Tomorrow is my first class period teaching a college-level course. I am excited and maybe a little bit nervous. But I think I’m ready. I’ve got the class pretty much planned out. And tonight I finished my Keynote presentation for the class. Check it out.

In a couple of weeks I will making my initial foray into college-level teaching. Last week I signed my first adjunct contract to teach Web Page Design to a group of Sophomores through Seniors. I am really excited about this job, to tell the truth. I think it’ll be a lot of fun and a good experience for me as a designer.

The class is once a week on Monday evenings for three hours. It’s an introductory web design class, so I’ll be teaching the most basic of XHTML and CSS. But I am hoping that this group of Digital Media students will catch on quickly enough that we can really get into the cool stuff.

Beyond markup and stylesheets I will be teaching them some design. Some actual design. Because I think that’s part of what the class has been lacking (from the students I’ve known in previous classes). The students in my class will be following good design blogs and hopefully learning some trends.

As a new teacher I think I’m lucky to have such great online resources available, in the form of so many design blogs.

Is there anything specific you would want to learn in a class like this if, of course, you were taking it? I’d be interested to know what you think is important.

This morning I’ll be training about 19 faculty and staff members at the college to use our new CMS platform. I’m surprised to have garnered such a great number of people.

Kevin and Lance will be helping me do the training. We’re going to go over the interface and how to contribute content to dotCMS. Should be tons of fun.

Hurrah?

I promised it and now it’s here.

Yeah, it’s been two weeks since we hosted the 32nd AgapeFest music festival here in Greenville. The festival itself is entirely run by students from Greenville College and they do a fantastic job handling such a large event. We bring on average 5000 people to the Bond County Fairgrounds each May and host the biggest names in Christian music on our main stage, plus many local, indie and up-and-coming artists on our smaller Stage 2.

We are a mid-sized festival and definitely a different experience than the Cornerstones and Icthuses of this industry. But we serve a need to be a less expensive, local, but high quality event for churches and families to attend. Even with a tumultuous history of red ink, the last four or five years have been fairly solid in generating a profit. For our non-profit, that is important. If we hit a hard year and lose money, the festival is at risk to be shut down by the college board of trustees. We certainly know that we may have to pay–so to speak–for the losses of our predecessors.

But that serves as better motivation to do it right. That makes us tighten up the budgets and make smarter decisions with our marketing.

Part of my job at the school is to not only serve as a staff advisor to the festival student staff, but to oversee a bulk of the web marketing. This past year I made a push into social media for the festival and it seems to have paid off well enough. I rounded up a group of eight or so students on staff and gave them our Twitpic email for posting. From setup to tear down they were sending images to Twitpic that would post to the festival’s Twitter stream. We were *sort of* liveblogging the event in this capacity. It was really cool to be able to operate this way.

Another aspect of my normal work is as a backup photographer. So I had a Canon 20D on my back the entire time we were out there (mainly because Jessica wanted to hang onto our D80 and shoot with it). During the weekend I was uploading photos I took to our flickr group.

On top of those I had my Flip Mino camera out there and would hand it off to the staff to make videos, or I’d shoot some myself. These would get uploaded to the YouTube channel.

With these three (sort of four) avenues covered, I tweaked the AgapeFest.com design to be a little more micro-blog format friendly. I went to a two-column front page with a wider area for posts and then used the FeedWordPress plugin to import posts from our accounts. This meant that any visitors over the weekend could see what was going on at the festival without having to track down all of our social media outlets. It was a glorified lifestream for the main festival site, but it was wildly successful for a first run. I was averaging 8000 or so hits to the website in the days leading up to the festival and jumped our Twitter following by about 40 followers (Twitter isn’t as ubiquitous in this demographic).

At this point I’m looking forward to what we can do next year.

So, the festival. It was good. Looks like we made a little money this year despite the recession, rain leading up to and on Friday afternoon, and a few hiccups at the festival. We had some weird people come out. I’m starting to see more weirdness — we had a man and his two sons dressed in full Renaissance faire costumes carrying knives and hatchets try to come in — and I’m not sure if it’s just not being on student staff I see more, or if there really are more oddities happening.

In any case, the student staff did a great job, as usual, even if there were some hiccups and challenges along the way.

CurtisBlackwell.com

It’s the time of the year when the Digital Media near-graduates give their portfolio presentations so I’ve been spending a lot of time giving advice, troubleshooting and, now, grading their portfolios. It’s a lot of fun. I am really excited to be teaching Web Design next semester. Hopefully I’ll be able to get the newer kids loving web design as much I do.

One of my good friends, Curtis, just launched his portfolio/site tonight. And I want to give him a plug because:

1. He’s and awesome guy and put together a really cool site design
2. I helped him a bit in getting it together

I didn’t realise the sheer body of work that he’s put together just in the last 6 months or so. It’s pretty amazing. In any case, please check his stuff out.

CurtisBlackwell.com

It’s no secret that I’m addicted to social media, or that my favourite outlet is Twitter.

Why? So many people I (or my friends) come into contact with don’t get it. They say Twitter is stupid. Given, most of them haven’t checked out the service. But while they’re making fun of Twitter, they’re off spending hours on end on Facebook or MySpace. You know, the old social media. (Strange we have old New Media already, yes?)

But Twitter is the anti-Facebook. On Facebook you’re bombarded with photos, fan suggestions, ‘Become a Zombie’ requests, snowballs, and God knows what else that is hiding in the depths of their app schemas. Last week it was suggested I become a fan of curly fries. Really? Curly fries?

