Just starting to work on a YouTube framework

We’re planning to move our video content over into YouTube as soon as we reasonably can. That brings some big plusses – namely a lot of saved local server space, more visibility, more chance of being referenced and linked to by the rest of Wharton, easy inclusion on Wharton pages that have Eric’s media bar thing. However, that same media thing won’t work natively in our content because it’s CF. I don’t really want to create the same, because A) I’m a tinkerer and want to make something cool, and B) we can fine-tune something to our needs, which often involve a rich layer of metadata. For instance, our Alumni Impact Interviews would be amazing YouTube content, and will work fine “standalone” there, but on our site I want an interface that cross-sections them by industry of the alumnus, subject matter they’re talking about, alums of the MBA program vs. undergrads, and so on.

Well, long story short, I’ve been doing some early testing brushing off my JavaScript skills and the YouTube API and I’m brimming over with excitement at what I’m gonna unleash. It’s gonna take some heavy work, because this is going to be a finely polished bit of machinery.

Front page

A nice little update: the Wharton home page features our story on Karl Ulrich’s class in Wharton West. That’s the class I went to San Francisco in January to film. Our video presentation and text story are both linked.

Task description: BPC

This Spring/Summer’s revamp of the BPC site will include the following fixes/overhauls:

- When plans are presented to judges, they should be in a random order.

- Judge selection (which happens in several different places) needs to be much more flexible using an AJAX-y system (already built a prototype)

- The system for sending email to judges and teams needs serious work to make it much more usable and flexible.

- The process of finalizing judge feedback requires some work – probably renaming as “finalizing” isn’t the right metaphor.

- Minor things: when teams send email, make sure the email is labeled with team information. Better uploading widget using the AJAX-based system I built for VIP image uploading.

- Periodically save judge feedback? Maybe a draft saver?

- It -should- be possible to use other tools to make reports and such better.

Leveraging the Web

Friday, February 20:

In a new sort of activity for me, I’ll be speaking to the Venture Initiation Program this Friday about using the web to further their fledgling ventures.  The ventures are at very different stages, so it’ll be a challenge trying to come up with content that is interesting across the set.  But the rough outline will be:

• Greg’s first rule of technology (I’m not sure I have a pithy way of putting it, but it boils down to: Your time is worth too much to waste it on technology unless you know it’s going to help)
• Your web presence before you’re really anything (ISPs, domain names, design, rentacoder)
• The Web 2.0 thing: creating content that builds your brand… aside from your actual website.  Blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and so on.
• Using the tools available on the VIP website to leverage all the stuff you did above.

I’m going to be demonstrating that last point, probably pulling in content from this blog to show how you can pull content in from blogs.

Back to posting

This site has lain fallow for a while, but I’m hoping to get it back up to operable as I move into the spring-summer project season.

A few updates:

- GNU Partition Editor turns out to be one of the greatest things ever.  It’s free (GPL), comes in a bootable-CD form, and gives you a simple graphical interface for messing around with partitions.  That’s a huge plus for me, as every server I build turns out to have too small a system partition (no matter how big it was at first).   I tried it out on our development server, and it was incredibly simple to use.  I backed everything up first, but didn’t need the backup, and now I’ve opened up five more gigs, which should keep thing going until that box gets replaced by a virtual machine.

- One meta-project I’m thinking of now is applying for the Penn EMTM program.  I’d like to go full-time and get it out of the way quickly – that’s a big workload, but in many ways I’m hungering for exactly that kind of crunch.  “Full time” means I’ll miss every other friday of work, so I need to draw up the plan by which I’m still giving work a full balance of hours.  I’ve attended some info sessions and whatsnot for the program, though, and am very excited at the prospect – plus it looks like having a WEP “spy” over there might actually help us gain some new contacts and connections.

- On another front, I’m presenting to the members of the Venture Initiation Program next week, talking about ways to maximize web presence, both through using the tools I’ve built for them on the VIP website and using what’s out there in the world.

- The Wharton SBDC website just got a big aesthetic overhaul: http://whartonsbdc.wharton.upenn.edu .  It’s a great accomplishment for several reasons: first, it represents the way in which I helped the center re-think a large project (building a whole new super-complicated website) as a series of more achievable goals and positioned the easiest, highest-priority things first.  Second, the transition itself went very smoothly – time and time again, I demonstrated that the technology is the easy part.  Much easier than choosing pictures.  Finally, Bob did a lot of good administrative coordination and anchored some of the project on the WSBDC side, which was good to see him succeeding at.

End-o-summer update

So far how is the summer project list going?

- I created the new website for the Venture Initiation Project, at http://vip.wharton.upenn.edu. This site features a login system so students can update company information and logos, and I plan to show them how to use the site to show an RSS feed from their own blogs or twittrs. Also, on the What Students Say page there’s a video edited from various student exit interviews we’ve been doing. I did that too.

In more detail: the site makes a lot of use of technologies scattered around WEP’s other sites. Every HTML page pulled up actually doesn’t read a file direct from the file system (which is how web servers usually work) but instead draws from a database and puts the content into the main content area of an ASP.NET master page (the same master page, or template, used for the .aspx script pages – so if I need to change a layout element, I change it once and it will affect everything on the site). A nice added bit of magic is that the content area is rendered from code that isn’t raw HTML, but rather a WIKI-language (very much like wikimedia’s markup used on Wikipedia) which can be typed in directly or generated with the help of buttons on the page editing window. So users have a lot of direct control over formatting without needing to know HTML. The site also includes an image uploading widget that uses IFRAMEs and ajax to allow users to upload a file in a way similar to how GMail handles file uploads – it happens with a click while you’re still filling out the rest of the HTML form. Very swanky. The overall effect of the wiki and upload system is that administrators are updating their web content directly, rather than relying on me – when they rely on me, they tend to hold back on changes, not wanting to bother me.

