Archive for the Work Category
I was reminded today for what seems like the millionth time how I hate the way that Microsoft Word and associated tools try to be too intelligent for their own good.
If you’ve ever typed a document in MS Word, you may have seen the document engine turn your quotation marks in to a slightly “prettier” rendition of a quotation mark – intended solely for the printed page – automatically.
This feature was introduced way back in MS-Word 97, and it’s been the sour
March 24, 2011
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Sounds simple, I know, but I had enough trouble getting Active Directory integration working with Drupal that I thought it would be useful to write up my experience in the hope that it helps someone else save themselves a bit of time.
Once you have it working, it’s one of those “wow, that shouldn’t have been so hard” moments, where you just shake your head and lament the time you lost.
The Basics
Grab the modules that you need from here and install them.
Visit admin/bui
February 24, 2011
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It’s both true that when there’s a desire to get around it, it happens. It’s also true that the rule itself is designing failure in to a system and begging for mediocrity at best.
February 22, 2011
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Facebook recently revamped business and brand pages to make them look and behave more like Facebook profile pages. The changes don’t dramatically impact page functionality, but there are a few important changes that page administrators will want to be aware of.
A new look for “Pages”
The most obvious change to the pages layout is the removal of the tabs that used to appear at the top of the page. The content of tabs have now been moved to links directly beneath the profile p
February 14, 2011
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There’s an interesting article on collegewebeditor.com this morning talking about how Ithaca College recently went through a complete redesign – not of their website – but of the website content. The article credits the assistance of outside vendor Decimal 152 with guiding the school through the process.
Decimal 152 is a consultancy that focuses on helping shape the content that organizations offer by looking at the needs of the organization, and the audience that they’re s
February 1, 2011
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The week before last, I quietly launched a new Event Calendar at Marshall U. There’s a long history of not having and desperately needing a central campus event clearinghouse that can both supply event data to the campus and general community, as well as accept new event listing requests without a lot of drama.
There’s a lot of behind the scenes massaging that makes the calendar work – but essentially it takes the K5N source for WebCalendar, guts a lot of it, and adds som
December 11, 2010
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After a long wait to get an initial build of MUMobile that would work on Android devices, it finally made it to the Android Marketplace yesterday. There’s still a long way to go in terms of achieving feature parity with the iPhone (and even the Blackberry) builds of the application. That said, getting something out the door is a good thing.
If you have an Android phone and want to try it out, you can find it here:
December 11, 2010
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I had an interesting experience Friday, just as it was time to leave work for the day. A story was shared with me about a third party who had come in to meet with MU administration about what they believed was wrong with the Marshall web site.
Some of their concerns were valid ones – concerns that I have in fact myself raised about the state of content. All of them, though, lacked context – or any basis in the reality of what it takes to keep hundreds of people from tech savvy IT st
May 8, 2010
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![Experiments in Leadership [Lemons and Lemonade]](http://www.gossipduck.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/c258557_l-150x150.png)
Last October I was basically handed a responsibillty that walks a very fine line between blessing and curse. In October 2008, I joined the Board of Directors for a local non-profit as an associate board member. A few months later a board member resigned and I filled that slot. Less than a year after joining, I was asked to take on the President's role.
Our organization is 25 years old and plays a central role in my community. There is a lot emotion and history (literally) invested in
April 25, 2010
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