∞

The future? It’s here.

∞

Really interesting. I’m not sure if this would confuse our school’s web editors or be a great time-saving, more intuitive way for them to edit their sites. Not to mention the impact this could have on server load. Hmm. Need to do some testing!

∞

A service is only as good as the utility it provides with minimal friction or overhead. As soon as managing or keeping up with that service becomes a burden, we can do one of two things: change up how we use it or drop it from our life / routine.

A few weeks ago I came to a point where social media for me was far more noise than signal and there was too much cross over between my personal and professional lives.

Diff’rent Strokes for Diff’rent Folks

As soon as I took a step back and looked at my social media usage, there was a clear dividing line in terms of who I was “friends” with on which service:

• Facebook = personal contacts and interests. That is, people I actually have met in real life and some bands and brands that I have an affection toward. (It should be noted that I’m very selective about what I “Like” on Facebook and I play no Facebook-based games. Therefore, for me, Facebook is mostly about online versions of personal relationships.)
• Twitter = professional development & miscellaneous nonsense. Web design and higher ed thought leaders, colleagues, bands, random weird celebrities, etc. Unusual combinations, for sure.

The very first move was to eliminate the “miscellaneous nonsense” from Twitter. No more celebrities, bands, or even personal friends that weren’t in some way related to web design or higher ed.

In web design/development, formal education is way behind the times and/or just plain sucks. Five years ago, the best way to keep up on the latest advances in code, techniques, etc. was to follow the major web design thought leaders’ blogs – Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Dan Cederholm, Dave Shea, etc. When Twitter came along, it was these same guys that jumped on it the earliest and as it grew, it became easier for them to dole out nuggets of wisdom 140 characters at a time instead of writing a blog post. I would argue that these days, any web designer/developer who is not following a certain 50 or so people on Twitter is behind the times and will be left in the dust of innovation.

In higher ed, the same thing is true – except to a lesser degree. Higher ed web blogs still exist and are actually flourishing. But still, there’s a more granular level of wisdom and thought happening on Twitter than you can find on blogs.

A Digression: LinkedIn

You might be saying, “Jess, what about LinkedIn for ‘professional development’ and networking?”

Well, LinkedIn would be fine except for three things:

1. It requires, in most cases, a personal relationship. There are many, many people who I follow on Twitter who I would not be able to interact with on LinkedIn.
2. Many people don’t have their Twitter statuses flowing through to LinkedIn and/or publish any meaningful content to LinkedIn.
3. I kinda hate LinkedIn. In fact, I’m this close to closing my LinkedIn account altogether. I get ZERO value out of it. Seriously, zero. I’m on it just to be on it. Do you get anything out of it? (I sincerely want to know. Am I doing it wrong?)

I could also do lists through my Twitter client, but that’s not the point. The point is simplifying altogether in terms of raw usage. For me going forward, Facebook = personal. Twitter = professional. Then, I don’t have to worry about switching lists, filtering, etc.

It’s In The Way That You Use It

After living with the above scenario for a week or so, it was clear that I needed even more granular fine-tuning. I’m one of those people that needs to be able to “turn off” thoughts of work when I get home. I have two young kids and a wife that I love very much – and also a long commute which already limits my time with them. When I’m at home with them, I want to be with them in every sense, not checking work email at 9pm.

Now don’t get me wrong – I love my job. I work hard and I take pride in my accomplishments. But I need that separation so that I don’t (a) cheat my family out of my attention or (b) go completely insane with worry and stress, as I am wont to do.

So, it’s become clear that I need to severely limit the number of work-related folks I interact with on Facebook and the degree to which I interact with them.

Your Mileage May Vary

This is no silver bullet and it’s a personal decision. These are the lines I have needed to draw in the sand.

If nothing else, I hope this inspires others to have the courage to make some hard decisions. You may have to “un-friend” an actual personal, long-time, real-life friend. And that can be awkward. But if you explain it to them, they’ll get over it. Trust me – I just did it.

Recommended further reading and a continued source of inspiration for me, Patrick Rhone’s personal blog and his site Practical Opacity.

