Category Archives: Webinars

Google Search Appliance webinar

Looks like a lot of this is aimed at internal/intranet search. (which makes me wonder if there’s a Banner integration.)

– SharePoint integration (no relevance for us)

– multilingual (does that have any use for us? translation could be helpful, I think. will want to ask about that for potential international students)

– PDF preview (which is pretty sexy)

– assist & suggest, dynamic navigation with entity recognition (controlled vocabularies)

– searches file shares?

– moderated social settings, subject matter experts can recommend results at the point of search w/out having to do manual keymatch, with a moderation queue.

– search of subject can also include a list of experts.

– search across sites (sharepoint, wiki, etc) and other repositories (document mgmt, database, filesystem)

– entity recognition is like filtering – by author, creation date, file type, or attributes set on the back end

– pull info about experts from LDAP (or Sharepoint profiles) to build a profile page. (this feels a lot like intranet in a box)

– that answers the translation question – individual can choose to translate previewed PDFs from any (supported) language to any other.

Gut check: overkill for our needs unless we did something REALLY big with it internally.

Gerry McGovern webinar

quantifiable task completion to see results

choose the top tasks (a survey) – took 6 weeks putting it together – gathered from employees? to be answered by customers/potential customers. “often your gut instinct is totally/dangerously wrong”

[how do you intrduce this survey in front of site visitors?]

“continuously improve the small things” (cisco)

4 tasks got as much of the vote as the bottom 49 tasks. (OECD site)

we have to say what we’re focusing on, but more importantly, what are we NOT focusing on?

often an inverse relationship between importance of task and the amount of time being spent on it by staff. ouch. “often the tiny task are political”

same as OECD with Scottish Enterprise: top 5 get same level of interest as bottom 50, etc with Enterprise Ireland, Innovation Norway.

“supertask” – Get funding, book a flight, etc.

brng the top tasks to the top of the architecture

[do the same thing for my?]

people want to do things themselves, not call a sales rep or customer service.

“have to break the culture of launch & leave”

“evidence of actual behavior”

identify top task, measure them continuously, loop of continuous improvement

Cisco: top 3 tasks get as much votes as the bottom 40+. checked with internal data: matched with metrics. list of survey is overly long on purpose, btw.

even potential customers had the same questions as current customers. (is that so for students?) ppl are coming to websites to “take you for a test drive” because they know what they’re going to be doing later.

“download software is our ‘book a flight'”

in 2010, took 15 steps, ~800 seconds (ea step?).

2012: 4-7 steps, 60-100 seconds

end of formal presentation

first few questions are terrible, this one guy wasn’t paying attention to the presentation & is nitpicking.

missed some questions while doing survey (which is very like the one he talks about in the presentation)

cost of projects they work on: $25-50K. (!) [altho it strikes me that there are some of these techniques that can be done without spending a ton of money.]

“the stranger’s long neck” – his book

“get rid of all the navigation you can get rid of” – plus naming navigation around the tasks, then focusing into that task’s navigation.

“we’re really in the stone age if we’re measuring visits [pagehits, time on page]” – what activity but none of the why. harder to measure, but worth doing.

Cascade “Bootcamp” Tidbits

To upload a bunch of images (or other files) at once, go into the folder, select Tools > Zip Archive. etc. etc. Works quite nicely!

Inside CSS, can have Cascade manage locations of referenced images: url(‘[system-asset]/_files/images/bg01.jpg[/system-asset]’) and so on. (But in “Edit > System” must check “Rewrite links in file”)

I really wish there was a tooltip next to “system name” when uploading a file that actually SAID that it’ll take the file’s name if you don’t fill it in.

Thinking that the switch to Sites should NOT be done automatically, at least not for the main site. So many things we could be doing so much better.

Is there any way to make the text editor window automatically just a bit bigger w/out going fullscreen?

So in Sites (vs Global) a Content Type is required?

I would really like it if the Data Definition builder forced the no spaces in identifiers. Because seriously that’s the third time I’ve created a data definition with a space in a field ID, and I don’t realize it’s broken until I go to actually create some content & get a damn error.

I really wish this was three (?) half-days that started at a reasonable (PDT) hour and ended at a reasonable (EDT) hour. Getting up at 5:15 is catching up with me.

Really thinking about how to generate a dynamic side navigation rather than having people edit XHTML blocks for navigation.

Still don’t quite get when you’d want to set blocks in the template vs configuration set. Template: that block will ALWAYS be in the same spot in the template. Config set: you might want to change what goes in the various system-regions of the template.

Configuration set can include multiple outputs for individual pages. (That PDF etc that Susan was on about.) And on a page that’s a listing of things, that could theoretically include an RSS feed of those things. No need for two separate files.

When do you use Velocity vs XSLT?

Day 2

Dynamic Fields in the metadata sets – why these vs data definition fields? He explained how they’re different, but not why.

Metadata fields, Visibility “inline” = on the actual content creation page.

We’re not using the “link” content type often enough, as far as I can tell. (My.e.e probly being the prime example.)

Most of today’s stuff was either a repeat of yesterday or things I’d already worked out. I would like to take a look at the other kind of index block, though. And I’m definitely thinking about how to create a non-manual navigation.

Workflow still doesn’t make any sense.

Something I tweeted today: What [redacted] does well, from I can tell: speedy for visitors, easy to see what content is in your site, fine-grained access control.

A related tweet from @eaton: Drupal = rich content modeling, WordPress = great OOB workflow for river of news, Rails = better for pure RESTful apps/APIs?

And the rich content modeling is what I’m trying to get out of Cascade. I would push for Drupal instead, but I don’t know how to get it to do the things that Cascade does really well, which I think are all really important.

Hm.

Webinar: Summer of Learning (HTML5) session #1

Gah, I hate the idea that HTML5 is a catchphrase, and not simply a spec. :\

Nothing new to me here.

Still sad about HTML5’s loosey-goosey syntax. (anchor tag wrapping around multiple block level tags?!)

shim/shiv and/or modernizr. (I should probably go look at modernizr again. altho…interesting, it adds classes to the body to say what is & isn’t supported.)

Homework! “make the drink once you finish the assignment.”

Learning Rails, Take 2

I happened across Code School’s “Rails for Zombies” today (I’d seen a link to “Try Git“, was impressed, and started poking around), and holy cow, it might actually stick now!

Three things about it:

  1. Immediately they recommended going through “Try Ruby” if you didn’t already have familiarity with the language. That got me a taste of the syntax, which is pleasantly sane.
  2. There isn’t any futzing about with setting up an environment. Where I got stuck (initially) was just in setting up the environment on my machine.
  3. Lots of little bits of trial and error, following VERY short videos. With two monitors, I’ve got the slides open nearby so I can skim back and forth to see the exact syntax & whatnot. I’ve been doing all the extra credit just to get it to stick better.

So I’m optimistic.