YouTube Channel

YouTube is a fantastic resource for viewing and sharing original videos online.  It's also one of the most popular destinations on the web today, so sharing your videos there opens it up to the possibility of an extremely wide audience.  

The school has a channel setup to share various short original videos.  It is also being used to serve up the videos featured on the recent What's Cooking that's currently airing on NBC40 as well as the web.  We're working on some other pretty nifty ways of incorporating YouTube within our site leveraging their developer API's.  So hopefully they'll see some light and go live soon.

Setting up your own channel for your own personal use is simple as well.  Just sign up for an account then begin uploading videos.  That's really all there is to it.  You can customize the look of your channel, create playlists, embed videos into pages, and even work with their robust API if you really want to get advanced.  Just be sure that what you're uploading isn't copyrighted and you should be fine.

Edu Web 2008 Conference

I attended the Edu Web 2008 Conference at the Trump Marina in Atlantic City this week.  It's a conference aimed at the use of technology in higher ed.  There were several hundred people there from all over the world.  It was a good conference and I did learn a lot that I hope to work into our website.

I blogged about my daily events on my personal blog.

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3

I didn't take too many photos (been to AC many times already) but many attendees did take some very nice photos and they can be found on flickr.

Enhanced Search

Just rolled out some enhancements to the search on atlantic.edu. The search results are now pulling several searches into one convenient tabbed page. With Communicator backissues and news release separate from web page results.

Searches include:

• web page on atlantic.edu and venus.atlantic.edu
• college news releases
• CommuniCator issues
• employee listings
• site images

The employee results are marked up using the hcard microformat which is a first for our site.  Other microformats will be adopted throughout the site as well.  Also the image search is another first for atlantic.edu as well.

Since additional searches are made via an AJAX call, the entire page doesn't need to reload.  Resulting in faster, almost immediate searches.

Check out the new improved search on atlantic.edu.  While it's still in beta, if you have any suggestions or comments please share.

Cafeteria Menu Online

If you're feeling kinda hungry and wondering what the fine folks in the cafeteria are serving, you're now just a simple click away from finding out.  The cafeteria menu gadget can currently be found on the cafeterias page as well as by clicking on the employees link in the footer of atlantic.edu.

It will also be offered shortly as stuff to be added to the employee start page at its.atlantic.edu.  Check under Add Stuff to see if it's been added yet.  I previously wrote on how to Add Stuff to the start page.