May 2005 Archives

Summer is officially here. Everyone has cleared out - nobody here but me and a couple of servers. Well, that's not entirely true. I'm just feeling secluded in the server closet this morning. The eHub needed a fresh start and what better time is there but summer?

We're planning to move from Blogger to WordPress...There are just so many things that frustrate me with Blogger.

The most frustrating being a lack of control over the input system. Although we can host the blogs on our own servers, the system that our students use to post is hosted on a server(s) somewhere beyond our control. This leads to unexplained downtime, mysterious feature 'upgrades' and no control over how or what the interface looks like. However, I remain steadfast in my belief that Blogger is a good place to start. It served its purpose, and helped our J-School get into the world of blogging and content management. For that, I am forever grateful for the months of good service Blogger provided. Could it be that we are just all grown-up and ready to move on to something new?

These are just a few of the reasons why we are exploring our options. And we have explored. Believe me. I found this list helpful in my search for the "perfect" blogging system.

I was personally looking forward to testing the Blojsom system that comes bundled with Tiger Server. However, after one night of playing around with it, I discovered it is even less flexible than Blogger.

So, WordPress it is. I like it because it uses opensource tools like php and MySQL. I also like the tweaking control that we have over templates and various settings. The only downside, right now WP cannot support multiple users with multiple individual blogs...unless of course, you install WP in every single user's directory. With more than 60 new users coming on board every semester, I just don't have time for this kind of installation. Instead, we're going to experiment with a Multimedia Reporting class blog this summer. Stay tuned.

About twenty-five people loaded a bus at noon on Saturday to attend the dedication of William Allen White's home in Emporia.

White lived a tremendous life, he and his wife traveled around the world, something you begin to understand as quite a feat when you see the large trunk in the master bedroom.

The home was filled with interesting 'knick knacks,' like a soldier's helmet from Russia, ornate glasses from Katherine the Great, and old photos of White and Teddy Roosevelt, White and Albert Einstein. So much history in those red bricks, if only we could've have spent more time analyzing the books and the photos.

After our tour of the house, White's great grandson, Christopher White Walker, led us over to the Emporia Gazette for a sneak peek at White's old stomping grounds. Walker is currently Editor and Publisher of the Gazette. The building was really quite amazing. You could almost feel White's presence in the newsroom, a quiet, and mostly abandoned room. And, it smelled like journalism. You know the smell, a mixture of newsprint and wood polish.

All-in-all it was a beautiful day and a wonderful reminder, once again, of how cool the history of journalism really is. See the photo slideshow (courtesy KU grad, Ross Martin).

If you haven't read Rick's comment posted on Adam's blog, you really should. He provided an eloquent and insightful post.

After his post, all I can do is confirm, according to my experience, that web development is not easy. It's hard. I don't think many people really understand what goes in to it...especially, when you want to do it right.

Our J694 class of online producers learned a lot this semester, the hard way, in a very short time. Such is the nature of education, such is the nature of the web biz. At the very least, all of the students will leave, (some of them graduating and leaving college for good), knowing a lot more than they did when they came into this class in January.

Planning takes time, it takes rough drafts, and second rough drafts, and third, and sometimes even starting from scratch all over again. It's all part of the development life cycle.

And it's good to know that we can throw journalism students into a project like this and see them really thinking about it. In the end, when it all comes together, the sportsTV site should be something this semester's class is really proud of.

Site maps, site maps everywhere and not a web site to be seen...YET.

The design team is having a rough time getting things done. Well, not actually getting things done, but having to re-do them. It's a difficult situation to be working along the same timeline as content, because we design and then they decide what they want on the page and then we re-design. Despite these kinks, I'm really excited with what we're doing here. I know we still have some work to do and undoubtly some corrections, but we've made a lot of progress over the last week. View the future of sports

That's right folks, it's finally here the new and improved KUJH-TV and tv.ku.edu Sports Staff structure.