Facebook pushes and pushes at you. It’s become rampant with advertising, idiot chain-letter memes and even our parents! There’s so much noise that in order to pay attention to anything you have to dig. It takes a lot of work to set privacy levels and filter down what’s smacking you in the face into the things that matter to you in your ‘mini-feed’. That noise decreases a lot of the social interaction that the service had in its early days. Facebook has turned from being person oriented to being feature oriented.

In contrast, Twitter doesn’t have any of that crap. No apps, no ads (at the moment), no groups, no nothing. It’s simple person to person communication and it leaves group interaction up to the user. And that’s why it’s a success. That is why it’s making headlines. That is why I can ask a question and less than two minutes later have solutions from 10 of my followers. And more often than not those followers become friends. Twitter brings a level of personal interaction to the “evil digital communication” channels that we haven’t seen since email was first introduced.

One Higher Education colleague astutely observed that Twitter is redefining what a coworker is. It’s so true. People I’ve met only once, and in some cases never, help me everyday to solve problems or refine ideas. This one-on-one interaction is what makes the service great.

Of course there are the businesses out there that don’t abide by this rule. They post stupid anonymous advertisements or they simply import links from their site’s feed. They attempt to behave like old media on new media and wonder why it’s not helping. To them I say YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!

The companies that are making a difference are the ones that have REAL PEOPLE manning their Twitter streams. Companies like Starbucks and Paste Magazine do it right. Even Comcast, one of the most hated companies in the country, has improved its customer service by having a real person behind a company-branded Twitter account to answer real customer questions.

That’s what people seem to crave in social media–a conversation. Not games and noise and a false face. That’s all a distraction from what social media should be: Social.

Super stoked about this one…

I’ve been working on a blog design for my friend Wix for awhile. He came to me in January, I think, and asked about getting a site designed and built for him.

The beauty was that he wasn’t in a rush and so I was able to work on this among all the other projects and sites and work I was doing. I felt kind of bad because it took awhile, but he’s been travelling a lot too…

Anyway, long story short. We hit it kind of hard this last week and have pushed it out for release today!

The overall design style for me is a bit different than what I’m used to. I took it as sort mid-90s + New Wave + Grunge and did a bunch of vector art and half-tone sort of things.

In any case, I’m happy to have it finished and live! Head over whatisawix.com and check it out! Let me (and him) know what you think.

Pretty close to being done. I think I’ll end up putting it live on Wednesday of next week, when we start going out to the fairgrounds to hammer fence posts and do preliminary festival setup.

[sneak peak]

I tried to make it look more Twitter-y, I guess. That wasn’t really intentional, but it’s the direction it took. I’m using a plugin called Fresh From FriendFeed and Twitter which is a ridiculously long name. The author doesn’t give enough options in the backend, so I had to modify some of the PHP for this one project. It’s a little sad. I wish I could’ve just left it, but it was so convoluted.

Basically, the plugin monitors your twitter feed and imports your latest tweet and creates a post out of it. Cool right? Well, the instructions in the backend are a little hard to understand. I’m all for making language in your posts/docs sound cool, relaxed and comfortable (see how I write on agapefest.com), but not when you lose clarity of meaning. I’d like the settings to say things like: “Import each Tweet as a post. (We’ll refresh to keep you current.)” and “Import your tweets once a week/day/month” instead of the craziness he has in the backend.

One of the cool things about the plugin is that it automagically parses media from Twitpic and YouTube (and others) and creates the embed code while inserting it into your new post. Well, it would be cool if the images were given any classes whatsoever. Or if the layout had any classes whatsoever. Really. No classes. Metadata is there for the alt attributes… but not one class. So custom styling is a no-go without poking around in the plugin code and adding your own for each item. Annoying.

Also, every post title begins with “Fresh From {Service Name}” and you can’t change it in the graphical config. Once again, you have to poke around in the plugin code. Oh, and on top of that, by default it adds a filter to redirect all of your meta links (including permalink in headers) to the service URI. That means “leave a comment” takes you out to Twitter to leave a reply. And there’s not option to turn it off. It’s a cool idea, and definitely useful in some cases. But a on/off option would be killer.

So, I’ve had a few annoyances, but had no other recourse short of learning PHP to a degree where I could write my own plugin. Not conceivable for me at the moment, though it’s on my list. That, or the time will come when Twitter is ubiquitous and I won’t have to deal with so many visitors not having an account.

Apart from all the headaches, I’m pretty excited about this little experiment next week. Hopefully the plugin will refresh quick enough to keep things going (documentation doesn’t exist. No FAQ. Just a FriendFeed room that you, again, have to search through to find what you need — if it’s there at all). Otherwise I really may have to write my own plugin. Maybe I will for next year anyway.

Well, not entirely new. This week I’ll be working on converting AgapeFest.com into a quick micro-blog for festival week.

What does that mean? It means I’ve got all of my staff that have iPhones, picture messaging or Flip cameras set to take photos and post them to Twitter/Twitpic. Then AgapeFest.com will pull each of those in and create a post about them. If I had been thinking, I could’ve used this as an opportunity to learn how and then write my own WordPress plugin for it. Maybe later.

In any case, I think this is going to be super fun. By the way, does anyone know of a Twitpic-like service that does video instead? Like if I had my Flip out there, little 30 sec to 1-minute videos would be awesome. I’d better buy some batteries…