Web Strategy and Development Blog

New opportunities merging education and passion

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“So do you want it?” For a moment I didn’t say anything. I glanced between the three other faces looking back at me. Did she just ask what I think she had? “The… the job?”

“Yes.” I couldn’t tell you who in the room had said that. They were offering me the job. I had prepared for this interview for weeks, and it was playing out better than I ever could have imagined. Shocked and humbled, I quickly blurted out my acceptance. With my head still reeling, I stumbled over my words of appreciation and excitement.

The next few moments was a blur of shaking hands and expressing enthusiasm as my three interviewers went back to their day jobs. My feet somehow found themselves planted back in front of the elevator. A woman stepped off the elevator, and I gave her the peppiest smile and “hello!” of my life. I raced down to the ground floor and towards my car, phone in hand poised to call my mom with the news that I was officially employed by the Office of Web and New Media at Missouri State University. Did that just happen?

Nun-Sense

Working for an order of religious sisters for the past three summers in their communications office certainly taught me a great deal. This nontraditional work environment began as an intimidating volunteer opportunity. I was there to get the service hours I needed and then to get out. I stayed for four years. It’s no secret that my appreciation and admiration for this group of women grew as my time with them went on.

There’s a great deal the sisters have taught me:

  • When in doubt of someone’s name, “sister” works just fine.
  • Not all nuns wear the black habits anymore.
  • Buildings and people with history are the most interesting.
  • The morning paper should always be read with a bowl of M&Ms close at hand for subconscious snacking.
  • My best work comes from working on something I value.
  • You can find you lifelong passion in the place where you least expect.

While working for this group of women that I would eventually call friends, I found the career that merges all of my passions in life. I began down a path that led me here.

“Missouri State had become my home away from home freshman year. This new home became my place of education and now my place of work.”

Exploring and expanding

I entered my sophomore year of college with a comforting level of certainty and excitement. I had decided where I wanted to be. After a meeting with my adviser, I proudly opened my Missouri State University portal to see my major newly listed as Public Relations – Pre-admission. The next several semesters of college would only continue to keep me excited and engaged for what the future held.

In my second to last semester at Missouri State, however, I was met with an opportunity I was hesitant to take on. A friend had referred me to a webpage outlining an internship with the MSU Office of Web and New Media. This was too good to be true, right? Scrolling through the page, I could feel the familiar certainty growing in my gut. This should be my next step. I wanted this to be my next step.

I could tell my time with the Sisters was coming to a close, and I was ready for something new and different. Fate seemed to have placed this in front of me at just the right moment. The next few weeks consisted of a whirl wind of activities: an online application, an interview, an offer, and an excited yelling session with my mom on the phone. Missouri State had become my home away from home freshman year. My home away from home became my place of education and now my place of work.

This new opportunity could not have come at the more perfect time in the more perfect place. Even if it was a little unexpected.

Going Mobile – Extending a Maps API Project to Smart Phones

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Campus MapThe Missouri State University Campus Map combines several different types of data into a single map site using the Google Maps API version 2. This past June, my office was approached by Jeffrey Thomas, a senior computer science student at the university, about software he had developed that uses BlackBerry phones as GPS devices. Jeffrey wanted to track in real time the location of buses in our campus transit system. As we looked at use cases, it didn’t take long for us to realize a large demand for such a service was going to be from the person standing at a bus stop with a mobile phone as opposed to the more traditional user on a laptop or desktop.

Version 3 API Issues

I began working on a proof of concept of such a site using the newly announced Google Maps API Version 3 but ended up having to postpone the project due to lack of features – especially polylines. After polylines were added, the first major snag I hit was lack of support for tile layers. So I wrote my own. I spent several days hammering out the code, followed by a substantial amount of time beyond that optimizing.

On our main map, we had been using invisible polygons to make our buildings clickable. I knew that strategy wasn’t going to perform well on a mobile device, so I changed to using an AJAX call that dynamically queried our database. The strategy worked so well we ended up implementing it on our main map as well. I’m even in the process of implementing the clickable tile layers that Pamela Fox described in her presentation at Google I/O on our main map.

Once these issues were handled, the major hurdles became less technical and more user-interface focused. I wasn’t happy with just having our bus routes and bus locations displayed on the map – I wanted a mobile map with the majority of the features offered on our main map.

Interacting on a Small Screen

Campus Map - Mobile VersionI struggled for a while with how to create an interface that maximized the actual map size but supported three different overlays (one with sub-options), geolocation and search. With feedback from coworkers, I ended up taking a cue from the default map application on the iPhone; I added a 44 pixel action bar to the bottom of the screen and used a combination of icons and text labels. Informal user testing has shown this approach to be effective as even people not familiar with either the iPhone or our campus have been able to effectively use the map.

Branding and the Fine Print

With screen real estate a precious commodity, I knew any type of header to the page was going to have to be small. Yet it was crucial to display our university logo and the page title. I settled on a thin band at the top. It was also a requirement to have some standard fine print on the page – typically reserved for the footer. I was not willing to shrink the map any more to accommodate such text. so I ended up developing an “about” button on my bottom toolbar which brought up an overlay with all of the required information.

Optimizing Everything

Once development was nearing completion, I moved to spending a considerable amount of time on improving performance. I took full advantage of the version 3 API support for marker icons using CSS sprites. I ended up also using CSS sprites for the action bar icons.

