week - 08 - A summary

Pages are beeing replaced by streams. Words by pictures and videos. And information is becoming a cliché, slowly but gradulay. Welcome to the post-information age! A few words on whats hip and happening at the first UM Facebook group meeting yesterday. Around 40 people, most of them female and under 30 took part in what became my personal "meeting of the week". Thoughtful organizers and plates full of delicious cakes and snacks as well as drinks made everybody feel more "social" than during most meetings.

The first attempts to tap into the fabric of conversations of prospective students in order to engage with them on a more personal level where successful.The lessons learned where: # regular posts keep people's eyeballs busy # images and videos trumph text # the carrot that keeps the donkey going stays the same: prices and questionairs. An outstanding example is Maarten's facebook page of the faculty of law. The static HTML page includes an video with a message from the dean, quick links to the master and bachelor programs and students weblogs.

Also this week I was sitting together with people from KAAS and discussed solutions for their website as well as the "Creative Writing Course" by Lucia.

What's the buzz?
The Equis accreditation comitee visited the School whos international as well as national reputation is quiet impressive. My contribution was to dress up a bit our twitter and youtube channel. Facebook is part of the deal and beeing taken care of by Veerle and Heiner. I also launched the first department website: Economics and received already one email that included a request for change. The events and activities section was also renewed featuring now all seminars, conferences and the SBE calendar.
For PhD students and all who are interested I stumbled upon two links: #1 is the electronic disseration database which offers fresh RSS feeds of published theses here #2 and an illustrated guide to a PhD here.
Since Economics is our Business it is worth sharing this one

New Economy, New Wealth on Prezi

Prezi is a non-linear presentation tool used by everybody these days who feel limited by the way powerpoint has fooled us into believing that sequentiality is the holy grail of "the future of education". This is not to say that Prezi is uncool, but it makes every clear headed observer of the malstroem suspicious over its "newness". Dreaming of the Malstroem, Infonomics published a new video to explain to the world what it is! Kinematic Typography at its best and the video has already 90 views (3 days old). Here it is exclusively for you:



Last but not least there is the "revolution 2.0" in the former Magreb and Arab countries televised live on Aljazeera. For those who are not interested in social media might not notice this versioning of the word "Revolution". And for those who hate dictators and brutal regimes the words of Sergei Markof, a senior legislator from the ruling United Russia Party, might provide the necessary realism to put the Revolution 2.0 into the wider historical reality. In an article of yesterdays Wall Street Journal he spoke of the mainstream opinion held by the ruling class of Russia. "We in Russia have seen revolutions, and they often start out like the February one and end like the one in October".

Writing for the Web - Course Material

This time No time Just an update:

- Language, Dates and other Guidelines(UK)
- Spelling and Writing Guidelines (NL)
- Style Guide for editors at UM

A standard Problem in GX

A standard problem is a problem that yield no surprise. It's just there and not much can be done about it. The annoying thing is that there are so many standard problems that one gets easily confused if the problem is standard or serious. Because a serious problem demands a "Request for Change" and takes long to be solved. But lets start with the expectations. I expected to see something like this:

A Brandingblock is rendered like this. It consists of a line (1point) on the upper and right side and bulleting points. Althou this example shows a list I thought in my naivety this should somehow be true for Media List items. But the result looks completely different:

 

Altough I choose the correct presentation mode:

Why asks the engineer is the element rendered in the way it is and not how he expects it? That’s a standard problem. Any solution? 

This is an update to this problem I emailed to ICTS on 22.11.2011 as GX problem #6:

If you add a Media List item into the page after the first Separator you end up with what you see in the two screenshots.On the backend I added three news items to the media List and on the Frontend it looks quiet distorted. Now I don’t know What it should do if I put the presentation mode onto BRANDINGBLOCK but I am almost certain that the result is not what

I want to see. I hope this is ok as a description. On my blog post I provide screenshots of the same problem in more detail. 

Not so serious GX error

One not so serious error was pointed out to my by Johanna here:

Besides this I spend on Monday some time on a RfC. Although it took me more hours to understand the proceedure than to produce the document itself. The basic problem is the size of the UM website. Thousands of pages with information that needs to be up to date and correct. While two eyes are certainly not enough to oversee the digital landscape many more would certainly help. But how to facilitate a conversation between people who browse through UM's websites and those people managing it?
In principle the solution is an integrated expertsystem. Integrated means only that it is contained within the GX content management system and not a third party app that is either embedded or runs on a seperate server somewhere in the cloud. Expertsystem might also need some qualifications here but it is fairly accurate to call it that.
What does the system do?
In a first step, it simply shows up as a link at the bottom of every page of the UM website and says something like "Hey, found a bug?"

If a visitor clicks on this link a window opens:

Nothing terribly complex happens then. The visitor is asked to specify the bug, describe it and indicate the size (or priority) of the bug observed. This information is recorded and distributed to the person responsible for the website. 

This system offers also staff members to easier notify the webeditors or coordinators about changes. The workflow here is that people copy and paste half of the webpage they want to make changes in an email. Copy also the URL and an explenation or description of the changes.

Although it is in princible simple some remarks have to be discussed. Such as, user and system management, visibility of the UI on the web and the workflow proceedure. Here is the link to the RfC document. 

Comments or remarks are very appreciated!

RSS Problem

Lets start with a problem:

Here you see a seminar which was created using an Agenda item. As you may notice, a very important piece is missing, namely the start date and time of that seminar. This information is important but missing from the RSS feed. On the website the aggregated feed looks like this:

Using the GX's Media Overview to show the same seminars on one page everything looks ok:

But on the backend one thing is wrong. The agenda items are sorted by publication date according to the settings of the MEDIA OVERVIEW element. The same element produces something else; It lists the agenda items according to its start date in descending order and not as the setting of the MEDIA OVERVIEW suggests by Publication date.

The date of publication is the date of the agenda item's creation! Interesting enough, when looking at the RSS feed, the publication date is contained in the field y:published while the start date/time is missing.

Why is this a problem? First, RSS - Really Simple Syndication makes only sense if the most important information is actually contained in the feed created by the Web Content Management System. What sense does it make to offer people a subscription when it contains the publication date and not the start date of an event? Second, if the UI does not do what it says it does it only confuses people to the point that they don't care anymore about it. Which is a reall problem when the goal of the web project is to make people using it.