the feedback form and those who have provided support and guidance in the development of modules for the Portal.

You’ll find this feature under the “View/Edit” tab of the self-service admin interface. There is now a field for entering a single admin username. The user will be added or removed as an admin of any codes you check before hitting the corresponding submit button. A handy “check all” box allows you to make an addition for all shortcuts that you are an admin of.

You are not able to remove yourself as admin from a shortcut if you are the only admin via this feature. Instead you are prompted to add another user as an admin to discourage the orphaning of GO shortcuts.

I hope this feature makes the administration of your GO shortcuts easier and more enjoyable!

Main site and mobile site speed improvements

Our main website and mobile website make fabulous use of data feeds from blogs, calendars, Twitter, and other sources to provide up-to-date news and information to users of the sites. Some pages in the main site have as many as 3 feeds in the carousel at the bottom of the page and another 2 feeds in sidebars. The mobile site displays 7 feeds on its home page for desktop users.

Unfortunately displaying all of these feeds on the site was causing performance problems for users when those feeds needed to be refreshed.  Even if the blog system returns each feed in under a second, that time adds up and was making users wait for 10 seconds or more for some pages to load.

We are happy to announce that we have now resolved this issue by piping all of our data-feed access through a system we call FetchProxy. FetchProxy sits between Drupal and the source of the data feeds and keeps a fresh copy of the feed always available so that Drupal never has to sit and wait for feeds. Pages that once took more than 10 seconds to load, now load in 1-2 seconds. You can read more about FetchProxy on Github.

Campus Map

We’ve updated the interface for our Campus Map with the help of designers in College Communications. New features include a list of locations with quick icons to help you find special locations, a search interface, an improved photo gallery, and more special filters which allow you to scope the locations on the map. For instance, you can get a map of all the locations on campus with Wireless.

MiddMedia

A permalink is now available for each file in MiddMedia. You can access it for a particular video you click the “Embed Code & URLs” next to any video you are browsing in MiddMedia and click on the “Click here to view and/or download this file.”. Alternately you can construct this URL like this “http://middmedia.middlebury.edu/middmedia/view/dir/[the directory where the file is located]/file/[the name of the file with its extension]

Example: http://middmedia.middlebury.edu/middmedia/view/dir/lafrance/file/go.mp4

This is useful if you want to reference your video without embedding it elsewhere.

Web Portal

M.middlebury.edu, home to our mobile portal and web portal has recently seen an update to the web portal customization options. This includes the ability to customize portal panels in the left and right columns independently. Panels can now be chosen from the full list of currently available modules. You still have the option to toggle default modules off and rearrange modules. This goes for the modules that appear in the navigation and the ones that appear as panels on the home page.

MiddLab

Working papers published by the Economics department are now automatically added as projects in MiddLab. We’ll be adding other feeds to MiddLab in the near future.

MiddSTART

The MiddSTART site got a minor facelift. You can now view the MiddSTART Success Stories and special categories of projects, like Scholarships.

MiddMedia is not a video browsing and search service. To share a video with others you must embed it in a website visible to your intended audience. This website might be a Middlebury Drupal page, a WordPress blog, a MediaWiki wiki, or another site on campus or elsewhere on the internet.

Features of MiddMedia:

• Free for Middlebury College users
• All users get 500MB of storage space by default
• Requests for additional storage space will be granted if appropriate.
• Video quality is not restricted when uploading in original quality, DVD-quality is possible
• Video length is not restricted, only total storage-space usage (which is 500MB by default [see above], 1.5GB per file).
• Local network location means that high quality videos can be streamed instantly around campus.
• Videos can be of any aspect ratio (such as tall and narrow)
• Supports MP3/M4a audio
• Video uploads are private, access control is totally dependent on where you embed the video (if anywhere).
• Download links are available for all audio and video.
• Upload and insertion plugins are available for WordPress.

Some changes have been made to the MiddMedia platform in the past year. Videos are now encoded in two video formats supported by browser based HTML5 compliant video players; mp4 and webm. This will ease display of videos on mobile devices and across modern browsers. The embed code generated by MiddMedia includes a Flash fallback to our recently updated Strobe player.

