Smaller Numbers, But a Loyal Audience
We do have a smaller audience for softball & baseball compared to the number of viewers for basketball & football. However, this audience does seem to be more vocal in their support of our streaming efforts. Every baseball game I have attended I have had someone talk with me about how much they appreciate us covering the games. I had one guy tell me about watching Titan games for over 50 years and thought it was great that we are now broadcasting the games! Another guy told me about going to school at IWU and having a radio show with WESN. He was very impressed with our broadcasts featuring the WESN announcers! He is now working for Elmhurst and having a hard time rooting against the Titans. Recently, a mother asked if we were going to cover the doubleheader of baseball this Saturday. She informed me that she is not going to be able to attend and told me that it was senior day and was hoping to catch the ceremony prior to the game. I told her that I would have to talk with Dennie & Mike about this change (we are scheduled to broadcast the softball games). I did tell her that I would setup earlier to ensure that we cover the ceremony prior to the start of the game, if we do get to cover these games. Don’t be alarmed if our schedule changes this weekend. 

Tommy’s Night
If you are not familiar with Tommy’s Night, it is an awards show put on by the student-athlete advisory committee and the athletic department. Last Monday’s award show was very well done. In particular, I would encourage committee members to check out the On Demand version of this on our Stretch site and slide over to the 1hour and 35minute mark to view Fightin’ Titan Award winner Angel Garcia (custodian for Shirk Center). As Mike Wagner describes, Angel essentially had the worst year of his life and still supported Athletics in a way only Angel could. It is a very touching tribute. By the way, Angel always offers to help our student workers carry and set up our equipment when he is working. He is such a nice guy.

Stats
One thing you will notice about the stats is that we covered a lot of doubleheaders for baseball and softball. This is an economical use of our time allowing us to cover two games in a short period of time with only one setup. Here are our most recent viewer numbers:

Softball vs Monmouth  15
Softball vs Monmouth  14
Baseball vs Millikin  38
Baseball vs Millikin  30
Softball vs North Central  30
Softball vs North Central  46
Softball vs Augustana  27
Softball vs Augustana  23
Softball vs Elmhurst  29
Softball vs Elmhurst  22
Baseball vs Knox  54
Softball vs Washington U.  18
Softball vs Anderson  21
Baseball vs Elmhurst  28
Tommy’s Night  45
Baseball vs Augustana  56

Once a month, I compile statistics on which browsers have how much usage on the Illinois Wesleyan website. This information comes in handy when I’m developing new apps on php.iwu.edu or writing new code for the site as a whole. I was very encouraged by some of the statistics for December. Notably:

• Chrome (my personal favorite) is now handling 25.26% of pageviews. Safari (on Mac OS) is at 23.17%. Firefox rounds out the top three, with 20.89%.
• Old versions of Internet Explorer are declining significantly, while newer versions are rising in popularity. In the month of December, IE9 and IE10 represented 10.50% and 0.30% of pageviews, respectively. IE8 decreased from 8.83% in November to 7.87% in December. The two worst enemies of web developers, IE7 and IE6, are now at 1.36% and 0.04% (!), respectively, and both are on a steady downward trajectory.
• Mobile browsing continues to increase in popularity, with iOS at 8.67% (up from 6.99% in November) and Android Browser at 1.52% in December.

These numbers are all encouraging to me, and they should be for you, too, as a web content provider. The fact that 88.79% of visitors all run on advanced, standards-compliant browsers means you don’t need to do too much cross-browser testing when rolling out innovative features, and when you do, chances are, everything will work as expected.

IE8, 9, and 10 all do relatively well with new CSS3 and HTML5 features, so checking compatibility in IE8 tends to suffice for me; IE9 and IE10 tend to be somewhere between IE8 and Chrome when it comes to compatibility. Most of the time, if it works in IE8, it’ll work in newer versions, too.

And as for IE6 and IE7 users, well, these statistics are showing me, month after month, that the time I spend fixing things for them is becoming less and less justified. Big changes will still be reviewed in IE7 (for now), but, frankly, I’m not even sure I’ll need to keep a copy of IE6 around for testing much longer. And that makes me incredibly happy.

There are no (ITS-related) reasons for keeping older versions of Internet Explorer around anymore. If you’re one of the people running an outdated version, you can upgrade on your own or contact Help@Ames (x3900) for assistance.

Amusement
If you are looking for a good laugh, just pull up this link of the women’s soccer game vs. North Park that took place last Thursday. Watch a few seconds from the start of the game where everything looks normal then take the play bar to almost the end of the game. Yeah, they had to stop filming because it got completely ridiculous! I can’t believe the game continued under those conditions. We did win the game 5-0. I have a new respect for those girls who played in this game. Completely crazy!

http://client.stretchinternet.com/client/iwu.portal?mode=link&eventId=64687&broadcastType=video

Problems
We had a series of problems during the fall 2012 streaming broadcasts.

