Persa Zula

Wooster.edu featured in Smashing Magazine

admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:20:59 +0000

I’m pleased to see that Wooster.edu is featured in Smashing Magazine on the Showcase of Academic & Higher Education Websites, along with many other great higher ed designs.

Cameron Chapman sums it up very well in the opening paragraph regarding the challenges of working on a higher ed website:

College and university websites have a lot of roles to fill. They need to provide information for prospective students (both new and transfer), parents of students and prospective students, current students, and alumni. In many cases, they’re also the gateway to the school’s intranet and the public face for both academics and athletics. They often need to include reams of information in a way that makes everything easy to find. It’s a huge challenge.

Ask.com Running Ads on Google?

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:50:31 +0000

Has Ask.com gotten so desperate for users that they are running ads through Google?

Seems like it:

There IS a way to remove all of your Delicious bookmarks!

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:32:35 +0000

With more and more companies being snatched up by other tech companies, I’m tired of having my personal data (like bookmarks on delicious) shifted around from owner to owner and privacy policy to privacy policy. I don’t use delicious to share information “socially”; I started using it years ago when I was a student because I worked on so many different computers that it was impossible to keep all of my bookmarks together. I’ve tried leaving delicious before, but could not find a way to remove my 20,000+ bookmarks without going about it one by one - since delicious doesn’t offer us a “mass delete” button, and even deleting one bookmark takes four clicks!

I’ve gone through this before with Facebook before the advent of Web 2.0 Suicide Machine*, which would have made my life easier as I deleted years’ worth of comments, photos, albums, mail, and more - one click at a time. (* Unfortuantely, Facebook is fighting back against the Suicide Machine, but hopefully it will prevail.)

Thankfully, there is Scripted ReMark, a script that will allow you not only to mass-change tags, but also to completely remove all of your bookmarks that are up on your Delicious page, either while you wait or walk away to make popcorn (I recommend walking away - it does take the script a little time to run, but make sure you are able to come back every few minutes to run a new batch of 100, and set your delay to 0!). Since Delicious only allows viewing of bookmarks up to 100 at a time, this is slightly tedious but a much better option than the 80,000+ clicks I would have had to made to remove all of my 20,000+ bookmarks.

Thank you, Scripted ReMark!

Composting at Wooster

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:02:18 +0000

Another piece I worked on in the past year while at the College has been a video on the food composting process.

Shot with very limited resources, edited with iMovie, it’s not the greatest in quality, but it gets the point across:

Do-It-Yourself Web

admin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:21:59 +0000

A couple of months ago I was asked to present a very basic run-down of what it takes to build a website to one of the courses on campus about marketing for the arts. I put together the following presentation in Prezi (now free for academic use) and helped a handful of students get their websites off the ground from IA to final product. I shared it with a few higher-ed folks and figured it would be a great resource for others to use as a starting point for similar presentations to students.

Google Doesn’t Care if You Protect Your Tweets

admin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:58:23 +0000

Google will show your protected tweets in a search if someone looks for your username.

For example:

And the search results page:

Advanced Themeing for WordPress

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:47:02 +0000

Advanced Theme Development @ WordCamp NYC 2009 from Persa Zula on Vimeo.

John Hawkins Speaks on Plugins

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:42:36 +0000

Intro to Plugins @ WordCamp NYC 2009 from Persa Zula on Vimeo.

Brad Williams’ Security Presentation @ WordCampNYC

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:32:10 +0000

WordPress Security @ WordCamp NYC 2009 from Persa Zula on Vimeo.

ScotBlogs

admin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:09:12 +0000

WordPress theme created for the College of Wooster’s WordPress MU blog installation.