YouTube Videos and Ingeniux

We have created a way to insert YouTube videos into our site using the Ingeniux CMS. Here’s a preview of a video running in our new college template:

This was quite a nut to crack, but after numerous hours and a large order from Starbucks, we completed the process. The problem existed in the fact that the url of the video was what we wanted, but the embed code provided by YouTube wouldn’t work. Insert this code into your page schema to create a YouTube video component. (Note that we have autoplay set to true, so the movie will play when the page loads).

<xsl:variable name=”video” select=”/*/Page[@Name='Video']/@URL”/>

<xsl:variable name=”videourl” select=”substring-after($video,’=')”/>

<xsl:if test=”/*/Page[@Name='Video']“>

<object width=”425″ height=”355″>

<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/{$videourl}&hl=en”></param>

<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent” ></param>

<embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/{$videourl}&autoplay=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”355″ />

</object>

</xsl:if>

<xsl:if test=”/*/Navigation[@Name = 'VideoPageNavigation']“>

<!– Goes to template match in include-navigations –>

<xsl:apply-templates select=”/*/Navigation[@Name = 'VideoPageNavigation']” />

</xsl:if>

To create the link for the video, set up the page (on the Edit tab) like the following example:

Getting Down to the Wire

We are in the final days development for our new website. This week we have our CMS provider (Ingeniux) and our design firm (New City Media) on campus trying to solve any last issues with integration. We had a big breakthrough this afternoon on the navigation (thanks Jeth!) and I feel good that it is going to work well (the navigation that is). I’ve blogged about this previously. And it was great to see it running live on our site.

Our plan is to work on content placement as much as we can this week, and then do a two week content lock down where we update the site like crazy, and hopefully publish the new site on June 1. I suspect that most of June will be taken up by doing clean-up. And we have quite a few applications that are outside the CMS that will need to be reskinned in order to mesh with the new site.

CFImage and Coldfusion 8.0.1

Since upgrading to Coldfusion 8.0.1, several of our applications that use CFImage to resize images have been broken. Adobe came out with a patch recently that I just found, and after uploading the jar file and restarting the server, things seem to be working better.

If you are having similar issues, I urge you to apply this hot fix:

TechNote: kb403144

New site launch - classiccollege.com

We launched classiccollege.com this week.

This site is the culmination of our new messaging launch, a mascot contest, and just a chance to to have fun with our work. We are a classic college, but don’t have a mascot. We thought it would be funny to show people what we don’t want for a mascot, so we have posted around 10 videos of “rejected” ideas. All of the actors are our students and we think they did a fantastic job! Check out the videos>>

One site down and one to go… =) June 1st, here we come…

.ics and .vcs files and gmail

Well, I spent a somewhat frustrating and unproductive few hours trying to figure out how I can send a calendar item to Gmail and have it add to Google Calendar.

We have a few applications that allow you to open a .vcs file and have it add to your Outlook calendar. I was hoping that I could e-mail this file, and have various web based calendars open this file, too. But it looks like this is not possible.

I can, and probably will use CFEXCHANGE to directly add to people’s calendar, IF they have an exchange account. Sending a .ics file would work for Outlook, iCal, Thunderbird/Sunbird, etc. I worry that the UI is going to be weird, if I have to say: “If you are on campus, do this, and if you are off campus do this, but if you use Google Calendar, do this….”

My plan is to look at some other online services and see what they do. I suspect that all they do is allow you to subscribe to a feed, which isn’t really what I want.

* Sigh *

Access Key Support on Mobile Site

This morning I have added support for single key click access to many of the links on our mobile site. This will allow someone to more easily navigate from a cell phone. For example, to get to the campus calendar all you need to do is click the #3 key on the keypad, or to get to people search #4 on the keypad.

The code is really simple, it just requires adding the accesskey=”x” argument to the <a> tag. So the “About Roanoke” link’s code now looks like this:

<a href=”about.cfm” accesskey=”6″>6: About Roanoke College</a>

Check it out at: m.roanoke.edu or see the screenshot below:

Navigation!

We have have lately been struggling with the left site navigation, and what happens at various levels of depth. We don’t want people to be getting lost in the site, but we also don’t want to overwhelm users with too many options.

Here is what our designers are currently proposing:

Our main concern is that at Level 3, we are loosing all the other links for the sub-section (the siblings), so we have thrown it back to our designers to come up with a better option. Overall, it has been a real challenge for us to get section navigation right, and we are working hard to make sure that we do a better job on this redesign that we have currently.

Most sites don’t have the level of depth that a college site does. Or if they do, they jump to a whole new navigation once you get to a certain depth. So trying to maintain a navigation that goes from top to bottom for a site that has 15,000 - 20,000 pages is a real challenge. I’ll post more as this develops.

Virtual Tour Progress

We are going to launch a new virtual tour when the new site launches on June 1st.  Our “virtual tour” is going to be more of a campus testdrive. It’s not to going to be map or building based, but rather experience based.

We are going to have 3 main categories:

1. College Life
2. Academics
3. Location

The interface will be flash based and will have photos, videos and links.

We’ve been brainstorming how to do the videos and we performed an experiment last week with students that turned out great. We decided to get a group of students together from all walks of life, but yet know one another and get them talking about life here. We videoed the conversation, so we were worried that the students would be nervous with the cameras, but they were very comfortable and some interesting stories arose. We plan to use snippets of this in the videos. Here’s some photos from the video shoot.

Branding Collateral Materials

I have been working on some collateral materials for the branding roll out in April.

ONE

I have redesigned the e-mail signature card, it now uses both an image and text, instead of a whole image like before. Here is a sample:

TWO

New desktop Wallpaper. Check out the sample below.

THREE

New screensaver. I choose a product called Screen Saver Factory Pro 4, because it allowed me to set a static image as a splash screen (the logo with the classic tag line) and allowed me to make the images high rez (1600 x 1200) and then scale down for smaller monitors. I will link it once I get it approved.

Live Streaming with Ustream.TV

We had our first really successful live streaming of a Lacrosse Game this week. Over all the video quality was really good. The fans were enthusiastic. We topped out at around around 113 total people watching. There seemed to be a large word of mouth component, as viewers increased throughout the broadcast.

You can see below that we are 3rd in overall viewers after Chris Pirillo (Internet star)and SpaceVidcast.com (showing the space shuttle docking with the Internation Space Station).

The service that we used was ustream.tv. The others ones that we looked at where Yahoo! Live and Stickham.

We plan to do more testing in the coming weeks. And check out an upcoming game at our live streaming page:

www.roanoke.edu/athletics/video.