Another minor innovation on the site is that I found a nice way to handle the departmental (and school) need to have the WEP and Wharton logos prominent on the page. The tabs at the top very clearly represent the stacking hierarchy of VIP to WEP and Wharton, provide an obvious link out, and make an asset out of the potentially worrisome fact that they’re three different color schemes. Overall I’m very happy with the site and look forward to finding ways to make it more useful for the students to take advantage of it.

Another accomplishment, albeit less work, was that our WEP Pre-term session video was added on the WEP website in the teaching area. We did an hour plus of informational session, and I shot the whole thing from the audience. We tried recording the room’s direct “press feed” for microphones, but the recording was too hot and clipped a lot (I set things too high because I was worried about them being too low!) so it’s just the camera audio, which is still pretty good.

The Wharton SBDC website got updated in credit card handling, using a new vendor with new requirements for passing data back and forth. The Real Estate center will be updated similarly very soon.

WEP’s Venture a Guess! trivia contest for undergrads will enter its second year this fall and the coding is done for it; we’re doing an internal test now. This year we’re doing much simpler questions and we designed a much more open way of handling prizes to encourage more participation.

We’ve also done sundry updates around the website, for instance updating the research area, but under the surface is where the WEP site is getting the most help – a lot of technical advances modeled in the VIP site are being transferred into the WEP site, including support for wiki pages, a login system for students, consolidation of the style template pages, and possibly that image uploader too. We’ve also changed video playback modules to one that doesn’t have as much stuff surrounding it but doeshave a timestamp, as well as a much easier time being scaled. We also have a unified signup engine – last year every time we had an event I created a new page and database to handle it. This year I can use this system to spawn a new signup without any programming or db work – hopefully mastering it all enough so that next year I can have it friendly enough that anybody can do this.

Outside of the web, WEP’s machines all got upgraded to Office 2007 this summer and we have some new printers, many of them reflecting a general shift away from HP in our office. HP’s old strengths have dissipated over time and we’re finding better cost-per-page efficiency in the Ricohs and Dells we’re bringing in.

I think that’s all! Not a bad summer of work.

More Wall Street Journal stuff

We have again made it into the Wall Street Journal with our video content, this time into a mainstream story about an MBA student named Ifeona Mba. I wandered around West Philly with the reporter and Iffy and then recorded the interview, using our new Sony HDD camera. He cut together footage for his purposes, and we cut it together for ours.

Unfortunately, the video is embedded on their page in the article, which is only visible if you have a subscription.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121331692461769909.html

Our video is more readily available (via WEP’s new video interface, incidentally!) at http://www.wep.wharton.upenn.edu/showVideo.aspx?vcID=50&categoryID=-1 (for a trip, go to our front page and you can watch the whole thing in postage-stamp size right there)

I was planning to get summer projects outlined here at some point. Consider doing that to be one of my summer projects!

Summer

Admittedly, I’m writing this post… is it an efficient way of using ten minutes before lunch is ready to be picked up, or is it a way of avoiding doing something more involved with that time?

Summer is always a big to-do.  These projects will get their own entries as I get into them.  The list:

• Performance evaluations. Gotta get those done for my staff and for me.
• WEP website work: I’m making a single centralized signup engine… this is something I keep trying to do and then end up having to make one-off databases and pages for every new signup, but two things have improved: the WEP staff are more uniform in what they want for signups, and I have a pretty good grasp of what’s required.
• Also on the website, better handling of video.  Video content is all over the place and great, but a better way of categorizing it so it can be invoked easily, and for showing “related video”, or a dynamic way to show the front page content (which is currently handled by the announcement engine and hasn’t been updated with “new” video for some time).  This should also simply the current way of posting Alumni Impact content.
• BPC promo videos.  Using footage from the Venture Finals and rehearsals. This will let me break in the new video production machine and software we now have.  Vroom!
• SPIA executive summaries by May 16.
• WEP single-login environment.  This is a big one.  I want to call it “Weasel” internally.  Use a combination of PennKey and Facebook to facilitate one-login way for students to signup for things and auto-gain their existing student info next time they sign up.  Down the road, it’ll show their history of activity, and so on.
• Improvements to WEP website architecture – some of the areas of the site need to expand dramatically to accommodate areas that have grown in importance.
• Venture A Guess 2.0?
• Database-ify the WGFA Newswire newsletter.
• GIS – add links for Digg, del.icio.us, stumbledupon
• Move beyond our current many-computer SizaTola lab.
• Decomission web server once everything remaining is moved to virtual servers.
• BPC to SSL.  New features in BPC for next year?

That’s the quick list.  My food’s ready.

ACT! -B- GONE

Problem: Can we move from our current ACT! installation? It’s a system resource nightmare, runs like molasses, and the usability is so bad that we don’t use the small subset of its features that we might actually benefit from.

Possible solutions:

- updated version of ACT!? (we tried this a few years ago and it was the worst thing ever. I’d prefer not to, but maybe it’s time to man up and admit that a newer new version might be better). Enterprise (SQL Server based) versions might also be a big step.

- web-based. Highrise or something else. (Bob is investigating what it would look like to migrate)

- Sharepoint? We should have an eye on this to see if it can fit the needs, since it’d also become a platform for addressing a lot of other needs (collaboration, file sharing, etc.)

- Will newer computers/faster net connections obviate the problem? (possibly, but memory size doesn’t seem to be the problem)

- Change the method of distribution, and use replication across local versions instead of one central copy other people connect to. (Tried this.  Synchronization in old ACT is cumbersome and awkward, and this simply doesn’t look like it’ll work)