∞

∞

I know, given the nature of the transition we were going through, it should have been a focus earlier. Hindsight, y’know?

Goals

I wanted our page to have a little bit of humor, but also be useful. It had to have enough personality to soften the blow of missing content and also provide links and search functionality to (hopefully) get the user to where they intended to go.

Here’s what we did:

Chompers

We’re the Allegheny Gators and Chompers is our mascot. The original plan was to have a more basic photo of Chompers but my colleague Derek got creative. We had a photo of Chompers in front of a “2014″ flag from move-in day last fall. A little photoshop work later and “2014″ became “404″. Awesome!

Links & Search

We’re providing three links:

1. Link to the “Search” box. This search is site-specific; if you’re on the Admissions site, this search box will only search within Admissions. (We also have a “global” search box at the very top of the page that searches the entire Allegheny family of sites.)
2. Link to the site’s home page. Again, if you’re on the Admissions site, this will take you to the Admissions home page. This is done using the home_url() and bloginfo('name') WordPress functions.
3. Link to Allegheny’s home page. If you’re really turned around and just need to start over, this is for you.

Wufoo Reporting

We used Chris Coyier’s excellent tutorial on the Wufoo company blog to add a form to let users report the “page not found” error. In short, there are two hidden fields (“URL with Error” and “Referring URL”) as well as a big ol’ “Comments” field. We haven’t had a lot of reports filed, but the ones we have received have been super helpful.

How’d we do?

It’s hard to measure users’ satisfaction with something like this, but anecdotally, it’s been a success. And purely from the standpoint of the web team fixing errors, the Wufoo reporting has been great.

That said, there’s more we’re going to do – including utilizing a WordPress plugin to report 404′s instead of relying on users’ form submissions. But compared to where we were, this feels good.

We have an upcoming event on campus that brought up a seemingly simple request: have a form available to fill out online and display a live count of form submissions on computers and/or TV screens in the Campus Center. (I drank the Wufoo kool-aid long ago, so when I heard “online form”, that’s where my head went. We could have also written some quick custom PHP/MySQL to do the job, but that’s no fun.)

The question was how to get a count of the form submissions out of Wufoo.

There are likely many ways to accomplish this (based on the form’s RSS feed, etc.) but I took it as an opportunity to dig into the Wufoo API – something that frightened me. See, I have a confession to make: HTML and CSS are my friend. PHP? We get along kind of okay, but anything the least bit complicated makes me run away shrieking. API’s? No clue. Scares the crap out of me.

Not anymore. This was easy. And it was pretty much all there in the Wufoo documentation.

The Code

<?php
$curl = curl_init('https://{your-wufoo-account}.wufoo.com/api/v3/forms/{hash-for-your-form}/entries/count.xml');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, '{your-api-key}:footastic');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_ANY);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Wufoo Sample Code');

$response = curl_exec($curl);
$resultStatus = curl_getinfo($curl);

if($resultStatus['http_code'] == 200) {
echo $response;
} else {
echo 'Call Failed '.print_r($resultStatus);
}
?>


Explanation

Let’s dig just a tad deeper into the pieces you need to fill in and what’s going on here.

1. {your-wufoo-account}
The URL prefix for your account.

2. {hash-for-your-form} and {your-api-key}
These can both be found by going to the “Forms” tab in the Wufoo admin area and clicking “Code” underneath the name of your form. On the next screen, click “API Information” at the top right of the screen. Finally, on that page you will find your unique API key and form hash.

3. What’s Happening
The magic is simply in the XML URL in the very first line of code. By ending the URL with /entries/count.xml, we’re telling Wufoo to return the count of entries. (I told you this was easy.) In our case, we’re storing that entry count in the $response variable and then simply printing that count on screen with the PHP echo command. At this point you could easily use that count in any number of calculations, as a basis for some other looping or paging code, etc.

Resources

Further documentation can be found on Wufoo’s support site:

• Wufoo Docs: Wufoo Rest API V3
• Wufoo Docs: The Entries GET API

Screenshots of this code in action coming soon!