Logging onto Middlebury web sites just got easier to do on your phone, tablet, or other small screen. Today we updated the Central Authentication Service (CAS) theme to dynamically reformat itself so that login form is easy to use on any screen size. No longer will you have to side-scroll or zoom to enter your username and password to access authenticated services.
The Mozilla Foundation’s latest version of Firefox, version 34, has started running searches when you type go/mail into the address bar without prefixing with httpd:// or using the fully-qualified name go.middlebury.edu. This follows similar moves by Chrome and Safari to prefer searches over host-name lookups when there isn’t a fully-qualified domain name in the URL bar.
The good news is, that confirming the dialog to go to GO instead of to search will set a preference allowing GO shortcuts to continue to work:
If you forget to click the confirmation, it is possible to manually add the preference to make GO links work permanently. See the LIS Wiki for more details.
I’ve applied the latest update to our WordPress platforms, sites.middlebury.edu and sites.miis.edu. This update provides a smoother media editing experience:
Here’s a short video covering the changes.
More information about this update can be found on WordPress.org including a full list of the changes to the platform.
We recently took a look at the server logs for the GO service over the past 29 days (September 22 – October 21) and thought it might be interesting to share the most-used shortcuts and their aliases.
While some people access these shortcuts by clicking on links embedded in our various web sites, the vast majority are directly typed into users’ browsers.
Which shortcuts (one of these or others) do you find most useful in your normal day?
We are pleased to announce the addition of a much-awaited feature to our WordPress site network. As of today groups added to sites can automatically maintain their membership over time. Site administrators will no longer have to go back into WordPress and regularly bulk-add groups to grant access to new group members.
In the WordPress Dashboard
When you add users to a WordPress site by group the new default option is to keep the group in sync:
Adding a new group to a site.
Note the new “Keep in Sync” option.
All users currently in the group will be added to the site with the role you specified. Members of the group who already have a role with greater abilities will not have their permissions reduced. Members of the group who already have a role with less abilities will be raised to the role specified for the group.
The groups synced are shown in a list and can be removed if desired.
Over time, as people are added to the group, their roles in the site will be updated whenever they log into WordPress. If a person is removed from a group they will have their role in the site removed when they log into WordPress if their role hasn’t been manually changed to a different level.
More details about group-synchronization are available in the LIS Wiki.
In the Course Hub
In tandem with this new feature in the WordPress dashboard, the Course Hub now automatically adds class-groups to WordPress sites when adding WordPress Resources. When you add a WordPress Resource to the Course Hub the screen now includes an option that lets you specify what role to give students in the WordPress site. (Instructors will always be administrators of the site.)
Choose which role to give students in the WordPress site.
When you save the WordPress Resource in the Course Hub three class-groups (instructors, students, and audits) are added to WordPress site and kept in sync. Instructors no longer need to do the extra step of going to WordPress and adding the class-groups to the site. As well, new students enrolled during the “Add/Drop Period” will automatically have access to the WordPress site when they log in after their enrollment has processed.
The instructors, students, and audits groups are automatically added to WordPress by the Course Hub.
If you delete the WordPress Resource from the Course Hub the users and class-groups it added will be removed from the WordPress site, however the site itself will not be deleted automatically.
In February 2012 we started noticing a large influx of new comment-spam coming into our sites.middlebury.edu WordPress system that the built-in anti-spam plugins weren’t able to handle. To combat this annoying plague we created a new plugin that instantly killed any comments trying to submit an “author URL” along with the “author name” and “comment text” now that the “author URL” field is hidden.
In the year and a half since this plugin has been in place across our blog network it has blocked an average of 40,000 spam comments every month.
+------+-------+--------------+ | year | month | spam blocked | +------+-------+--------------+ | 2012 | 3 | 14,814 | | 2012 | 4 | 19,956 | | 2012 | 5 | 18,225 | | 2012 | 6 | 15,937 | | 2012 | 7 | 29,232 | | 2012 | 8 | 24,073 | | 2012 | 9 | 25,973 | | 2012 | 10 | 42,514 | | 2012 | 11 | 49,265 | | 2012 | 12 | 106,128 | | 2013 | 1 | 103,850 | | 2013 | 2 | 72,944 | | 2013 | 3 | 38,336 | | 2013 | 4 | 35,125 | | 2013 | 5 | 32,975 | | 2013 | 6 | 35,011 | | 2013 | 7 | 28,218 | +------+-------+--------------+
While some spam is bound to get past any automated filtering, we hope that these efforts have alleviated most of the hassle of dealing with spam comments in WordPress.
By default, when you create a Moodle site it is set to be “not available to students” to give you time to add site content before students can access the site.
Unfortunately, the “availability” setting can be a bit hard to find in Moodle settings. To make this important setting easier to change and its current state more visible, you can now set its value from right in the Course Hub when creating or editing the Moodle Resource:
