ATTN: Those who have read/are planning to read my novel this year:

Oh some things have changed. Yes, yes they have.

When I thought about how messy the whole noveling on my blog process was last year, I made a rash decision. A decision with so little thought put into it that it is awesome. Instead of noveling my progress here, I have set up a completely new site with a completely new theme with awesome features.

All NaNoWriMo noveling will take place here: nanowrimo.thegoodmanblog.com.

Oh but that’s not all. I have built an entire WordPress template especially for National Novel Writing Month – and more specifically for my fellow WriMos that post to WordPress.

The new theme is called Modern Linguist and is based on Chris Coyier’s WPTypo theme, though with some decidedly drastic alterations. Notably, the theme has these amazing features:

• Built-in word counts pulled from the NaNoWriMo API (as soon as it’s activated for 2009, anyway)
• Clean, minimal interface. Not widgetized as to keep it focused on your novel(s)
• Choose-your-own Font Style with 8 (eight!) different typefaces
• Width optimized for online reading
• Typography based – no images in the template by default
• Optional Synopsis display on the front page
• Yearly category navigation (for easy novel separation)
• Special displays for registered/logged-in users

It’ll not only be a better experience for readers, but also for the person doing the noveling.

I’m looking at a launch date of 30 October, just in time for NaNoWriMo (which starts on the first of November). If you’re interested in using the template, let me know in the comments and I’ll make sure answer your questions and email the theme to you when it’s done!

For all of you that had an account here on my blog, that’s all been moved over to: http://nanowrimo.thegoodmanblog.com – you can login with your same credentials and should be able to read last year’s novel still. If you have issues, shoot me an email.

If any of you check out the new template, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

And for those of you who have no idea what I’ve been talking about, read this post.

Had our kickoff meeting with Dotmarketing today about implementing dotCMS. We’re getting it all rolling. I’m hoping to set up a tech/development/process blog on EDU to keep track of all of that as we go through it.

The target launch looks like early to mid March, which is awesome. And Kevin starts work on Monday so we should be getting this cranked out pretty quick. First design meeting is Monday.  yay!

I convinced my boss to let me do something awesome. Something that’s right and good and will make everyone’s life easier.

I am moving our school’s news to a WordPress install in the coming month or so. Our current site is built in Joomla! which I absolutely hate. It’s not that it’s a bad CMS, it’s just not designed to do what we need it to, and we don’t have a full-time developer on staff.

So, I will be moving and then importing all of our archived news stories into WordPress and then using syndication feeds to target news content on the main Joomla! site. It’s going to be a lot easier for me.

See, WordPress by default builds an RSS feed for each category, tag, or everything. Which is great. That means I can place a story from the Management department in the “management” category as well as in the “School of Professional Studies” category and it will be included in both feeds. On top of that it will be included in our main news feed. When I want to place news from that department on their information page on EDU, I just have to grab the feed, shove it into a module and the latest stories will automagically show up on their pages.

And I can do that across the site. The other benefits I see are being able to add a more social element to our news content, adding more media – photos, video, podcasts, etc., and breaking away from our current habit of posting only news releases. Rather, we’ll be able to run a sort of year-round online magazine highlighting what our students and faculty are doing. This will go beyond our current alumni publication – I mean, there’s only so much you can put in a 26 page print publication. Instead, we can expand on that and drive people back to our website.

Can you tell I’m excited? One guy I met at the HighEdWeb conference handles his school’s news in WordPress already. And it’s working out great.

I’m excited to start developing it and see where I get. At the very least we’ll have greater control over our content and that will make me a happier camper.

Day two of HighEdWeb is finished. Just about anyway. A lot of the attendees went to the “excursion” to the Discovery Center. Which looks semi-fun. But I’m tired and missing my wife and needed food other than “heavy hors d’oeurves” and I really want to watch the debate tonight. So I found a Chipotle. And ate it. I’m watching tv and waiting for the debate to start.

So check out my new friend/collegue’s blog – mattherzberger.com. He works for a major university in Texas (for now anyway) and has some great design and layout ideas. If you’re a web developer, he’s definitely someone to check out.

