November 2007 Archives

This week finds the staff in Web Communications very busy on the heels of winning the Big 12 North Championship game against KU and being ranked #1 in the national football polls. With the upcoming Big 12 Championship game against Oklahoma on Saturday night, we are industriously churning out online material to meet the demands of Mizzou Tiger fans all over the world.

So, how does one take advantage of these historic opportunities to deliver messages to the hoards of online visitors? As with everything we do in Web Com, it starts with a plan.

There was to be an immediate update of the MU/KU pre-game story when battle was completed last Saturday night. First thing Monday, a victory story made its appearance in the rotation on the Mizzou homepage. By Tuesday, we added a story from Mizzou Magazine to the rotation and deleted non-football related stories for this week. On Wednesday, we'll launch a retrospective of this dream season, building up to the next big battle to be won on the weekend. On Thursday, our editor, who will be traveling with the Mizzou Alumni Association to San Antonio, will make his first post to our Big 12 Championship blog. Friday, he will begin blogging from the road as he follows the team and the fans to the big game.

There are many other activities taking place on campus and to promote quality, consistency and ease for PR folks, we've established a page for people to download football related photos and logos as they send emails, newsletters, etc.

Our analytics tell us that football is, indeed, tremendously popular with online visitors to the Mizzou site. Within 24 hours of posting the story about the win over KU, that feature had received over 4,100 unique visitors. Those are some very healthy numbers, folks!

Online blogs offer another glimpse of the success story. When searching blogs, it was interesting to see how those in the prospective student demographic reacted. There were many mentions of being interested in attending Mizzou, being glad they were accepted to Mizzou and so forth. Successful athletics do help when recruiting students.

It's a lot of extra work, no doubt about it. But, if a PR shop has to put in extra hours on crisis management, this is the best kind to have.

When creating slide shows for Mizzou Wire, I wanted them to look similar to the normal photos with each story: an inset image with a caption underneath (an example). Out-of-the-box, Slideshow Pro presents photo captions as an overlay when you mouse over the image. In order to have captions formatted the way I wanted, below the image and slide navigation, I had to do some customization. It required a bit of ActionScript coding, but with the help of the SSP Customization Guide and the user forums, I was able to figure it out.

Turn off captions in the component

First, create a slide show like you normally would in Flash. In the Component Inspector set Caption Appearance to Hidden.

Give the component an instance name

Next select the SSP component and give it the instance name 'my_ssp'.

I have to admit, Amy (Reeter)'s question during our Web Dev meeting on Tuesday, of what I think are the next new technologies, caught me a little off guard. Because of that, I don't think my response was as complete as it should have been. I'd like to expand a bit on what I stated.

The next new technology that will affect our jobs, in my opinion (and this is PURELY speculation), is mash-ups. If you are unfamiliar with mash-ups, it is a new breed of interactive web application. It takes data from multiple, external/internal sources (using web services and/or online application APIs), and "mashes" that data into a brand new online service.

With the development of Mizzou Wire, Mizzou’s news and features Web site, we knew we were going to want to have multimedia with our stories — including slide shows, audio, video and other kinds of media we haven’t thought of yet. The challenge was finding a way to present all this information in a uniform way so the end user could easily view it, but also make it manageable for us to update using our content management system.

It took a bit of research and trial and error, but I think we’ve found a system that covers all the bases and doesn’t require a lot of money or programming time.

If you have always used the default settings for sessions in your PHP apps on Bengal, you might have awoken to a nice little surprise on Halloween when Division of IT implemented suPHP on the Bengal servers.

Before Halloween, if you didnt specify a session_save_path(), php would write to a default location as the Apache user. Which was just fine, because at the time, php was running as the Apache user. But once they implemented suPHP, php was now running as the owner of the application. With that, your php scripts, running as you, no longer had permission to write to the default directory (which if I remember correctly, was /tmp).

Division of IT has since placed an article in the KnowledgeBase, but I thought I would expand on it.

In your home directory on Bengal (at the same level as your www directory), there should now be a "session" directory. This is where you will need to have your php scripts store your session files. To do so, before any calls to session_start(), and on every page where you are going to be using sessions, you will need to use session_save_path('/path/to/your/session/');

Personally, I like to have my own function to handle sessions that I can call at the beginning of the page. That way, when I have to move servers (like from Bengal to VH), I dont have to go update my session path in every file (plus gives me the ability to do some other things that I will discuss later). So, if the path of my session directory is /users/p/gilzowp/session/ then I could set my function up like so:

[code]
/**
* Sets up the correct session save path, and initiates the session
*
* @return void
*/
function mySessionStart(){
    session_save_path('/users/p/gilzowp/session/');
    session_start();
}
[/code]

Now in each page where you want to use sessions, after you have included/required the file that contains your session function, you simply need to call mySessionStart();

Next, I'll discuss some problems with sessions and things we can do to get around those problems.

I saw this article in Digital Web Magazine and thought it was worth a read. We don't give enough thought to the copyright liabilities we face when posting Web content, or the risks we take when creating it. It's always a good idea to learn as much as you can about the legal issues surrounding intellectual property before posting.

Web Design and the DMCA: Giving and Getting Take Down Notices

I've been with the University for 7.5 years now. I originally started out as a Technical Trainer in DoIT's IT Training group. From there, I took a position at Human Resource Services as a Programmer/Analyst. While there, I helped design and build the Online Job Application system, the Employment Verification and Online Vitals Extraction application, and the Smart PAF application.

Before coming to the University, I worked as the Department Manager for The Computer Skills Institute here in Columbia, and before that, a computer trainer with Productivity Point International out of St. Louis, providing training for the Department of Natural Resources in Jefferson City.

My job here with Web Communications is that of a Programmer/Analyst, and to serve as their IT Pro. The position is brand new, so my specific duties are still a work-in-progress. Though I know that Lori has several large-scale projects in mind.

Until then, I'll be taking a more active role in the PHP Birds-of-a-feather user's group, and will continue to give talks on Cross-Site Scripting.