Since I have had a number of people ask me about how we built BG Views, from BGSU, other colleges, Facebook and even some people on Twitter, I have finally sat down to write about it. For the most part, you can gather how BG Views has been built by reading the posts already here on this blog.
Sections of these posts will be overview and cursory, while others will be technical in nature. You have been warned! This will span many parts, this is more or less the introduction.
The project started a few years ago when Bob Bortel and I wanted to re-launch our BG News web site to be a community site, not just an online version of our newspaper. Timing for this was right, too, as College Publisher was getting ready to release CP5, with many more community driven features.
Fast forward to the time we went to put the wheel to the pavement, and College Publisher did not have those features fleshed out yet - and still don't. This blindsided us, as mtvU and College Publisher were not going to be able to deliver features they had promised us months earlier, and we had a looming launch with a feature set in place as a goal.
Luckily, I had for months toyed with the idea of handling much of the site ourselves, not through our partner. In the end, that is what had to happen. So, as the site runs today, the "news" portion of the site, Our Views, is run through College Publisher, the rest running on our own servers that we maintain.
Sections of these posts will be overview and cursory, while others will be technical in nature. You have been warned! This will span many parts, this is more or less the introduction.
The project started a few years ago when Bob Bortel and I wanted to re-launch our BG News web site to be a community site, not just an online version of our newspaper. Timing for this was right, too, as College Publisher was getting ready to release CP5, with many more community driven features.
Fast forward to the time we went to put the wheel to the pavement, and College Publisher did not have those features fleshed out yet - and still don't. This blindsided us, as mtvU and College Publisher were not going to be able to deliver features they had promised us months earlier, and we had a looming launch with a feature set in place as a goal.
Luckily, I had for months toyed with the idea of handling much of the site ourselves, not through our partner. In the end, that is what had to happen. So, as the site runs today, the "news" portion of the site, Our Views, is run through College Publisher, the rest running on our own servers that we maintain.