Note: None of our on-campus platforms support the copy and paste of this embed code (to my knowledge), however it can be made use of on other sites. Currently Mediawiki still uses the Flash player only, and WordPress does not support webm. Drupal makes use of a full HTML5 style embed with Flash fallback. Documentation on working with videos in our on-campus platforms can be found here:

- Drupal: http://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/LIS/Editing_in_Drupal#Video
- WordPress: http://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/LIS/WordPress_MU#Embedding_Video
- MediaWiki: http://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/LIS/MiddMedia#Using_audio.2Fvideo_from_MiddMedia_in_MediaWiki

On upload, quality settings can now be specified if you’d like to generate specific quality versions of files. There are also now some basic controls for collapsing folders making it easier if you have multiple folders to browse. Additional documentation may be found here.

If you’d like to see a list of shortcuts that are currently available simply type “go” into the address bar of your web browser. If you are off campus you may use “go.middlebury.edu”. If you’d like to visit a go shortcut directly from on campus simply type it into your address bar. For instance type “go/liswiki” and hit “enter” to get to the LIS wiki page.

Chances are you will use a go link without even realizing it by clicking on a normal anchor (link) in a web page. You can use a GO shortcut as a URL in a link on a web page for any page internal to middlebury.edu. Example: <a href=”http://go.middlebury.edu/liswiki”>LIS Wiki</a>. You’ll want to use a GO shortcut rather than a direct link for any resources you are linking to that could change location. As long as the shortcut admin updates the shortcut when a content location changes you won’t need to update any of your links.

GO eased the launch of the new site by allowing links in content to be easily updated en-mass. GO has also become central to our search strategy as GO shortcuts are now provided as suggestions and automatic-redirects when you enter search terms on the main site.

This year we’ve added additional features to GO, such at the community moderation of GO shortcuts, an improved editing and admin interface, as well as the ability to generate a QR code for any go shortcut by visiting its info page.

Box Office

• The Box Office page now has a mobile theme. Any device that supports CSS media queries will now see a mobile friendly version of the Box Office allowing for easier browsing and purchase of tickets on the go!

Drupal

• Image enclosures now appear for the news stories features in the MIIS news feed.
• We’ve made a significant page speed improvement in the module that allows you to add meta tags to pages and nodes. This module no longer creates over 1,000 extra database queries every time a page is loaded.
• Updated modules: select_or_other

MediaWiki

• You can now properly indent text in MediaWiki using the following wiki code:
  : single indent
  :: double indent
  ::: triple indent

Summon

• Serials Solutions will perform an upgrade to Summon on August 2nd. This will include significant changes to the appearance of the search results, to make them an easier-to-read and more informative. To see the effect before it goes live, follow http://middlebury.uipreview.summon.serialssolutions.com/
  (book availability doesn’t show up on the preview, but it will live!)

WordPress

• Added Chinese localization files.

The Web Application Development Team has been hard at work making enhancements to the MiddMedia application in order to better support mobile platforms, the current HTML5 standards, and our users. Below are some of the enhancements that have been made in the past month.

• As part of the recent HTML5 standard, modern browsers support the native playback of video files using an HTML5 video tag. All videos uploaded to MiddMedia are now encoded in both H.264 and WebM formats so that they can be played natively in browsers that support H.264 (IE 9, Safari, iOS) and WebM (Firefox 4, Chrome, Opera, Android), and allow better support for mobile browsers.
• When uploading a video, you can now select the quality that will be used when the video is transcoded (original, 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p). Previously a single standard of around 480p was used unless the videos were encoded in Mp4 or Flv to start with. Now you may choose additional high-def qualities (NOTE: Does not upscale video), or original to preserve quality as closely as possible during encoding to multiple formats.
• Embed code references the Mp4 and WebM versions of the videos for HTML5 compliant browsers. All others will fall back to a Flash player (the recently updated Strobe Player). Videos embedded in the Drupal site with the video short code also display in this manner. Instructions on embeding videos from MiddMedia in Drupal are available here.
• Added basic support for M4a files. Users can now upload M4a audio files to MiddMedia. Quicktime may be required to preview them in the MiddMedia application. The WordPress MiddMedia plug-in allows you to embed m4a files in WordPress blogs/pages. You can add these to your posts as you normally would for other audio/video files. When the post is displayed, you will see the m4a with images in a video player if you are using Safari, or a link to the m4a file that users with other browsers can download and play in an application like iTunes or QuickTime. NOTE: To ensure your audio files will be accessible to the broadest range of listeners and devices, we recommend using the .mp3 format unless you have a special use case that requires m4a.
• A new show/hide feature will allow users to toggle show/hide behavior for folders in MiddMedia. For users who only have access to a single personal folder this feature will not be of much use, but for users with access to several shared directories this will help with navigation of multiple folders with many videos.

We hope you enjoy the new enhancements!