Web Strategy and Development Blog

Missouri State courses featured in iTunes U

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Missouri State currently has a podcast as well as two courses featured in iTunes U. Todd Daniel’s Great Ideas in Psychology podcast is featured on the homepage of iTunes U, while Dr. Wyrick’s Principles of Macroeconomics and Dr. Kaufman’s Introduction to Philosophy have been featured in this month’s iTunes U Spotlight.

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Congrats and thank you to our faculty members who provide us with great audio and video content for iTunes U. If you’re interested in becoming a content provider for Missouri State on iTunes U, please visit our iTunes U page to learn more, as well as the Contribute to iTunes U page when you are ready to submit content.

iTunes U content available in new iPhone/iPod Touch OS

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With this week’s OS 3.0 update to Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, users can now access Missouri State on iTunes U directly on their mobile device. The easiest way is to navigate to http://itunesu.missouristate.edu on your mobile browser and click on the ‘Open Missouri State on iTunes U’ button. This will automatically open iTunes on your device and go directly to Missouri State on iTunes U.

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Another option is to open iTunes on your mobile device and navigate to the ‘More’ tab, and then select iTunes U. Scroll down to Universities & Colleges, then scroll down to find Missouri State University. Here is what Missouri State on iTunes U will look like on your mobile device:

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UPDATE: Apple now has a great video online showing you how to access iTunes U on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

WordPress Upgrade to 2.7 + some new plugins

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The WordPress upgrade to the new version 2.7 was successful yesterday. If you now login to your blog, you will see that the Dashboard is significantly different. We are currently working on updating all of our Blog Setup and Instructions pages to mirror the changes made to the Dashboard. These new instructions should be updated next week. *The instructions are now updated as of 3/30/09*

Our anti-spam plugin, Defensio, was not working correctly with the new upgraded version of WordPress, so it has been replaced with the WP-SpamFree plugin. I activated it on all of the blogs in our system, so you shouldn’t really see any changes. I also added the SI-Captcha plugin to all of the blogs that were not using it, just as an extra precaution. If someone is logged in the Captcha won’t show up on the comments, but if someone isn’t logged in it will appear.

The other two new plugins are WPtouch and the KB Advanced RSS Widget. WPtouch reformats your site with a mobile theme when viewed with an Apple iPhone, Apple iPod touch, Google Android or Blackberry Storm touch mobile device. It does not affect the look of your blog when viewed in a normal web browser. You can look at this blog on a mobile device to see an example of how it works (it’s really neat). The KB Advanced RSS Widget allows you to pull in RSS Feeds into a Sidebar Widget. You can add multiple widgets for different feeds. The ‘Media’ widget on the right sidebar of this blog is a working example of this new plugin.

iTunes U/Podcast Producer training in Chicago

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This week I spent 3 wonderful days in the Windy City to attend two separate Apple training sessions: one day of iTunes U training, followed by two days of training for Podcast Producer. Both sessions were great, if not very intense and overflowing with information. Thankfully I came home with hundreds of pages of printouts and nearly 2 gigs of coding and workflow samples, so I feel much more prepared to tackle the huge mountain of work we have in front of us.

I want to thank Keith Mountin and Mike Miley from Apple for doing a wonderful job, and feeding me for 3 straight days. During the training I created something like 80 podcasts of nothing but the following. It was a good week.

httpv://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=z4ysREh8gs4

Web Site Access by Wireless Devices Tested

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A study was recently conducted to determine how University web sites functioned when accessed from various handheld wireless devices.

Devices tested included the popular Blackberry, Palm Treo, Apple iPod Touch, and Samsung Blackjack units as well as five others. Operating systems and browsers included Windows Mobile 5.0 and 6.0, Symbian, Mobile OSX, Internet Explorer, Safari and MediaNet.

Most devices could access most web content with little difficulty. Design guidelines are being modified to address the issues exposed by the study.

The complete study results are available online.