Credit where it is due, my friend Jason pointed me in the direction of a site that had a snazzy toolbar at the bottom that had support for Twitter, Facebook, and Google Translate. I figured it could not be home grown, and it took little digging to find it was Wibiya.

My biggest takeaways is that it is not obtrusive, and has a really unique take on using Facebook Connect. It also keeps Twitter, Facebook, (including our Page) Translate, Recent Posts, Subscribe to RSS, Bookmarking, and Flickr -- yes, a ton of stuff -- in a very minimal and very nicely designed interface at the base of the page.

I think it is really important to keep Twitter and Facebook front and center for organizations like ours, and this toolbar does that. Oh, yea, and Wibiya is in beta, they are still making changes and additions. From reading through their Get Satisfaction page, they have already added some changes suggested by the community.

On the Developer Blog here you will find the Wibiya Toolbar, as I am testing it and making sure it works and does not brake things. I have requested the opinions of our Fans on Facebook as well as our Alumni Group, and would like anyone else viewing this to tell me what they think of the toolbar at the bottom of the page. You can even vote in the poll to the right!

Hit the jump for a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo.

I have been working with Anthony Fontana for a little while now to figure out an issue with listing our RSS feeds in the BGSU RSS Reader Facebook app. It turned out I needed to add a RSS 2.0 template to the blogs, their app is not parsing Atom feeds.

Now with that solved, there will be more of our RSS feeds added to the app soon. This is great news for the Sports Blog and other blogs we have.

I want to thank Anthony and BGSU for including our blogs in their Facebook app.

(The beginning part of this is technical and could very well bore the crap out of you. If you just want to see the new features and some screen shots, please hit the Continued link.)

The BG Views Housing Guide was one of the first things we started working on, along with the Events Calendar. At the time we had not decided to manage the entire site in Movable Type yet, but that is for another reason entirely (which is a long story, not for this post). I settled on what I thought was the best solution at the time, Joomla and jReviews. The more I use Joomla and the more I use jReviews the more frustrated I get -- either by limitations or unneeded/unwanted complexities. The more I used Movable Type for other parts of the site, the more I knew I could do it better in Movable Type.

This fall we will be relaunching the Housing Guide, this time in Movable Type. The actual overhead to recreate the entire housing guide in MT was not as bad as you would think. Total time from start to finish, I would peg at about a month when all is said and done.

There are a couple reasons for moving it to MT, other than my frustrations with Joomla and jReviews.

• I don't like requiring rental agencies to have a Joomla account for one thing, and a Movable Type account for otthers.
• RSS is Joomla is a joke, an utter, complete joke. It is not just "there" like it is in MT or WP. I have gone through three RSS plugins to find one I like, and it is not ideal.
• The UI of jReviews, while nice, can be confusing to site visitors. Lets take for example the search. Click search. Click on the drop down and select Housing Guide to show (via AJAX) the search fields for the Housing Guide. jReviews gives no way of linking directly to the Housing Guide (I had Joomla and jReviews setup to handle all of our guides -- a task that MT is now handling).
• Possibly the deal breaker, I cannot format the data in more than one template. Meaning I cannot have a layout for a desktop browser and one for a mobile browser.

All of the above combined, plus the fact that I have developed so much of the site in MT already, made the decision to switch gears that much easier. Before this summer started I had already planned on the move, and basically got a lot of the "behind the scenes" work out of the way.

Enoch and John have been hard at work getting The BG News archives into Issuu. We currently have more than just the summer and spring issues in Issuu, but those are the only two semesters that we have created pages to easily get to them. Once summer terns to fall semester, I will archive them to their own page.

Issuu doesn't make it very easy to categorize large quantities of documents on our profile page, which is a shame, because the back end administration makes organizing them a snap. Here is what the folders look like in thumnail view, click to embiggen:

One of the last things we had Chase put together for us before he left for Michigan was a FAQ. So be sure and check it out and let us know what you think.

Enoch Wu (@thewuster777) made a sweet looking BG Views desktop wallpaper that we now have on all our computers. And now you can have it on your desktop to! Click the thumbnail to see a larger version, or download the zip, which is 1680x1050 and 150 dpi. This means you can repurpose it for any size monitor you have.  Thanks Enoch, nice job!


Download BG Views Desktop Wallpaper

Lara at mtvU/College Publisher asked me to write an article on how our newspaper uses YouTube for video on our site. I wrote it a couple days ago and it has since been edited and posted on the newly relaunched College Publisher site, it is called "YouTube as the Video Solution." Be sure and check it out, and let me know what you think.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but sadly I have been sounding like a scratched 45 for over a year now while working with the transition from CP4 to CP5. So, as it stands, here is another part of the site that is being handled in Movable Type now.

College Publisher's CP5 platform still has yet to produce a mobile template for us to use, so that was a major reason I brought our Classifieds section over to our MT site. Another reason was the fact that in the CP5 system, there was no way to actually search the classifieds. Also, CP5 no longer gives us the automated functionality for classifieds that CP4 once did.  Talk about a step backwards.

There is more to come this summer concerning our classifieds section, including a free Community Classifieds section. But for now, you can see the Today's Listings page, and the Mobile counterpart. Oh, and both are searchable.

I have also added a Classifieds link on the main Mobile site at m.bgviews.com.

Right now if you go the home page of bgviews.com (CP5) or the home page of bgviewsnetwork.com (MT) you will see a Flash-based widget from Issuu showing the latest issue. This is completely automated, which is something that CP5 could not do - College Publisher even suggested Issuu as the solution to the shortcommings of CP5. In CP4, it would auto thumnail, and automatically place the latest PDF in the sidebar for us, we just had to tell the tool which PDF to use. And now we are back to being just as much, if not more, automated.

Now I need to build out a PDF Archive section in our MT site, something else that CP4 did for us, and now we need to do ourselves. The PDF will be officially launching the PDF Archive in the fall, and likely have a soft launch sometime this summer.

Thanks to a suggestion from Chris at College Publisher, I am looking into using Issuu for BG News and other Student Publications publications. If it works well, we may even pay for the Pro version. Here is an embed for a test.

Sadly this widget only embeds the current document. I need to work on that. Hey, I just started using Issuu. Thanks to this blog post, it is easy to change document-id to folder-id. I have updated the embed code, and now it displays the most recent in my "2009 Summer" folder in my Issuu account. Sweet!