Ed's Tech Tips

Last month (I cannot believe how quickly the past month has gone by) the Alumnae Association hosted  an Alumnae Summit which was a gathering of the alumnae volunteers that sit on various boards and committees of the Association. One of the items I developed for the  club committees was a Google map that identified the locations of all of the domestic and international clubs. There is a sidebar that list the clubs in alphabetical order. Click a club name and the location marker is highlighted and a pop-up balloon list the contact person and a club web site link if applicable. 

One of the coolest things about the map is what you do not see. The data for the map is listed in a Google spreadsheet. When the spreadsheet is updated, so is the map. Also, the spreadsheet can be updated via a form that can be delivered via email or embedded on a web page.  Check it out on the clubs overview page. It looks best in Firefox, OK in Internet Explorer, but does not work correctly with Safari.

I have not blogged as much lately because I have been pretty busy lately. One of my current projects is updating an Access database used to handle registrations for the upcoming alumnae reunions at the end of May. The database does more than just list who is coming (I wish). It is used to help coordinate meals and housing on campus, along with tracking class fees, One cards, keys, dietary restrictions, children's programs and name tags. Some of this stuff does not change much from year, while other items do. For instance, this year we are using a ala carte system, instead of packages which offers more flexibility to alums for pricing their reunion trip. But on the other hand it contributes some some additional complexity to the database in some ways, but simplicity in others. Needless to say it has it's challenges. I make my wife's head swim just trying to explain parts of it to her.

Another reason I am busy is because a co-worker, Stacey - our web content coordinator left us last week to move closer to her family. We do not have a replacement for her so I have picked up some of the tasks she use to do, such as, the broadcast emails for classes and clubs, along with providing technical support to classes and clubs for their web sites which they are eager to update before reunion. I'll miss her, probably more than I had previously imagined.

Instead of blogging, I've been doing more Twittering which is much easier when you only have 140 characters to use for each post. I've embedded a Twitter reader in the right sidebar of this blog, so readers can see what I'm up to. I just enabled the Twitter plugin for this blog, so new articles should be posted to Twitter as we post them here. I did the same thing for the Alumnae Quarterly which has some followers.

It's time to get back to the database.   

This is another cool tech tip sent in from M. J. (who by the way, also works at Mount Holyoke College). Zemanta is a brand new application that acts as a research assistant for bloggers. Unfortunately, it does not work with LifeType (yet), but it does work with WordPress, Blogger and Tyepad. What it does is suggest related photos, articles, links and tags (keywords) based on what you are writing in your blog. Plus, inserting items is easier than copying and pasting, just click to select an item from the list and Zemanta inserts it into your blog. This is pretty clever and helpful. It will make blogging more fun when additional information comes to me, much like when my readers send me ideas for articles. 

Zemanta indexes around 300 top media sources and numerous blogs of our users. Therefore the more people that use the more resources it will have to pull from and a real benefit is that  links to recent blog posts frequently result in return traffic.  

In addition to blogging, I like to read and when I finish a good book I like to share it. LibraryThing makes it easier for me to let others know the books I have read and enjoyed, as well as, find similar books.

I was made aware of the site from a colleague at the Wellesley College Alumnae Association, Anne Springsteen '01 who I met at a conference last summer. I don't know if she is related to Bruce, like she has not heard that before. I bookmarked the site, but did not get a chance to do anything with it until I developed the blog version of our Alumnae Quarterly magazine. Which, by the way, was the most popular "link of the week"  on the last week of February on the Bob Johnson Consulting web site which specializes in best practices for college and university web sites. I used LibraryThing to highlight books written by alums and that were featured in the Off the Shelf column of the magazine. The covers of the books are displayed and are linked to Amazon where readers can purchase them.

I included a LibraryThing sidebar on this blog, listing books I have read and enjoyed. No, they are not all computer books. Actually I now seldom buy "computer" books because the information changes so rapidly and the books are out dated before you know it. The Web is my primary source for technology related information. I think I have a fairly eclectic taste in books.

Some of the benefits of the site include:

• It is the world's largest book club. Find people with eerily similar tastes.
• Catalog with Amazon, the Library of Congress or 669 other world libraries. Import from anywhere.
• Get recommendations. Tag your books and explore others' tags.
• Put your books on your blog.
• Enter 200 books for free, as many as you like for $10 (year) or $25 (life) [that's a bargain]
  
• Users have cataloged over 25 million books.

You can display your books as a list or on a shelf. You can write and read reviews and then easily find other users that have read the same books you have read. Take the tour of the site. If you like to read or want to read more then this is the site for you.

In addition to the Quarterly blog maybe we will incorporate LibraryThing in a book club blog or wiki since discussing books is a popular activity at many Mount Holyoke College Clubs.