Ken Newquist's Blog at Lafayette College
The first-ever Academic Technology Administrators Conference (ATAC) is being held at Lafayette College on June 25 and 26. Sponsored by CLAMP, the conference is dedicated to the people who design, implement and support the academic technology ecosystem. In some ways this conference is the successor to the old NITLE User Group meetings, where folks … Read more
Phase 2 of the Web Redesign — in which the new design is rolled out to department, office, and program websites — is well underway with more than a dozen sites converted. Learn more about the update at the Web Redesign at the next Web Community of Practice meeting from noon-1 p.m. on Wednesday, April … Read more
Digress.it is a collaborative editing and discussion plugin for WordPress that allows users to add comments to individual paragraphs in a post. We’re piloting as Scribe at Lafayette. These videos on Vimeo provide a good overview of how to make the best use of the plugin, from planning out documents to making comments. They’re well … Read more
Since the upgrade to WordPress 3.0 things have been running fairly smoothly, but I been seeing sporadic problems with some themes no longer displaying theme options for web site administrators. The three themes in question are Mandigo, Tarski and Viala and in all cases, the superadmins for the WordPress network are able to access these … Read more
Keeping up with the latest bugs and improvements with WordPress – or heck, any large-scale project – can be a challenge. To that end, I subscribe WordPress Trac and WordPress-MU Trac, the official bug trackers for the WordPress project. They feature a steady stream of bug reports, user problems and feature requests, and they’re a … Read more
CollegeWebEditor.com has a nice profile on Swarthmore College’s use of WordPress to power it’s online magazine, the Swarthmore College Bulletin. The magazine’s based on the Branford Magazine premium theme for WordPress, which just serves to remind me that we need to dig deeper into the premium theme options out there.
Bates College is using WordPress to power their new home page. College Web Editor has a nice write-up on the relaunch, including an interview with the project leader. They talk about what plugins Bates is using (NextGen Gallery, Super-Cache, WP Table Reloaded) as well as how the site integrates with the college’s social media sites … Read more
I’ve recently been running some tests on WordPress to determine where potential download bottle necks may lie. I’ve found two add-ons for Firebug, the excellent troubleshooting/development plugin for Firefox: YSlow: A tool for Yahoo that analyzes a page’s download time, breaking it down by file type (e.g. HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Images) and points out potential … Read more
When we first launched Moodle at Lafayette, we ran a short series of podcasts called “The Moodle Minute” aimed at introducing folks to basic concepts associated with the new learning management system. Each episode ran about a minute, and while we had a lot of fun brain storming them, we just didn’t have enough time … Read more