April's Web Interest Group meeting is approaching and I wanted to send out a quick e-mail asking what folks are interested in discussing. There are a few topics that I would like to get your opinions on, and a few uses of technology around campus that deserve a highlight. Also, I am in the process of reshaping my unit and the way we work with others around campus. I would like the opportunity to discuss these changes with you. Finally, David Hoover recently met with President Holbrook, interim-Provost Snyder interim-VP for Research Rosol and University Relations VP Bill Murphy to discuss University Identity. The meeting went very well, and she recommended moving forward with his proposal to fine-tune and standardize logos on campus. Although I may not have a lot to show you at the meeting, you should be aware of changes that are happening with both print and web logos for the university. David is in the process of meeting with necessary groups around campus to discuss this as well.
The first topic that needs your attention and opinion is from a discussion that came out of a recent NETWOG meeting. Some members of NETWOG are asking for extended uses of the osu.edu domain. They are not migrating web sites into this new space because other services they offer cannot be placed there as well: mail and ftp were the ones discussed the most, but I can imagine others as well. The discussion then moved to the possibility of moving all of what is now in ohio-state.edu into osu.edu and abandoning ohio-state.edu. Don't get alarmed. This is only is the discussion phase. I am interested in what the webmaster group thinks about this.
Second, RSS feeds have become a topic within several areas on campus and I wanted to share what OIT and University Relations are doing with this technology. For the unfamiliar, RSS stands for Rich Site Summary. It is a way of forming a simple XML document best suited for news and updates. Seth Hall in OIT has some ideas about aggregating RSS feeds for the entire campus. Hopefully he will be able to make the meeting to speak about this idea. Also, Kevin Balogh has developed an RSS feed for the Help Desk. http://8help.osu.edu/files/ten_newest.rss. University Relations has offered an RSS feed for both the OSU Events Calendar and for our Media Relations news releases for a few years now. We will be using all of these feeds to populate a new site for faculty and staff. That site should be live by the time we meet.
Here is a site Seth shared with me recently that explains RSS quite well, albeit in a technical specification kind-of way. http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/
Okay, that's enough for now. The next meeting is on April 13th at 2 PM in room 120 Baker Systems. I can see that this meeting may run over the scheduled hour we usually reserve, so you may want to make note of that. I will send out another notice as the date approaches.
