BG Views Developer Blog

WILL THIS THING WORK??????????????

Right about the time Bit.ly Pro was announced and they were taking invites, I wanted to setup our own URL shortener. Short URLs are very important in the Twitter World, and brand recognition is also important. As it turns out we finally got our Bit.ly Pro invite about a month and a half after setting up YOURLS. And frankly, I would rather have complete control anyways.

Before the break for the summer semester, I sat down with Sean Shapiro and Heather Linder, or Web Editor and Editor-in-Chief, respectively, and we took a look at what they wanted to see on bgnews.com for the fall.  Top of that list was an image-based carousel.

Feature-wise, the one we were currently using was not cutting the mustard. I took a good hard look at Agile Carousel, and even started writing Movable Type code to work with it. But its not exactly easy to use. Then I ran into AnythingSlider by Chris Coyier and eventually an even better fork of it by Dean Sofer on GitHub. That is the history lesson, now lets move on to AnythingSlider for Movable Type.

If you use Google Reader, we have a Bundle for you! This is a bundle of BG Views Network sites. It currently has seven feeds in it, but we will be adding more shortly.

What I do not understand is this: When I update the bundle, subscribers do not automatically see the changes to the Bundle. They must click Subscribe again. Why is this not automatic? A Google help forum post on this very subject has gone unanswered too, so I am not the only one seeing this as a problem.

Another section of the site that was a priority this summer was the Housing Guide. I have made small changes to both the Mobile template as well as the standard template, mainly aesthetic changes.

Also new is the Search box on the right, and the Advanced Search page. Although the Advanced Search form is not complete, you can drill down to search by all the fields there. Look for more options to show up there very soon.

For the start of this semester, we have introduced a restructured home page with a bigger carousel. Please let me know what you think! I have more work to do on the home page, but it needed to be simplified.

There is still the problem that I have so many external scripts running, that when the page loads, the carousel takes a second to fully load. That is what causes the navigation buttons to "pop" in like that. Currently there is CSS in place to minimize the strange loading, and that "pop" effect is the best I can do for now.

Summer is here, and Summer Session starts soon. Before classes ended for Spring I sat down with our Web Editor Shawn and our EIC Heather to outline the changes they would like to see on bgnews.com.

The menu bar is going to get a slight tweaking, moving things around. The layout of bgnews.com is also going to change quite a bit, going to a two-column layout.

There are a bunch of other things on the To Do list for the summer, but those I will get to in due time.

Thanks to the CoPress Google Group and @nacin, my life in WordPress is that much easier. By about 100%. Let me explain.

The drop down menu on the Export page (in 2.9.1. and before) is an absolute mess. It does not list authors in alphabetical order. It lists them in the order they appear in the database.  We have 10 years of archives to go through - that equates to a lot of authors! (Plus countless duplicates, thanks to the way College Publisher works.)

Quickly after posting my concern asking how to fix the $authors array, Andrew came up with a superb solution. You can find it on the WordPress Trac and make the modification yourself. This change will make it into WordPress 3.0. It also looks like the database query has been cleaned up quite a bit from the original code.

Many thanks to Andrew and his help. It has made the absolutely painstakingly headache-inducing task of going through our old College Publisher archives a little bit easier at the end of the day.

One of the biggest challenges in moving away from College Publisher has been the 10 years of archives we have had online. As I am sure you are aware, those were abruptly taken down in January.

Simply put, there was no other way to switch from their servers to ours.

We are working tirelessly to get the archive back online, and today I would like to share (a new) update on that. I sent out an update on our Facebook Fan Page on Feb. 8, and I wish I could say we have made progress since then.

Hit the jump to hear the (somewhat condensed) updated info.

I was just trying to find an example of our YouTube videos showing up in Google News. It did not take long, searching for "Obama Ohio" and look what came up.


"Sweet!"