ellen kanner

Twitter Widgets allows you to add an HTML or Flash feed to your page quite easily. Here’s the example, fairly un-styled except to match the list styling I’m using on this website:

I did have to change from the TinyMCE editor in Wordpress to the basic editor as it was clearing out the code for the widget. To do so, go to Dashboard > Users > and at the bottom of that page, and uncheck the box for the visual rich text editor. Type in your password, save and voila! You can then style it to follow the list styling of your website.

I’ve been offering workshops to acquaint folks with social media. I did a recent workshop on “Facebook, Twitter, Flickr - what’s the talk all about?” And today one about “Tracking your Organization across the Web: The Good, the Bad, and possibly the Ugly” What’s out there about your organization? How to find and track both user and media generated content.

Using a variety of tools and super-sleuthing techiniques somewhat similar to what I learned in my investigative journalism classes in college, we were able to compile a world’s view of Dartmouth College from the web.  All an interesting experience in capturing so many levels and types of content!

If you’re interested in setting something like this up for your organization, drop me a note.

I’ve been trying to figure out for some time how to remove date postings from Pages in Wordpress.  Good news is, it was quite simple for the theme I’ve customized (beyond it’s original recognizable state!) for this site.

To remove the date from only Pages (not posts), accessing the wp-content/themes/mytheme/ through FTP, I simply duplicated the index.php file and renamed it page.php.

I then went into the page.php file and commented out the code at the very top, in the div class=”date”, and voila - date removed from pages and still viewable on posts.

I tried the date-exclusion plugin and couldn’t get it to work with my site/theme.

This trick of deleting or commenting out the code as shown above worked just perfectly.

What a fun time!

I presented at this years conference, it’s been a couple of years and as usual, Lance and his team did a fantastic job of making this one of the more interesting conferences I’ve been to. Great speakers, like Stephanie Geyer and Mark Greenfield really set the show for a great discussion. The name of the game at the conference was communicating through very non-traditional methods, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and more. Very interesting statistics presented by Stephanie Geyer on where the prospective students hang out (it may not be where you think!)

My topic: Bring Multimedia and Interactivity to your Site(s) at Minimal Cost.  I covered flickr, YouTube, social sharing widgets, Google forms, Wufoo and more.  It was well received and, though I work with these tools on a regular basis, I’m always happy to share.

Drop a note if you’d like to learn more!

An icon on the Long Beach waterfront, Ray and I were able to tour it as part of the OmniUpate Users Conference last night. A fun group at the conference to do it with, and quite an amazing ship. See the photos here.

Colleagues have asked that our group in Web Services post about projects we;’re working on… so for those following, here’s my first update — the undertaking (or would that be overtaking) of Dartmouth’s IT/Computing website.

I’m on the working group to rethink and redesign the Computing at Dartmouth website. The site was originally built 4-5 years ago, and one can tell by quick glance, it’s based on a more “institutional” view which is apparent in the architecture.  Well, we won’t be going with this model in the next one.

We’re about a third of the way through the project and all seems to be going well at this point - we’ve done our survey of users, our asking of “what do you want to see here?”, our due diligence, and seeking out sites on the web that we’d like to emulate. One is Duke’s IT website… we like the straightforward approach, the clean navigation, the easy-to-use appearance.
So we’re at the point of wireframes and architecture, and rethinking content.

Some thoughts for this project:

• The site will be a “self-help” point of service.
• Content is being re-written for the web - if any procedure takes longer than 8-10 steps, it’s probably too long for the majority of our users to figure out on their own.
• Architecture based on user-centered principles, not the lay of the land from an institutional perspective.
• Prominent search box, and better tagging of pages and the use of the search engine’s Quick Link feature.
• This is Computing at Dartmouth - whether it be from a professional school, or from the Computing division - having the homepage of this project be the prominent entry point to all IT at Dartmouth is one of the goals.

We have plenty to cover, but this touches on our focus right now.  It will be different - stay tuned.