Fortunately, the Google Closure Compiler was just released. In order to use it for JavaScript minimization and optimization, I took the time to annotate my JavaScript (which was no small task).

The Allure of the Native App

Having our map site available in various app stores would provide exposure and better usability; however, I’m not willing to maintain additional versions of the map. That only really leaves me with the option of writing a shell application that simply embeds a browser (which may still happen). Now that the map has been optimized, the performance of the web application is very close to that of the native maps application on the iPhone.

Just push the red button! – A beginner’s experience with video

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Technology can be intimidating, even for someone who grew up in a house full of computers and hardware. My Dad is a computer engineer and his office is full of monitors, computers, wires, circuit boards and digital media. At one point there was a large oscilloscope blinking out a green heartbeat amidst the confusion. My sister and I would get hand-me-down computers from his office the way other kids got hand-me-down clothes, and I would tinker with the discarded equipment I found lying around.

But playing with obsolete equipment and working a job are two completely different things, so when I started working in Web and New Media, I made it clear I didn’t know a great deal about some of the tools and tasks involved with the job. I’d seen friends work with video editing equipment and I’d always worried about screwing up what they were doing if I messed with it. I didn’t know where to start on my own. When starting this job, I felt like my abilities were rather limited compared to some of the other students in the office. I still wanted to learn so that I could start doing those jobs, but the thought of working with expensive cameras and other gadgets worried me; what if I break it?

I’m sure that feeling is pretty familiar to anyone who has tried to get into something complicated and completely foreign to their experience. It’s like taking your parent’s car out for the first time. You know how it’s supposed to work, but things don’t always behave as they should.

So when my boss told me he wanted me to shoot some footage for a video we’d be putting on the website, I was kind of intimidated. I wasn’t sure how to make it look good. All I knew was some photography – point and shoot. The thought of using an unwieldy camera by myself for the first time was intimidating. Then he showed me the camera I’d be using and suddenly I realized this would be a lot easier than I’d thought.

Flip Camera
yurukov / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This is the Flip Camera. Not a flip camera, but the Flip Camera. And when we were going over how to use it, there wasn’t much to say, except “push the red button to start recording, and push it again to stop.”

That was it? No complicated features or settings, dials or extra buttons that you forget what they do until maybe you press them and nothing works? I felt like he was going too easy on me. But I relented, and I went out with a handy little mono-pod, which is just like a tripod with one  leg instead of three. It was better than having to hold the camera and getting a shaky picture. And I felt like I was brandishing some sort of techno-primitive shaman’s staff, with a little recorder attached to the top. Imagine Rafiki from the Lion King geared up with electronics.

The parallel continued because I was going to shoot footage for a model African village some international students created for Public Affairs Week.  But armed with my techno-staff and the simple video camera mounted to it, I had no problems setting it down, pressing the red button, getting some footage and moving on. I could do no wrong! I felt like a wiz.

When I got back to the office, editing it wasn’t intimidating either: we dropped the clips into Final Cut Express, which displayed them like “tracks” on a time line. I just cut and pasted clips where I wanted them, overlayed some video to change the view while people were talking and added some transitions. It was like working with music; just with some visuals to boot!

This is the finished video I made with everyone’s help:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJXr9eGUOZg

So despite my apprehension to working with video, I was able to cobble together a nice clip that received a lot of comments! Of course I had a lot of help from my boss and coworkers, but now I know I can do it on my own, and it’s as easy as pressing the red button on the Flip Camera.

I think it’s important not to let new experiences and challenges intimidate you, because when you face them, you wind up learning a lot about what you can do, versus being stuck with what you think you can’t accomplish. I know if I can create videos like the one showcasing the great African village students put together, anybody can do that. And now that I know the Flip Camera is so easy to use, I’m ready to face a more challenging camera to learn more!

Inside Missouri State Microsite Launched

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Earlier this month, the University launched a microsite,  Inside Missouri State, that correlates with the Undergraduate Admissions Guide. This was a collaborative project between the Offices of Admissions, Web and New Media and Publications.

Inside Missouri State HomepageInside Advantage Section

A few highlights:

  • This new site is meant to be a standalone, self-contained microsite. It’s like a advertisement about Missouri State. We link out to several standard Missouri State web pages, but the design used on this microsite will not be reused elsewhere.
  • The content within the microsite was repurposed from the printed Undergraduate Admissions Guide. This allowed us to reuse a lot of excellent content that Admissions and Publications had already produced and coordinated.
  • There are five marketing message videos, one for each of the first five sections of the site. There are also videos for the spotlights on the left of these sections. The video work was done by Brad Mitchell and student Carlynn Forst, with script help from Michelle Rose.
  • The design was done by Lindsay Winchester, in coordination with Veronica Adinegara’s printed Viewbook designs. Additional support was provided by student Dustin Jacobs.
  • The coding of the site was done by student Ray Lehnhoff, with oversight by Chad Killingsworth and Sara Clark.
  • The main route into this microsite is from the Admissions homepage, which has a new Flash element that links into the microsite.
  • Many of the features of this microsite can be reused in other sites, such as the spotlight videos which are in iTunesU and can be used within Web Press.

University departments are welcome to point their future undergraduate students to the Inside Missouri State microsite.

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.

itunes_intro

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.