All hats off to Jeramy Spurgeon today.
Our publishing engine is on the fritz, so he built this week’s issue of Scope* by hand. Who says hand-coding is out of style!?
Thanks, Jeramy!
*Scope, the official newsletter for the Indiana University School of Medicine.
I adore the medical school’s updated news publishing system. It’s got a sweet sidebar for graphics (which we don’t need to resize) and for video. Each news category has its own feed. Keyword tags pull up related articles that appear below the story (in the web version) and in the right sideber in the email version. There is even a tag cloud lurking at the bottom of the search page. (Note to self: unbury that.)
All possible with Concrete5. Adore that Page List block!
Yes, Google will use your IP address to geographically sort and rank returns to your query.
IUSM webmaster Andy Blomeke thought it was a little funny that his departmental website was suddenly turning up number 1 in a generic Google search — “department of surgery.” He wanted to know if this was some new, location-based quirk in Google.
A little research took me back to Google’s Matt Cutts, who says yes indeed, Google does this in order to provide more relevant searches. (SLYT)
BTW, the results we get from typing in “department of surgery” and “medical library” are NOT the Google-Map-with-pin-type results. The results look like regular search returns.
The good news about this not-so-subtle change is that many bosses will be happy — initially, anyway. (”Our site is number one on Google, woohoo!) The bad news is that Google’s search results (apparently) now favor commercial results over simply informational results.
The fall’s semester’s new (and returning) Tour the Life bloggers are up and posting. Besem (MS4) explains the tricky matter of writing a personal statement when applying for residency programs. And Patrick (MS1) shares life as a non-traditional student at the Terre Haute campus.
Forget tables. There are at least three better ways to alter page layouts in Concrete5.
1. Choose from multiple page types, including a right-column layout and a flash home page layout.
2. Edit page or block CSS; even save styles to apply to other pages or blocks.
3. Within a block, use the layout function to split a page into infinite sections and move blocks around a page.
I haven’t been paying attention to the PC wars lately. But a headline in today’s Infoworld caught my eye: “The ignominious fall of Dell.”
Having tussled with several Dell desktops, I can understand why customers are abandoning Dell in droves. I’ve grown accustomed to the oscillating, whirring hum of my power supply’s fan — which, along with the motherboard, was replaced at the computer’s 6-month milestone but nevertheless still continues to hum.
I consider it a fluke that the thing continues to run, however, and I certainly wouldn’t purchase a Dell again.
The sad part is that Dell was once a shining example of entrepreneurship and customer-oriented IT. Alas.
Will locator apps like Foursquare make it into business mainstream? Yes. In the way that social media programs such as Wordpress, Facebook, and Twitter have? Maybe.
Certainly, companies and offices that “get around” will find location-based social media useful. In academia, I see development and alumni affairs officers, even admissions officers, being interested in broadcasting their whereabouts. Who knows, you could instigate a flash mob, especially if you’ve got the right swag.
Businesses that are destinations will certainly take advantage – say a student center, a computer lab, or a campus theater.
Location-based social media services have a commercial feel to them, and I predict the most active Foursquare-type users will be active, young and youngish, consumers.
I’m surprised Facebook and Twitter don’t yet integrate location services, so you can checkin with a status update. They will soon.
Eventually our posts will integrate ads based on location, plus other personal data, maybe based on keywords.
Yes, ads, with discounts as lures, seem to be at the end of the locator-service rainbow. The more things change, the more they remain the same!
One of the most interesting and rewarding aspects of my job is working with medical students. Especially since we started the Tour the Life student blogs, I regularly get to work with with the cream of the academic crop at Indiana University.
Our next group of student bloggers are smart, energetic, artistic, musical, thoughtful, brave, committed, and did I mention smart?
Carrie is considering family medicine and oncology, and she is a painter. Besem wants to be a surgeon, and he’s ready to adopt perfection as his worklife standard. Charles is an MD/PhD candidate committing his life to studying and understanding leukemia. And Patrick, a perennial student with multiple degrees, has settled on rural medicine as a career.
I’ll post links to them all when the new TTL site goes live.
When hunting for information in a bureaucracy, there are two types of frustration: one is discovering nothing about your topic. The other PITA is finding way too much info. Funny how people used to think digitizing everything would improve communications. Ha!
One place I’ve come to frequent for technical info at IU is the Knowledge Commons.
It’s a wiki, so it needs regular feeding. But if enough of us contribute to it, the thing could function as a data hub with spokes out to the numberless disparate sources of tech info at IU. For instance, lots of the entries are links to articles in the Knowledge Base. But the wiki allows for local technical experts at IU to augment topics and to create new ones.
I’ll be keeping the Knowledge Commons in mind as I document projects in the future.
Yes, despite our current data-entry madness, I am having fun, mostly, while getting our site ready for live.
Our news release database is about 60% complete. Boy, do I know this format. I’m also creating the P&MR staff bio pages — which entails begging for copy and photographs from my office-mates. And I’m building the skeletal structures for about 15 new IUSM websites, for webmasters participating in our first Concrete5 training session on June 23.
Happily, our biggest problems are semi-philosophical: how to tag and categorize news articles, whether to use formal or informal profile photos, and if new C5 users need to learn about the global scrapbook from the get-go.
Back to those news articles. I’m only in April!
