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I was part of something truly monumental this last weekend. After a week of hide and seek, Tony Hawk ended his Twitter Hunt extravaganza (#THTH) with a surprise demo here in Columbia, MO. Why was this monumental (besides having the Michael Jordan of skateboarding here in the home of the University of Missouri), and more importantly, how is this relevant to us in Higher Education? Because it was one of the most successful uses of Social Networking/Media I have seen to date. (photo by Genevieve Howard)

@font-face is all the rage in the CSS world these days and I’ve been dying to give it a whirl. This entry won’t discuss the best practices in terms of CSS syntax or the ins-and-outs of @font-face; that has been done in numerous other places which I will link to at the bottom of this entry. I’d rather focus on a specific Windows-related issue.

Many universities have implemented whole disk encryption on university-owned laptops in order to provide protection against data loss if the laptop is lost or stolen. Truecrypt and PGP Whole Disk Encryption are two common software solutions used. However, recent research from Invisible Things Lab has come up with a proof of concept (dubbed Evil Maid Attack) that would allow them to hook into the encryption software and sniff the password.

Attack happens like this:

1. Attacker has access to your laptop for 1 to 2 minutes (like a maid at a hotel)

2. Attacker boots laptop from a USB stick and infects the system with the Evil Maid Sniffer

3. Victim returns to the hotel room, boots laptop, enters in disk encryption password (that is now sniffed by Evil Maid)

4. Victim leaves laptop in hotel room again

5. Attacker can now boot laptop again off the USB stick and acquire the sniffed passphrase.

At this point the attacker can either steal the laptop altogether, or boot it up and steal specific information.

So, what can you, as an end user, do to alleviate this attack? Short of never leaving the laptop physically unprotected (i.e. place it in a safe when you leave the room), not much. I know that sounds pessimistic, but the harsh reality is that whenever a device leaves your hands, it has become insecure. Assume, that even with encryption, you are still at risk.

(via Invisible Things)

Have you ever spent a lot of time getting the color in your image perfect only to have it go flat and dull when it was exported to the Web and viewed in a browser?

The problem is with color profiles and here’s how to get rid of them.

It’s amazing what a little branding scare will do to ignite change in a large public institution. For what has seemed like years Mizzou’s Facebook presence has been seriously lacking in an official capacity. There were many reasons: hesitancy by administration, lack of staff for support, lack of content, fear of the unknown, etc. All of those reasons (which amount to excuses) held us back. That was, until Facebook announced they’d be providing users and pages with the option to create vanity urls. We mentioned to administration the fear of others snatching up ‘Mizzou’ or ‘University of Missouri’ as names and we were off to the races!

“You don’t have to give up the power of Microsoft Project for the simplicity and efficacy of Basecamp. The IntelliGantt Add In for Microsoft Project gives you the best of both worlds, which means a happy project manager and a happy team.”

That quote, from the Team Direction Web site, pretty much sums up my latest breakthrough as project manager for Web Communications. But how did I get there?

It began with Basecamp

Our department has been using Basecamp since before I worked here. It’s a great online tool for managing project tasks because it allows everyone on the team to see to-do lists across multiple projects and to add, delete and mark complete those to-do items as needed. You can give team members access to as little or as much as needed and there are no syncing or hosting issues since it is Web-based.

Monthly charge or not, we weren’t ready to give up our Basecamp account. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. While Basecamp allows you to assign milestones within a project, it doesn’t have the ability to apply complex dependencies among those milestones. (You know, task B can’t start until task A finishes, no matter how late task A runs, and so on…) Yes, if you move one, Basecamp can move all subsequent milestones back by the same number of days, but this is far too simplistic for the level of complexity in a multi-person, multi-project office.

Enter MS Project

Gantt charts are my friend. I’m a visual person, and I really like being able to see a project (or several projects, in my case) laid out in front of me on a timeline— no imagination required. In a perfect world, our department would switch over to Project and take advantage of its collaboration features. But the problem with that is that we’d need the more expensive MS Project Server and the Web Access add-on. What’s more, we would have to purchase 12 licenses and somehow get our IT department to expedite their process for evaluating software and providing support. Not likely.

So, I compromised and decided that we really only need one copy of MS Project Standard for our department. The least expensive solution in the Project family of products.
I ‘d make my Gantt charts and print them for my office wall from time to time so that others could check in to see how things were shaping up. And then I could take some time to transpose those dates and to-dos into Basecamp. It’s not ideal, but it’s a cost-effective compromise.

But what if Project could sync with Basecamp? That’d boost my productivity like none other, right?

Enter the IntelliGantt Add In for MS Project

The IntelliGantt Add In for MS Project seems to have been developed with MS SharePoint in mind, but it does sync with Basecamp. Here’s a screencast about integrating Project and Basecamp. I struggled a bit at first, but once I enabled Basecamp’s API, it worked like a charm. (You need to be the account owner, not just an administrator, to do this.) I’m still working out the kinks, like how to set up MS Project so that milestones and to-do items appear correctly in Basecamp, but it’s already saving me mucho time.

As it stands now, all of the line items from MS Project show up in Basecamp as one to-do list. I still need to assign responsibility for the task, but I’m guessing there’s away to automate this that I haven’t found yet. I also need to manually sort to-dos into separate lists for easier reading in Basecamp, but that’s not too time consuming with the drag and drop feature.

As with anything, the longer I use the software, the more adept I’ll become. I’m definitely open to advice if anyone else has a similar set-up, though!

Our office has grown to where we’re not a few people who wear a bunch of “hats”. We now have a group of people who are specialized in their own little world. Whether it be technical or content, we all have our own avenues we traverse in the web world. This situation creates communication problems where we have to explain how we do our jobs, or even what certain words mean, to our own office mates. This eats up precious time and creates “knowledge gaps”.

Smashing Magazine - a great web resource for developers - has provided an aggregate list of web glossaries for just this problem. Categories include typography, usability, marketing, CSS and XHTML and more. It might not make a writer an expert on analytics, but it is a great way to get started; or at least give someone some working knowledge on a subject.

So if you’re having a problem trying to explain what resolution is to a client or what the heck wysiwyg means, check out this helpful listing:

Useful Glossaries For Web Designers and Developers

Another MU WebCom project is done! The redesigned Human Resource Services (HRS) site is live. This was a long, complex project that touched almost everyone on our staff. Every aspect of the site was rebuilt, from the information architecture to the final design. The following is a quick recap of our goals.

This week, we had the big boss command us to put the AddThis button on MizzouWire’s story pages. It’s a handy service that helps visitors share your content by emailing it or posting it to various social media sites.

It’s just a little button. How hard can it be to add it?

Well, that depends …

It’s never easy to just add a feature to your site. Even little buttons have their problems. The AddThis button, for example, uses off-site JavaScript to work and if you don’t apply it in a certain way, it might affect your site in unexpected ways.

Sure, if you just copy and paste the code where you want the button, it’ll work, but here are some of the problems we ran into.

On a recent project, I needed to produce a simple slide show, like this one, so I used SlideShow Pro (SSP) to create it. The difference was that I needed to have captions appear below the slide show and a click through button on top of it to let the viewer know that there was a profile attached to the image. Since SSP doesn’t do this “out of the box” I had to resort to using some ActionScript.

Note: All code here is AS2 and I assume you already know how to use SSP.

Create your slide show

I already figured out how to make my captions display externally, so review that post for more detailed info. For this project, here’s a quick overview:

• Create your Flash document using ActionScript 2 (code here is in AS2).
• Place your SSP instance and give it an instance name of my_ssp.
• Publish your slide show and make sure it’s working.