One of the best parts of this conference has been the twitter conversations. We trended higher than #obama and #sarahpalin and #tinafey during this week. It’s been pretty cool. If you want to check out what we talked about click here.

I’ve gotten a ton of great idea — moreso today than yesterday — about things we can possibly do at GC in the near future. Should be cool.

And I get to drive home tomorrow and take care of my ill wife. She came down with a nasty cold just after I left and I’ve felt pretty bad for her. (Hopefully I’m not going to get sick before we leave for West Virginia on Thursday evening.)

We’ve been doing some research at work into finding a CMS to replace the one we currently have. About two years ago GC transitioned from a static html site to a php-driven, dynamic content management system (CMS). In higher ed, you usually end up with thousands and thousands of pages of web content, more if you’re a large university. And we are no different.

I think Jared said we serve about 13,000 pages or so. And before switching to Joomla! that number was a huge burden for updating. Not to mention there was absolutely no on-demand content creation or display whatsoever.

But here we are two years after and we’re running into the inherent problems with Joomla! in the type of application we’re using it for. Not that it’s a bad piece of software – it’s not. Not at all. It’s just really hard to fit into our plans and needs.

Joomla! is open source. And with that state comes a whole slew of benefits and problems. This leads to the inevitable battle with weighing pros and cons – free vs. slow response and slim support, etc. And for smaller applications, it’s a great CMS. But with the importance of SEO in our line of work, it just doesn’t cut it.

See, we were running OpenSEF, a community-created plugin, to change the long string of php-created url characters to something simpler, like .edu/getajob or something. Everytime a link was clicked, all 13,000 pages were queried in the database to find the one that the SEF url matched – and led to server crashes. A lot of server crashes. Think, thrice a day or more. Pretty ridiculous. So it’s turned off now. And we have ugly URLs.

The organization of the backend doesn’t work for us either. Only 3 levels of content – Section, category, content item. No sub categories, no cross-sectioning of articles. Not bad, just not for us.

So we’re looking at others. One really cool one we’ve found is dotCMS. It’s GPLed but also comes with pay-packages for support. They also have a kit option that comes with a customized server (actual hardware) some addon-apps and setup. It looks perfect for what we’re wanting to do. And a lot of other schools have already started using it with really impressive results.

So. The next step is to convince administration to spend some money.

Do you have a favourite CMS or a suggestion for something we should look at? It needs to be able to handle large amounts of content, not necessarily OSS, but highly configurable.

Or nearly/really close anyway. This is what I’ve been working on. It’s okay. Probably not my best work. But it’ll do. I hate IE 6 and its poor rendering of CSS. 

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I am presently watching Thank You for Smoking, which I first saw in a theater in Huntington, WV with Jessica, Danny and Anna. This movie is funny.

So, we’re less than two weeks away from the music festival. A couple of bands backed out a week ago and we had to replace them. Phil Wickham and Spoken are the subs. I’m pretty excited about Phil Wickham coming out because that means Dan Bailey (who drums for Phil) will be here as well which is cool. I haven’t seen Dan in a couple of years.

This week I’ll be putting together pass lists, finishing the design of the passes, working with the student cabinet to make sure everything is done and probably planning for the next year.

Apparently my camera only takes pictures of Cors. That’s an exaggeration, but he for sure takes up a majority of my photos on flickr. Greenville’s a sleepy town and I think I’m bored with it. So I don’t think to take photos of things that I’ve seen every day for the last six odd years. It’ll be inspiring, I think, to travel with my camera. I’m sure Portugal and Ireland will lend their beauty to my lenses.

Hoping to have the WGRN site finished this week. It should be pretty quick. I’m nearly done. I don’t think I can do the song updating on the front page. It’s just not going to work with the old version of Simian they’re running. But maybe in the future. Simian sucks. Otherwise, the site looks good.

So that’s a quick update on what I’m doing. Cheers.

I’m really excited for the official/stable WordPress 2.5 release. I’ve got RC1 running this site on a backup/test install. It is awesome. I’m ready to get away from MU anyway… kind of sucks in a lot of ways. Anyway, the 2.5 revisions are excellent, so if you run WordPress or have been thinking of it, the release of WP 2.5 is the perfect opportunity to upgrade or start using.