Activate the Plugin:

Log in to your blog, go to the dashboard, go to plugins->appearance and find the Custom CSS plugin, click activate.

Use the Plugin:

Once activated the Appearance section under your dashboard will have a Custom CSS menu option

In here you can enter the CSS you wish to inject or override.

For example, to resize the fonts across the entire site you can try something like this:

Replace the em value with something that makes sense for you.

Protip:
You can use Google Chromes Inspect element option to see what styles are applied on each html element in your blog and to quickly test new values or styles prior to modifying the Custom CSS values, its much quicker to experiment this way.

So, IFTTT apparently can post to yammer — this can potentially be useful for sharing system status updates, blog posts, events to our community. Do you think we should post to all company or would that be too much spam? — Maybe a separate DoIT Announcements public group would make sense.

Interested in hearing your ideas…

I have arrived at SUNY Wizard, somehow missing the snow storm that is dumping upwards of 2 feet worth of snow north of here. Hopefully it stays up there.

Here are my slides for the presentations I’m giving this week.

Enhancing the Course Catalog
https://docs.google.com/a/stonybrook.edu/presentation/d/1p-KHZ6TnEt-7PYprGqkpz7vW6m5M4fOWcqG2R_hWopo/edit?usp=sharing

Front End Dev Tools
https://docs.google.com/a/stonybrook.edu/presentation/d/1qV8QApeGtUi7HOmXjtTgcexGZw4eKNqcoos6GE98EbM/edit?usp=sharing

Not much to report yet, one thing that I thought was interesting was learning that SUNY ITEC is creating a security services group, but it sounds mainly like its to monitor their internal activities rather than general SUNY consulting.

—

Wheres the Bus? Interactive Map @ Brockport

Brockport has a Mobile Technology Team: http://www.brockport.edu/motek/index.html
2 Years old, Based on Google Maps brockport.edu/map

The interactive map can be used for campus wide events like homecoming (brokport.edu/map/homecoming-2014-saturday)

Really loved this mornings keynote, the speaker made a clear cut, well supported argument for why organizations need to think about and embrace disruptive forces in the market. Higher Ed is ripe for major changes in this regard, even if we ignore the 800-pound gorilla that is online learning, there are numerous ways we can do a better job embracing the “disruptive” technologies that have made their way on campus in an effort to better to serve our students and faculty.

Area’s that I’m Personally excited about:
Web Publishing / Story Telling
– SB You and our Drupal offerings have huge potential to transform how we communicate our goals at an organizational, departmental and personal levels.

Course Catalog Enhancements
– We took a big step with Classie Syallabus, Classie Evals and Class Find but theres still so much more we can do to do a better job “selling” our courses and getting the right student in the right class so that they can be successful.

Community Building
– Yammer is one of those technologies that can immediately transform how we collaborate and share ideas with each other in a cross functional way. But very quickly the sheer amount of data (noise) being shared can choke out the ability to find content and area’s that interest an individual (what’s noise to me may be a symphony to you).

Looking outside of yammer theres so many ways we can collect community input and share it in a ways that allow for debate and positive institutional change

—-

The sessions today were interesting, Acquia discussed their new partner certification inititatives and I heard from other large (non-education) organizations and how they are solving their multi-site headaches. Its amazing how the same challenges affect us all. It really seems to come down to having a robust theme that enables effective story telling.

—-

Lunch was unique in that I managed to sit down with the CEO of Acquia, who prior to this conference I really didn’t know much about. I was impressed with how engaged he was in this conference and how much he values and appreciates the efforts of his team.

—-

I attended an afternoon session discussing the pillars of successful web implementations which outlined the key focus of most web initiatives: mobile, content, seo, advertising, email, automation, data & social and how your web platform is the foundation of the elements. I got some useful tools to checkout including http://www.vidyard.com/ and was reminded that I really need to take the time and upgrade our Google Analytics to the latest version.

—-

The closing keynote focused on Responsive Web Design and the tradeoffs in building Rich web experiences across all devices. It reinforced what I already felt, but its clear that I really need to look at creating a performance budget/goal.

—–

Overall I’m really glad I made the trek up here and probably the biggest take away is even in industry and organizations with seemingly large budgets team-sizes tend to be small (3-5 technical resources) but are supplemented by strong vendor partnerships.

Opening Engage Keynote was impressive, Acquia gave a brief outline of their platform strategy / direction, which was a rehash of DrupalCon Austin regarding the experience web.

We First
What really stood out was Simon Mainwaring from We First who outlined effective social strategies from major brands (Whole Foods, Cocoa Cola, Tom’s, etc.)
Very inspiring, more details to come.

Driving Faster with API’s
NBC Sports, PAC 12, Tesla Motors

Best Practices:
Make API’s — Put your code out there.
Document Them Apeir?
Scaling API’s with CDN’s
Versioning

Tesla API’s allow starting / stopping car
API First the new Mobile First?
Setting Content Free..
Tesla Releases 3x / Week
The entire ordering process goes through Drupal Site/Store

“Two-Pizza Teams”
Dog Food the API
Release often
Daily Meetings / SCRUM / Agile
Week Long Sprints

800 Sites: Pfizer
77,000 Employees
Viagra, Lipitor, Advil, Centrum…Hundreds of Brands
2012 -> IT acts as hosting company running dozens of different technologies. Chose Drupal/Open Source
2013 -> Decouple Agencies / Start Standardizing on Platform/Vendors
2014 -> Automatic Testing (Behat) / Enforcement of standards

Its really neat to hear how a large company like Pfizer deals with the same challenges that our instution has. Product / Regional groups have a lot of autonomy and control over platform selection. Wanting to get a better handle on this Wild West situation, their central IT group created a compelling platform (Acquia/Drupal) that was able to deliver a consistently great experience, reducing costs around 60% and delivering projects 30% faster. Groups still have control over direction, theme and content, but stay within the platform.

Content Strategy

http://www.gollner.ca/

Content Strategy Quad: Substance, Workflow Structure Governance

Substance:
What does it do for our users?
Why do we require this?
What are the editorial principles at play?
How will we measure success of this content?

Structure,
How do we prove out our models
Do we have a taxonomy? How will it be maintained?
How does content travel between our systems?

Workflow
Who are our authors and their skillsets? What are their pain points? Whats working for them?
How do we know where content can or should be acquired?

Governance
What are our priority programs and why
Where is the center of content decisions
Whos connecting the dots?
How do we assign and measure accountability?

Data management
audience planning
content management + tagging
content decisioning
channel + messaging
cross platform communication
measurement + optimization

Rahel Bailie Intentional Design Content Strategy Maturity Model

Goals, Strategys, Tactics

Establish a common lexicon
Know what you need.
Schedule time to think — activity is not productivity
Talk to front lines
Prioritize