This is the third biweekly update from the Web Programming work-group. We are moving to a cyclical task and project planning work-flow in order to better prioritize our work. We acknowledge that requests will always come to us in a variety of ways and do not wish to burden members of the Middlebury community with overly formalized request processes. At the same time we also need to acknowledge that institutional and departmental priorities often shift over time and therefore we must have a work planning process that allows for flexibility that addresses the needs of the community, and maintains a healthy work environment for our staff.
Author Archive
Web Development Workgroup bi-weekly update: the Third Edition
October 28th, 2009 by Adam FrancoCT Team Meeting Minutes 10/27/2009
October 27th, 2009 by Adam FrancoTopic 1: Segue v1 shutdown notice.
Team ok with Alex sending out the notice he presented. Team decided that the notice should be sent to all faculty rather than a limited group. Team decided that Segue 1 should be made unavailable at the end of Fall 2009 classes and not postponed until later.
Topic 2: CT Site IA.
Team looked at the Uses categories started by Alex. After much discussion and a few changes, we agreed to use the following IA as a starting point for our build-out:
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CT Team Meeting Minutes 10/20/2009
October 20th, 2009 by Adam FrancoTopic 1: Team collaboration processes.
Tasks to accomplish between meetings should be proposed during the meeting, not proposed between meetings. If proposed between meetings, should not have no expectations of accomplishment.
Communications strategies, EMail vs. Google Docs. Be clear about what is up for debate, what is not.
Vote: Email will be sent to team list. New message threads with descriptive subjects will be created for new topics. (unanimous)
Q: How does the CT site relate to our main charge?
A: A good CT site helps direct users to CT tools and services and helps users make better usage of all things we provide.
Topic 2: CT Site IA
Uses will be categorized under the following categories (to start):
- Video
- Audio
- Graphics
- Web Publishing
- Data Collection & Analysis
- Presentation
- Course (stuff?)
- Discussion
Uses will often fall under multiple categories. This should be encouraged to allow our constituents to find things even if they would assume categorization different from us.
Vote: Alex (and possibly others) will fill in uses into the categories for the next meeting. The categories decided will not be changed. Other categories can be proposed at the Oct 27th meeting. (unanimous)
Vote: Do we want to keep the Buzzwords category? Yes (unanimous)
Vote: Are we generally happy with the buzzword list? Yes (unanimous)
MiddMedia now supports more video formats
September 28th, 2009 by Adam FrancoI’ve just completed an update to our video hosting system, MiddMedia, to enable it to support the upload of additional video formats.
The Adobe Flash Media Server (FMS) — the software on MiddMedia that handles streaming the video data to clients — only supports the MP3 Audio (.mp3), Flash Video (.flv), and MPEG-4 video with H.264 encoding (.mp4) formats. Up until this point, users were required to convert their videos into one of the two supported video formats before uploading them to MiddMedia. Depending on the user’s operating system and the software they have installed, this could be a challenging proposition. With this update, videos in a variety of formats can be uploaded directly to the MiddMedia server where they will be automatically converted.
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