redesigning lclark.edu

RSS

Can we create some MyLC news feeds?

After I gave the presentation with Tom at the Admin Assembly (April 8), Charlie Ahlquist asked about an interesting possibility:

So, I currently work in Campus Living, and something that we’ve been trying to work with is advertising to the residents/students on campus.  When you showed the new “My LC” page, I got an idea.  I was wondering if it would be possible for us to set up an RSS Feed for each of the Complexes on campus (SOA, Platt-Howard, Copeland, Forest, and Apartzfeld) as well as one for all On-Campus Residents.  Then, would it be possible for us to have the default be for students who live in those complexes (which is stored in Colleague) are subscribed to the appropriate feed for their residence?

This is a great question and it is certainly possible at our end. We can setup groups in LiveWhale where you could publish news and information for residential units, or other such organization groups. These groups can push RSS which is then consumable by MyLC.

In this case, there is an additional wrinkle in that we don’t have direct access to Colleague. (In other words, we cannot directly ask Colleague for this information.) Colleague stores a great deal of financial data, so really, we don’t want this kind of access. However, we do have access to some of its data is through nightly dumps of select information and it looks as though we would have access to their building.

At this point I’m inclined to put this on a nice-to-do list for now until we get MyLC here and installed, and perhaps plan to look at it after the launch, since we’ll have the summer to iron out some kinks before the students return.

Also published: https://media.zendesk.com/forums/22045/entries/32110

Filed Under

Make the whale happy; post a comment.

The Confluence of Content Streams (Our Twitter River)

One of the benefits of our redesign process (including the modernization of the technological underpinnings of the site), is that we look forward to being able to reuse content in new ways across our site. This is not a radically new concept on the web in general, but for Lewis & Clark it is a change that offers exciting opportunities for an improved user experience.

In the old days, interesting stories that were told one place, say the newsroom, had to be manually added anywhere else we thought might be worthwhile, like an academic department’s news page, and vice versa. If you wanted to read those stories you were pretty much limited to using one device, the web browser and accessing it one place, the static web page. With the rise of some pretty heavy acronym-laden technologies, RSS chief among them, the PubCom team is using the redesign to play with some new ways to deliver the fascinating as well as the day-to-day goings-on of the members of the Lewis & Clark community, both on and off Palatine Hill. Recently we have hopped onto bandwagon that is Twitter (Twitter Explained in Plain English) and are experimenting with directing some of our varied content streams, of Watzek Library news, of Law School podcasts, of our Newsroom, as well as items that come to us from the outside world, like google news alerts, into a united content river. At this point you can access it on our twitter page from your web browser, mobile phone, or via our new service, telepathic broadcast, (still in beta). Advantages: we set the stage for serendipity, practice brevity, and offer a less formal venue to let people know what L&C is doing as an institution. Our approach will invariably change as we learn more, and if you find yourself asking your computer monitor “Why?” out loud as you read this, drop us a line in the comments. We like to talk about this stuff.

Filed Under

6 people have already made the whale happy; but who couldn’t be happier?(Go ahead, make a comment…)