I am about to embark on a project that to me seems a little hard to grasp: blogging at work, as part of my job. I am so used to blogging being a personal project that I go to great efforts to distinctly separate from my work life, that I have a feeling it will be difficult to switch gears. …

Every so often, I come to a point in my life where I hate all my software. This is one of those times. It seems like all my apps are conspiring against me to make my life a fractured inefficient hell. While some love their web apps, I tend to love/hate mine. While the apps are useful, I hate having my data spread out all over the place. I work on two computers regularly (work and home), and you’d think that moving to web-based apps would help with my synchronization. And it does, for the most part. I use del.icio.us,...… →

Brian and I spent all weekend painting the kitchen. The first person that guesses the color gets to determine the next animal theme I add to this site. Hopefully you can remember what used to be here before the redesign— if not, I’ll give you a list. I’ll give you a hint. Wait, no I won’t. I’ll tell you what color my kitchen used to be: terracotta with red/orange accents. Here is a crappy photo of what it looked like: Good luck! … →

I have been invited to speak at the E-Recruitment Mastery Workshop, October 12-13 in San Diego, CA. The conference is cosponsored by Noel-Levitz, a higher ed recruitment consulting company, and Liquid Matrix, a software company specializing in higher ed e-communication. I will be speaking on October 12, and the title of my presentation is “The Changing Role of the University Webmaster.” The secret subtitle (in my brain only) is “We don’t just post links anymore.” Here is my abstract: As the Web becomes more and more crucial to key university functions, university Web sites are becoming increasingly complex. This complexity,...… →

Being the webmaster of a University, and having to answer the webmaster@ email address, I get the joy of wading through metric tons of spam. My filter does a pretty good job with most things, but one class of spam it doesn’t deal with very well is link exchange requests. You know— the “I think our sites are similar and if you link to me I’ll link to you” garbage. A word to the wise: No university webmaster is ever going to link to you because you send them an email and ask them to. I won’t even link to...… →

Most University web sites are mediocre at best. How can this be, with the bevvy of experts in computer science, business, marketing, psychology, sociology, and visual design that a University affords? In Part 1, I explored the problems created by the large and varied user base of a University’s web site. In Part 2, I discussed institutional inertia, and it’s implications for university web sites. Here I tackle the subject of university politics and the decentralized nature of the University web site. Decentralization It is almost impossible to make a general statement about the number of “webmasters” a typical university...… →