Technically, the actual 2.5 upgrade went off without a hitch thanks to WordPress Automatic Upgrade. Everything in my template just worked, which I couldn’t say after the 2.3 upgrade earlier this year.

So what is my favorite new feature? Well, so far it has to be the automatic plugin upgrade, but I am looking forward to using some fo the media features and the media browser is a clear improvement.

This is quite possibly the most inventive call for applicants I have ever seen. Proof that with a burgeoning company and a copy of iMovie you can make yourself look like fools, but still come off in a positive light.

Nice job FreshBooks.

Disclaimer: I use and love this product.

This lovely theme will have to do for now until I can design my own.

As Web Manager for Pacific University (approximately 2,500 students), my solution for calendaring is an internally-built application that I call CANS (Calendar And News System). As the name implies, it also handles news/articles. It is basically the second time that I’ve written this app. The first time was for Concordia University – Portland, Oregon.

The first CANS was written with Coldfusion and MS SQL on a couple of Microsoft servers; the second with Coldfusion and MySQL in a Linux environment.

The backend is unimportant—I could have written it in [insert coding language here] and [insert flavor of database here] with similar functionality–the core requirement for implementing CANS is a relational database. (Sorry folks, you can’t get away with using an old version of FileMaker.)

What makes the conceptual model worthy of considering is the way that it treats “departments” (functional units of the institution) in relation to “categories” (roughly divided into unique audience groups that would be associated with a specific online resource such as a webpage or email newsletter).

Institutional units are usually quick to latch on to CANS because they see it as a benefit to their unit’s website. Some departments have several child categories associated with a parent category allowing them to get specific with the information they want to present.

This doesn’t make much sense without an example. Take a look at the career center at Pacific. The “Career Development Center” is a top level (parent) category with subcategories (children) of “Job Fairs” and “Spotlight on Success”. The output code calls up the events (a row in the CALENDAR table) or articles (a row in the NEWS table) for a specific category (a row in the CATEGORY table). Linking tables hold things together (i.e. NEWS2CATEGORY). This makes it possible to link multiple categories to a single event so that it will show up on several pages of the website as appropriate.

For the staff/faculty/students that log into the system (integrated LDAP) and add events, they are presented with the master calendar where they must look at the day associated with their event before they can click the “add” button. (This helps reduce redundancy and scheduling conflicts.) They will then see a simple form with some required fields including a multiple select box that asks “Where do you want this to appear?”.

For website visitor, there is no real need to know that any of this is happening. They simply see news and events on that pertain to topic covered by the webpage on which they landed.

The model is inherently expandable. The Concordia version has image upload capabilities and a special interface for athletics to manage their schedule and results with additional fields such as opponent, outcome and final score.

As an application, CANS is far from perfect. (Any software written by a single person—with no less than a degree in English—who is grossly overburdened with other design and development projects can’t help but have a few bugs.) However, it has enabled me to get people across campus, both here and at Concordia, to focus on communicating to their audience(s) with timely and useful information.

Incidentally, CANS does not currently integrate with the Pacific’s scheduling software—though I do plan to explore this someday. I would love to have the functionality of a tool such as R25, but it would add another layer of complexity that would be too much for me to take on at this time.

I would also, if I had the time and personnel, like to integrate the application with a full content management system. Anyone who wants to work with me on the model is free to drop me a line.

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See the other possibilities.

The hurry-up-and-wait process ended this morning in a flurry of activity that began with a phone call late yesterday afternoon.

So to sum up the week, my daughter couldn’t hold down anything on Thursday; the title company called yesterday and wanted us to sign with two hours notice—we declined until this morning due to “scheduling” issues, but were fine with signing first thing this morning; which we did, despite the fact I was awoken this morning by my son’s projectile vomitting in my face. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

The next two weeks are guaranteed to be crazy, but at least I have my Internet connection back—oh yes, that is another story for another day.

While I will readily admit to having a room of my own for the majority of my middle and high school years, I experienced the benefit of compromise-laden living with my younger brother for about 10 years of our lives together. Including my married years, I can say that I have spent twice as many years sharing a bedroom as not. There is a lot to be gleaned from the ability to share a relatively small space on a regular basis. With siblings, or with a life partner, there will inevitably be arguments and clashes of opinion, but it is the response to these conflicts that helps to shape our emotional intelligence.

While I believe you can learn empathy in a number of ways, it seems to be that the lessons learned from compromising with a roommate could be extremely valuable. While there may be some merit to the solitude that an individual room in a residence hall could afford, I would hope that the incoming freshmen would be encouraged to share a little of themselves in a way more intimate than instant messaging—which increasingly seems to be the choice of the college-age crowd.

To be fair, it helps if you are connecting to a decent server. For some reason the servers at Pacific are always painfully slow, which is something I have pointed out to the IT guys. Part of the problem could be related to heavy student use during peak hours. (What else is there to do on a Monday night?) Though, there has to be something else that is causing the problem—the hosting service I use for contract work and my personal site is in New Jersey and I get better performance out of it.