• A Stretch software update ended up breaking our older Mac laptop when we tried to upgrade the OS to accommodate this update. Luckily, Roy and Trey got together and provided us a new laptop. This new laptop is much better than the old one. We now provide streaming video at a steady 30 frames per second. The old laptop would sometimes drop below 12 frames per second on occasion.
• Our network core upgrade took out a basketball broadcast. We thought we would be okay to proceed with this broadcast for two reasons. The first reason we left this game on the schedule was because we thought the upgrade would be done before the game started. The second reason was because we have a Comcast connection in Shirk and we thought we could use it if our network was still down at game time. To make a long story short, the network upgrade took longer than we thought and the Comcast connection was being used elsewhere and was unavailable to us.
• This last problem did not cause a broadcast to be missed, but it did leave viewers hearing ambient audio and the PA announcer instead of our student WESN broadcast crew. Our radio finally stopped working and they had to switch over to the ambient microphone instead. Trey has since ordered a new radio. This new radio should offer better reception inside of Shirk Center. We hope to use it on the next broadcast that Matt Siegert and his WESN crew are able to do.

Streaming Stats

• Tennis vs. North Central  3
• Women’s Soccer vs. Wash U.  81
• Volleyball vs. Carthage  32
• Football vs. Millikin  233
• Women’s Soccer vs. Milwaukee SOE  20
• Volleyball vs. North Park  27
• Football vs. Carthage  238
• Volleyball vs. Elmhurst  40
• Women’s Soccer vs. Wheaton  86
• Men’s Soccer vs. Wheaton  102
• Men’s Soccer vs. North Park  81
• Women’s Soccer vs. North Park  51
• Volleyball vs. Dallas  12
• Football vs Augustana  162
• Men’s Basketball vs Coe  134
• Men’s Basketball vs Loras  64
• Men’s Basketball vs Illinois College  49
• Women’s Basketball vs DePauw  75
• Women’s Basketball vs UW Whitewater  100
• Men’s Basketball vs Wisconsin – Whitewater  149
• Women’s Basketball vs U of Chicago  67

If you lose your changes, you have up to 24 hours to return to the page and recover them. Simply access your page from the browser where you were previously working, hit the life-preserver icon (click “OK” to restore saved content), and you’re saved!

Read more

The basic idea is this:

1. Upload your photos to Flickr (which many of you have already been doing)
2. Create a page in OmniUpdate
3. Voila!

Simple, right? Okay, let’s go through these steps in more detail.

First, you’ll need a Flickr account. If your department already has one, great! If not, we’ll give you access to the main Illinois Wesleyan Flickr account on a case-by-case basis. Just ask Rick Lindquist or Ann Aubry for credentials.

Once you’re logged in to Flickr, upload the photos you want in your album. Put them all in a specific ‘Set’ (Flickr’s term for a group of photos), and make note of what name you give to that Photoset.

Next, go in to OmniUpdate and create a new page. When it asks what template you want to use for that page, instead of choosing the normal two-column or three-column, click on the “Flickr Photo Gallery” option.

On the next screen, you’ll see four options:

• Page Title (as usual)
• Flickr Username – If you’re using the main IWU Flickr account, enter iwuphoto. Otherwise, it’s the user name for your departmental Flickr account.
• Flickr Album Set – The name of the Set you created earlier. For example, this one would be Photo of the Week.
• Filename (as usual)

On the next page, you should see your photo album. You can edit everything on the page above the album just like normal, and, when you’re ready, go ahead and publish. It really is that simple!

We know there are a lot of photo galleries out there on the IWU website, but we think this one is so much better, both for visitors and for content stewards, that we anticipate this being the main way forward across the site. (It’ll also fix the aspect ratio distortion problem a few of you have seen when using the built-in OU feature.)

We also encourage you to consider moving your existing photo galleries into Flickr, as you have time, to improve the user experience. If you have any questions about this process, reach out to me, Curtis, Rick, or Ann and we’ll be happy to help!

Stretch Internet was chosen because of the reduced cost and proven track record. We could not fully evaluate other alternatives in the time permitted.
This reduced cost comes at the cost of the Campus Central portal. We will no longer be able to stream whatever we want on that portal. Instead, we have been given the option to add events to Campus Central on a per event basis. As always, we will need to get a three week notice if anyone needs to add an event to this portal and now they will be billed for the additional fee.

Fall Schedule
Mike Wagner and Dennie Bridges will be working on the Fall schedule this week. I will be meeting with Mike Wagner later this week to finalize the schedule of sporting events and get them up on our Game Central portal.

http://client.stretchinternet.com/client/iwu.portal#

Thanks again for all of your help and feedback. We look forward to another great year of IWU streaming events!

Select category “tables,” then under “snippet” you can choose from right, center or left alignment.

Our predefined tables come with alternating beige- & white-shaded rows.

You can replace the sample text and delete or add columns or rows as needed. Click on the table after it’s inserted, then you can select any of the icons in the bottom row of your toolbar to edit it. Hovering over an icon will bring up text with its function, such as deleting, inserting, merging or splitting rows or columns.

