Infrastructure Maintenance for Moodle and Measure

We have received a message from Remote-Learner, our Moodle hosting company, that they will be doing some maintenance to improve the security of the service. Expect disruptions in service between 1-6am on Saturday, February 16th.

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Dear Valued Client,

In order to install new security upgrades and additional security features, Remote-Learner’s IT technical support division has planned a five-hour maintenance. During the maintenance period internet connectivity may be briefly disrupted several times on February 16th from 1:00 am EST to 6:00 am EST.

The new upgrades and security features will provide additional hosting security for clients.  Ultimately, we believe that you will be pleased with the security updates, and we ask in advance that you accept our apologies for any inconvenience you may experience. We welcome your feedback on our efforts to continue to provide quality customer service and we request that you direct any questions and concerns related to this scheduled maintenance to Remote-Learner’s support division.

Sincerely,

The Remote-Learner Team

January 2013 Social Media Stats

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. For trend comparison, the previous month’s statistics are included in parentheses, where appropriate.

Facebook Insights

  • 233 (325) new people liked our Page, while 52 (62) people unliked our Page.
  • 801 (938) unique people shared stories about our page. These stories include liking our Page, posting to our Page’s Wall, liking, commenting on or sharing one of our Page posts, answering a Question we posted, RSVPing to one of our events, mentioning our Page, phototagging our Page or checking in at our Place.
  • 20737 (28907) unique people saw one of the items shared in that way.
  • 48283 (52082) unique people saw content associated with our Page.

Top Five Facebook Posts

“Reach” is the number of people who saw the post. “Engagement” is the number of people who clicked on the post.

  1. Board of trustees promotes seven members of Middlebury faculty. Reach: 6804, Engagement: 711
  2. “Dan Rather Reports” features the amazing story of Kenyan Middlebury student athlete Gilbert Kipkorir.  Reach: 5640, Engagement: 273
  3. Middlebury’s been recognized again for the excellence of its environmental studies program. Reach: 5167, Engagement: 632
  4. Middlebury College cross country skiers have stand-out performances at U.S. Nationals. Reach: 4811, Engagement: 255
  5. Former provost and longtime faculty member at Middlebury College will become the first woman president of Lafayette College. Reach: 4790, Engagement:351

ShareThis

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 Athleticssections of the site.

Shares By Channel

  • Facebook: 51 (60) Shares, 3332 (1326) Clicks
  • Twitter: 43 (24) Shares, 425 (264) Clicks
  • Email: 39 (21) Shares, 1050 (130) Clicks
  • LinkedIn: 13 (11) Shares, 6 (20) Clicks

Top Five Shared Pages

  1. Panther Cross Country Athlete Featured On Dan Rather Reports 21 Shares, 646 Clicks
  2. MIL, Middlebury College launch Vermont World Language Initiative 11 Shares, 186 Clicks
  3. Middlebury Center for Social Entrepreneurship to host symposium Jan. 24-26 10 Shares, 69 Clicks
  4. Alison Byerly named president of Lafayette College 9 Shares, 362 Clicks
  5. Panel discussion on Jan. 22 will explore how endowment should be invested 9 Shares, 249 Clicks

Data Sets

January 2013 Web Stats

For trend comparison, the previous month’s statistics are included in parentheses.

Traffic

  1. www.middlebury.edu: 520,072 (401,037) visits from 270,184 (217,374) people
  2. sites.middlebury.edu: 51,526 (40,982) visits from 44,242 (35,254) people
  3. menus.middlebury.edu: 33,886 (20,664) visits from 18,177 (11,888) people
  4. mediawiki.middlebury.edu: 20,887 (15,633) visits from 19,447 (14,481) people
  5. web.middlebury.edu: 11,891 (7,436) visits from 10,961 (7,045) people
  6. biblio.middlebury.edu: 10,524 (8,743) visits from 9,104 (7,159) people
  7. portal.middlebury.edu: 9,710 (9,389) visits from 7,416 (7,229) people
  8. courses.middlebury.edu: 7,771 (12,382) visits from 6,340 (10,720) people
  9. catalog.middlebury.edu 7,295 (5,971) visits from 7,262 (4,378) people
  10. boxoffice.middlebury.edu 6,092 (4,720) visits from 5,184 (4,093) people

Top Pages

  1. www.middlebury.edu: 286,339 (236,800) pageviews
  2. menus.middlebury.edu: 34,294 (21,801) pageviews
  3. www.middlebury.edu/athletics: 32,931 (27,189) pageviews
  4. www.middlebury.edu/academics: 26,928 (21,643) pageviews
  5. www.middlebury.edu/admissions: 22,339 (26,486) pageviews
  6. www.middlebury.edu/athletics/sports: 15,779 (11,717) pageviews
  7. web.middlebury.edu/database/directory/Default.aspx: 14,762 (10,660) pageviews
  8. www.middlebury.edu/academics/lib: 13,035 (12,005) pageviews
  9. www.middlebury.edu/ls: 12,022 (8,181) pageviews
  10. portal.middlebury.edu/home: 11,997 (11,795) pageviews

