Web Strategy and Development Blog

Blogging tips for August

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A blog is a great tool to communicate short messages to your audience, but the less often you post, the more people forget that you’re there!  This is why we recommend that blogging becomes a habit, and recommend that you update it at least once a month.

This month’s blogging tip

StudentsWe will also begin sharing blogging ideas monthly. With this assistance, we hope you will begin posting regularly to communicate with prospective, new and current students. For the month of August, an easy yet meaningful post would be something like: 

Welcome back students! So much has happened over the summer, and we hope that you are ready to begin an exciting year, finding your place here at Missouri State. Get the most of your college experience by joining one of our student organizations (link to them) or attend the New Student Festival on Aug. 18 to learn about getting involved on campus.

That’s it. A blog is not a research paper and doesn’t need to be more than a couple of sentences. If you have other ideas that are longer – that’s great, too. But they don’t have to be. Just think of it as a way to showcase some points of pride for your department.

Online resources and updating editors

Do you have questions about your blog? Review our collection of resources about making posts, managing contributors and more.

If you feel that there is someone better equipped to maintain the blog, we can add editors. Complete this online form to add or delete users from your blog.

Support page for copyright-free music

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We often receive requests from campus users looking for copyright-free music they can use in their video or podcast projects, but have never had a centralized location of resources available. That is, until now.

You can now find a list of music sites within our Support pages that offer music files that are either free of copyright ownership by a third-party publishing company, or are licensed to allow for reuse under certain stipulations (such as attribution licensing through Creative Commons).

If you know of any other sites that I missed, please feel free to share them in the comments below and we’ll add them to the list.

New Media Support

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The Office of Web and New Media recently overhauled our new media support web site. It now offers guidelines, recommendations, examples and resources on a variety of social media and multimedia topics:

Twitter Support

YouTube SupportWe’ll continue to update and enhance these pages.

You can also keep up with new media (and web) tips and resources by subscribing to the Web and New Media blog, following MSUWEB on Twitter or referencing our Delicious bookmarks.

Re-purposing videos from Inside Missouri State

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This post will give you step-by-step instructions on how to embed the videos from Inside Missouri State on your University web site. There are five marketing message videos, one for each of the first five sections of the site, as well as testimonial/spotlight videos that correspond to each marketing message on the left of these sections. You are free to include any of these videos on your University website. Here’s how:

  1. The videos are hosted on Missouri State’s iTunes U site. You will need the URLs for these videos to embed them on your site. First ensure that the iTunes software is installed on your computer, and then visit http://itunesu.missouristate.edu and click on the button labeled ‘Open iTunes U: Public Access.’ This will open iTunes on your computer, and automatically navigate to Missouri State on iTunes U.
  2. Now that iTunes is open to Missouri State’s page, click on the section labeled ‘About Missouri State,’ which is in the first content area called ‘Welcome.’ You will see multiple tabs in the About Missouri State section. The tab labeled ‘Inside Missouri State’ houses the five marketing message videos from Inside Missouri State, and the tab labeled ‘Spotlights’ houses the testimonial videos from Inside Missouri State (they are the first six videos under this tab).
  3. Find the video you wish to use on your site, ensuring that the correct tab where it is located is selected and open in iTunes. At the top of the page is a ‘Subscribe’ button. Right-click on this button, and select ‘Copy Link.’
  4. Open your web browser, and paste the link you just copied from iTunes into the address bar and press Enter. You will now see the RSS Feed of the tab you had open in iTunes U. Find the video you wish to embed on your site, and copy the URL of that video. The video URLs should all end with ‘encolusure.mp4.’

Now that you have the URL to the video copied, you need to paste that URL into the video player. In Web Press, you will use a content class called ‘Video Player – MP4 or FLV.’ The instructions below will show you how to embed the video using this player in Web Press.

If you have a University site that does not use Web Press, the embed code can be provided to you. Please send an email request to bradmitchell@missouristate.edu if you would like to use the video player embed code on your site outside of Web Press.

To embed the video in your Web Press page:

  1. Open the Foundation Page of the web site that you want to edit.
  2. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and click Edit List of Content Pages. The Edit Link Element page opens.
  3. On the Edit Link Element page, click Create and Connect Page. The Content Class Groups page opens.
  4. In the top portion of the screen, click the General Pages group.
  5. In the bottom portion of the screen, click Video Player – MP4 or FLV.
  6. Type in a headline. This headline can not seen by users and is used for searching only.
  7. Open Edit Video Settings Via Form and paste the video URL you copied from iTunes.

(More information on using the MP4/FLV Video Player in Web Press can be found at http://webpress.missouristate.edu/VideoPlayerMp4Flv.htm)

Also note that you can use the above instructions to embed any video that is hosted on Missouri State’s iTunes U site. Simply find the video you wish to embed on your site, and then follow the above instructions.

Join us on Twitter!

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The Office of Web and New Media has a new Twitter account where we’ll be posting news and updates from our blog, as well as sharing resources from our Delicious account. Start following us on Twitter to keep up to date with what is going on in our office, and make sure to use the #msuweb tag to share items with us.