Who You Calling A Jesse?

I have been doing a little cleaning up of this site and the layout. I have gone back to a white background and cleaned up the right column a lot. There you will find article listings from AideRSS and some other links. I tried to simplify it a bit and give it a new feel as I move to a different (but not much) role on the Special Projects team. Over the next little while I will clean it up even more and then see where things go.

Looking forward to this week and working with a bunch of new people!

As I effectively wrap up my position as the ‘keeper of the home page’ here at UW I can’t help but reflect on a few projects I would have liked to have started as well as those that I am in the middle of and would have liked to have finished. I will leave you to guess which ones were started, just being planned, or only far off ideas. Here is the list in no particular order:

1. redesign the UW home page for a more external audience focus
2. create specialist internal sites for the faculty, staff, and students
3. get UW Chatter off the ground as a web communication hub
4. see MMNP achieve its vision
5. identify what content people actually use in the UW web space, figure out what is missing
6. enhance the UW Search application; integrate mapping, more detailed information on people searches, better tagging of keywords, study search patterns, provide people with quick links to popular searches
7. apply microformats where possible
8. integrate a testing, development, and production server environments with a slick web GUI that integrates with Subversion and Capistrano
9. document things
10. podcasting, my goodness its easy, there should be more audio/video/etc
11. accessibility of campus sites through testing, education, and community
12. usability study swat team

On to the next thing! It will be interesting to look back at the above list and see what I think 6, 12, 18 months from now. Some things may come true, others may be less important.

The biggest challenge I see higher education web folks facing (it’s not just UW) is the ability to clearly define their target audiences and then build to suit. There is far too much ownership of the public facing web by internal audiences—not sure if that is the cause or the result of the lacking identity. Perhaps that is what makes higher education sites unique?

I wish the best of luck to Communications and Public Affairs as continue to tell the story of Waterloo to the world. For the next person in my role the best bit of advice I can give you: do not take this stuff personally and join the uwebd community. Great people.

This blog now switches it’s focus to that of a ‘Web Technology Specialist’ or I move over to my own blog that I never use. I will think about that this week, promise.

It has been just over a year now since I had put some serious thought into holding a BarCampWaterloo. Since then there have been four successful BarCamps, a couple DemoCamps down highway 7 in Guelph, and a few lunches to discuss making things grow even more. The regular community is small (30-40 people) and made up of a mix of students and entrepreneurs that have produced some cool things like AideRSS. A Facebook group exists now, a Google group, a WatCamp space to document it all, and we keep trying to figure out ways to get the word out.

What is next? Well this Fall will see BarCampWaterloo on September 22nd, StartupCampWaterloo is being discussed for the following month, and DemoCampGuelph will be held again sometime in November hopefully. Three un-conference events that are free and open to the community in the next four months.

What can you do? If you are interested, please come out. Although we encourage everyone to participate you are more than welcome to just lurk in the audience. You can bring someone with you to BarCampWaterloo, don’t come alone. Blog, post in facebook, and talk about BarCampWaterloo if you have been to one of the previous events. They are a great way to spend a day.

As today’s Daily Bulletin mentions, as of August 27th I will have a new job on campus as part of the Special Projects Group led by Ken McKay. This team is pretty exciting for campus as it is organized around a different model then what is normal for campus. Plus it has a load of Co-op students involved. I can’t wait.

So what does this mean for my blog? No idea. I will still be doing web development (working on the RIA part of jobmine) and there will be plenty to write about. Ideally I would still like to get some more people writing on this thing but who knows. I do have my own blog off the campus web space that I never post to as well. Perhaps I will move things over there… for now its business as usual.

A very annoying lesson was learned today: if you have Contribute Publishing Server (CPS) controlling your site settings and you are sharing connection information with the users on the site (sometimes a good thing, most times not) and you change the server password of the shared connection you will be locked out of the site altogether. To fix it and retain the users on your site you have to do the following:

• change back to the original password
• change the user directory settings so each user must have their own connection information, enter yours as directed
• change the password on your server connection
• go back into Contribute and change the user directory settings back to the sharing option, re-enter information, done

If I am not sharing the connection, why does Contribute not just prompt me for a new password given I am the administrator and the keeper of said connection? Works fine if I am not sharing so I can only guess once you share all people become equal under the connection settings.

Locking the admin out is still dumb. You shouldn’t have to connect to the web server to admin the site if you have a CPS controlling it all. No idea why I hadn’t noticed before. I have only a few sites that share but it sure was a waste of time thinking of a way to get around it.