The far-left icon provides a dialog box with overall table properties, such as padding. I like to use cell padding  of about 7 px so there’s a buffer between the table contents and other elements surrounding it.

You can also see OU documentation about tables or watch their tutorial (and feel free to search around their site for other helpful resources).

If you have been set up with an approver, instead of a “publish now” button, you will have the option to “send for approval.” You can select your approver from a drop-down menu of OmniUpdate users.

Select “send external email” and they’ll receive an email with a link to your page, where they can either revert your changes, approve the page, edit it, or send it back to you for more editing. They will have the option of sending you an email notification of their action from within the system.

Even if you don’t have an approver, you can send a page to another user in a similar way. The system will include a link in the email where they can preview an unpublished page within OmniUpdate.

Be aware, however, that sending a page will check it out to the user until they take action. Only administrators can cancel this checkout (a note to admins: this can be done under the Admin/Checked Out Content tab, not at the Content/Pages file listing.)

Checked Out Content

Regardless of how you manage your workflow, it’s a good practice to check your pages back in when you’re finished editing. Publishing a page will automatically check it back in, but saving it will not.

You can click on the “Dashboard” tab, then “Current Projects” to see the  list of files checked out to you. They can be checked back in by clicking on the status icon.

Create the Image Gallery Asset
This part is very similar to creating a new page in OU, but instead of doing this on the pages section, we switch to assets. At this point you don’t need to worry about the page that the gallery will ultimately appear on.

1. Click on Assets to the right of Pages in the Content tab.
2. Click on New in top right corner.
3. Choose Image Gallery.
4. You will be asked to name your gallery. Give it a descriptive name to make make it unique to the content within it. This name will appear in a large list of assets available on campus, so the name “Photo Gallery” would not give anyone a clue as to what kind of photos they might see within the gallery.
5. After choosing a good name click on Save.
6. Fill out the remaining information shown in the screenshot below.
7. If your original images are all different sizes and you want all your thumbnail images to appear the same size, you will want to use the “Crop” selection. Choosing “Original” with different size images will give you all different size thumbnails, with no uniformity.
8. It is important to keep the aspect ratio of your thumbnails in proportion to their original size so you don’t create distorted looking thumbnail images. For example, if your original photo was 500w x 300h, keeping the aspect ratio intact would mean downsizing the thumbnail to 250w x 150h or 125w x 75h. This may not be avoidable if all your photos are all different sizes.
9. Now we are ready to start inserting images into our gallery. Click on New under Images at the bottom of the screen.
10. This will bring up a file selector for you to choose an image from your computer to upload to the web server. Choose your image or photo and click Open.
11. Any size images can be used with no resizing needed. If you want to resize or crop your photo, now is the time to do it, otherwise click on Upload As.
12. Give your image a name and click OK. Note: if you upload a PNG file it will be converted to a JPG file and any transparency will be lost.
13. The current Image Gallery tool we are using in OU only makes use of the Description field. Enter a description for your image (it can also contain HTML code, including links) as shown below.
14. You can now either continue adding more images by clicking New or click Save to finish your image gallery.
15. Once you click Save, make sure to publish your image gallery asset. It is now ready to be used on your website.

Inserting Your Image Gallery on a Page
You can use your newly created image gallery on any 2-column page on your website. You can either create a new 2-column page or insert it into any existing one.

1. Place your cursor where you want your image gallery to appear on your page.
2. Click on the Insert Asset icon shown highlighted in red below.
3. Choose your image gallery asset in the list of assets. Then click on Select Asset.
4. This will insert your gallery on your page. It will not show your photos in your gallery until you save your page. Click on the Save disk icon in the upper left corner of the screen.
5. You will now see your gallery as it will appear on your page. Click on Publish Now. Then click on Publish again.
6. You are done! Click on View in new window to view and test your new gallery.

We have learned a lot in this pilot year. First and foremost, it can be very difficult to do a lot of these events with a one-camera setup. When we did a track and field meet in January, we had a lot of viewers (well above our average), but even though a handful of events were happening at any given time, all we could really show was the track. Every sport presents its own challenges in terms of finding a good spot to set up.

Finding a reliable internet connection is also sometimes a hit-or-miss venture, since there isn’t always a network port right where we need one. Just yesterday, for instance, we had to scramble when, less than ten minutes before the start of President Eckley’s memorial service, the Chapel’s WiFi started to get bogged down. I ended up bringing over a 4G LTE/WiFi hotspot. (We’re very lucky Bloomington/Normal has such high-speed cell service!)

We’ve got a few more events coming up in the next few weeks. You can watch the athletic events at our GameCentral portal, and Commencement will be streamed through our CampusCentral portal.

This summer, we will be undergoing a review with our campus stakeholders, including Athletics, Alumni Relations, Student Senate, and Communications, to decide if we should continue offering the service in the future and who will provide the ongoing funding and staff. Let us know what you think about it: do you watch it regularly? Do you like the look and feel? Any and all feedback will be appreciated, as we really are evaluating every aspect of the program.