Search Terms

  1. Search Midd: 894 (683)
  2. academic calendar: 411 (289)
  3. mojo: 338 (242)
  4. menu: 163 (64)
  5. banner web: 128 (78)
  6. moodle: 127 (20)
  7. sites.middlebury.edu: 94 (81)
  8. snow bowl: 91 (57)
  9. wordpress: 89 (39)
  10. course hub: 88 (62)

Browsers

  • Safari: 37.85% (39.30%)
  • Chrome: 22.10% (22.35%)
  • Internet Explorer: 18.93% (17.89%)
    • IE8: 9.86% (9.30%)
    • IE9: 6.34% (6.10%)
    • IE7: 2.28% (2.18%)
    • IE10: 0.37% (0.22%)
    • IE6: 0.08% (0.08%)
  • Firefox: 18.42% (18.03%)
  • Android Browser: 1.23% (1.07%)

Platforms

  • Macintosh: 43.71% (47.38%)
  • Windows: 42.36% (41.18%)
  • iOS: 11.35% (9.17%)
  • Android: 1.50% (1.27%)
  • Linux: 0.37% (0.37%)
  • BlackBerry: 0.11% (0.10%)
  • Windows Phone: 0.05% (0.06%)

A web site by any other name…

Owners of blogs & web sites on Middlebury’s WordPress site were asked their opinion on a proposed change in the URL (address) of the site from “sites.middlebury.edu” to “sites.middlebury.edu”. The change was proposed to the Web Prioritization Committee as a way “…to provide faculty (and others) using WP as a content management system, personal website, research portfolio, conference proceedings, or other collection of information with a more neutral-sounding domain name than “sites.middlebury.edu.””
Continue reading →

Safari Books Online new & improved

Safari Books Online, our digital library with over 22,886 ebooks on technology, digital media, and design, announced some recent changes.

Screen shot 2013-01-25 at 4.26.43 PM

  • Download the new Safari To Go app for Android, iPhone, iPad, and Kindle Fires or Nooks. Find out more about mobile devices and Safari here.
  • Access Safari content via the Mobile Optimized Website for mobile device users.
  • Self-register for a My Safari account for enhanced features including: (1) The ability to create, organize and manage folders of favorite titles (2) Create notes and tags in Safari content (3) establish digital bookmarks in Safari titles to allow users to keep their place (4) write reviews for Safari ebooks.

WordPress Plugin Spotlight: Tons of Features in Jetpack (Part 1)

This is 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 might not know are available.

WordPress is an open-source, community-built platform, but it also has a company behind it that coordinates activity and runs WordPress.com. This company Automattic, has released some of the most popular features of WordPress.com as a plugin they support named Jetpack. By connecting your site with a WordPress.com account, you get access to many additional features. We’ll describe a few of these features here, and in a follow-up post, but descriptions are also available at their site.

Activating the Plugin

You can activate Jetpack as you would any other plugin in the WordPress administration interface for your site. After you activate the plugin, you need to connect it with a WordPress.com account. These are free to register on their site, but if you do not wish to create an account, let us know and we can connect it using one of ours. It is important to note at this point that all features of Jetpack are currently free to use, but some may require an additional payment in the future.

Useful Features

Here are some of the things that you can do with the Jetpack plugin.

Site Stats

Screen Shot 2013-01-29 at 11.34.34 AM

 

Jetpack can be used to collect information about the people visiting your site and display that data in an interface that is significantly easier to use than Google Analytics. This allows you to see which of your posts were the most popular, how people are finding your site, and the geographic distribution of visitors to your site.

Extra Shortcodes

In addition to the embedable items you have access to with the WordPress Video Plugin, Jetpack adds some extra shortcodes allowing you to add Google Maps, Scribd and SlideShare documents.

There is also code for adding LaTeX markup to your posts, making is easy (well, easier) to write things like this:

$latex i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\left|\Psi(t)\right>=H\left|\Psi(t)\right>$

Extra Sidebar Widgets

Jetpack adds three extra widgets that you can add to site sidebars:

  • Twitter: show the latest tweets from your account to encourage people to follow you on Twitter.
  • RSS Links: add a link to the RSS feeds for the posts and/or comments on your site.
  • Image: add an image to your sidebar for extra visual appeal.

More Image Galleries

While we have the NextGen Gallery Plugin for advanced image galleries, with Jetpack you get access to two more simple image gallery layouts: Tiled Galleries and Carousels. Here is an example of a Tiled Gallery in a post:

Stay Tuned

In the next post in this series, we’ll cover the Contact Forms feature of the Jetpack plugin.