Apple just made it redonkulously easy to put your alumni magazine on the iPad – and best of all, they did it for free.

First, let me back up a second.

I’ve been getting a lot of calls and emails lately from vendors wanting to make me an app version of my University’s alumni magazine. The magazine apps I’ve seen have been mostly flip-book PDF style apps and they’re expensive to create and maintain.

While driving home in the snow last night, I had a realization. Yesterday, Apple released new software called iBooks Author, free software that will allow people to create multimedia rich books that can be read in the free iBooks app on the iPad.

The light went off. While Apple is aiming this at textbook authors and publishers, there’s no reason we can’t easily create rich multimedia versions of our college magazines using it.

So, last night, I did it. I downloaded iBooks Author and in 15 minutes had a story laid out including photos, an interactive slide show and dynamic image with hot spots and text.

The application is super simple to use, easier than Word, and creating the dynamic elements is very easy. Here’s the interface, I had a few extra guides turned on.

As you work, you can preview your work on an actual iPad, if you have one. You connect it, and a proof shows up in your iBooks 2 app. You can then scroll through the pages in the real app, interact with the elements, highlight, take notes and so on.

This just changed the game.

I made an iBook in half an hour. Imagine if I spent an hour on it.

If I’m not charging for my magazine iBook, and I imagine many institutions wouldn’t, you can distribute the file on your website. If you want to sell it, you’ve got to go through Apple (and they’ll take their 30% cut, thank you very much.)

iBooks Author requires a Mac running OS 10.7.

While meant for K-12 and textbooks, I think they’ve given us higher ed folks a nice present as well.

I’m a fan of filmmaker Joe Carnahan. He’s made some good films (NARC), over-the-top movies (Smoking Aces) and big Hollywood movies (The A-Team.) His newest movie, The Grey, comes out in a few weeks and looks interesting. Here’s a quick synopsis from IMDB:

In Alaska, an oil drilling team struggle to survive after a plane crash strands them in the wild. Hunting the humans are a pack of wolves who see them as intruders.

I was watching a trailer for the film, and was surprised to see the end credits for the trailer:

and this:

I can’t decide if this kind of social media marketing is genius or dumb.

What is the marketing gain for this movie if I tweet something with the hashtag #MickeyLiddell? Will that influence my social circle to go see this film?

I have a confession. I tried World of Warcraft over the holiday break. It’s free up to level 20, so I decided to try it. I think I’ll stick to console games for the time being but it was interesting.

Want to learn more about it?

Zoom in to See More

I’ve been trying out the new Facebook timeline feature for my profile since before the holiday break. Now that I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, there are things I like about it and things I don’t. I like the header design, and the fact that you can get a lot of information about a persion in a quick glance. Below the fold, so to speak, it goes a bit pear-shaped. It’s tough, when scrolling quickly, so see what’s newly posted and what’s older.

Some items are pinned to a center line with a dot, signifying their timing, but other boxes seem to float, such as the friends box and other information, such as recent tracks I’ve played in Spotify.

Anyways, as you can see above, one of the key parts of the Facebook timeline profile is the header graphic, which is something you can select. I must have gone through a dozen photos until I found the right one. In the end, I ended up tweaking it quite a bit in Photoshop to get it to fit just right. My photo is one I took when I was in Cardiff, Wales in 2009.

I would guess that in the next few months, as these become more prevalent across Facebook, we’ll see them start to roll out to fan pages as well. I’m not sure how the timeline will work for brands, as I think some of the display of information on these pages can get a bit confusing.

Despite that, when the time comes I thought we’d all want to customize that header for our brands/colleges/universities/whatever, so I created a Photoshop document template all set up and ready for you to design with. I laid out the “notch” where your profile picture is inserted by Facebook so you can make sure text or other graphical elements that are important aren’t being covered up.

Here’s a ZIP file.

If you’d also like, here’s a torrent version.

If you’re like me, you’ve been getting or are about to be getting questions from people on your campus about all this SOPA and PIPA news and legislation and what it could mean to sites, including our .edu websites.

I saw this video today that really breaks down what the bill is and what it will mean to web users. I can imagine higher ed sites could be targeted quite a bit.

We’ve been testing Gravity Forms here as part of our WordPress CMS, allowing users easy access to be able to make forms and manage them right inside WordPress. So far, our tests have been positive, and we’re set to open it up to all our users.

We’ve run into a challenge though as we get ready to roll this out. When set up and turned on in one of our sites (we run multi-site), only administrative users could access and see Gravity Forms.

We set up our campus users as editors, so they can’t go and switch themes and install rogue plugins. Even though the plugin was installed, editors couldn’t see Gravity Forms. They could see all our other functions and custom post types, but not Gravity Forms.

I wrote to their support, who suggested I use yet another plugin. That’s fine if I was just running one site, but at 140 sites and growing, I can’t be spending all day in that plugin turning things on and off. I figured there’d have to be a way to give the editor role access.

Enter some code. It’s one of the things that I really love about WordPress. With a bit of good code, you can do a lot of different things.

I added the following to my functions.php file, making Gravity Forms see that the user role of editor had the correct privileges and could run it. After some trial and error, I found the following snippet of code worked for an editor:

	function add_grav_forms(){
		$role = get_role('editor');
		$role->add_cap('gform_full_access');
	}
	add_action('admin_init','add_grav_forms');

So far, so good. I can make new forms, see entries and more as an editor, and I think I won’t have to manage this with a plugin, which is good to avoid that overhead where possible. Here’s what an editor sees now. The other things (taters, tots, etc) are custom post types we’ve developed.

I can add a new thing to my higher ed career list – taking a TV commercial from inception through editing and into production and onto the air.

The spot was written by our marketing team here at John Carroll University and shot and edited by my long-time friends at Route1a. It aired on cable and broadcast TV in a few midwest cities.

An awesome experience from start to finish.

I often find myself transcoding video into all sorts of different formats, and today I found myself needing to get a video into FLV format for streaming.

While I usually just upload my H.264 MP4′s into a place like YouTube, occasionally I need a different format. I’ve tried all sorts of tools, including FFMPEGX and several online tools such as encoding.com, but I was never completely thrilled with the results. They always take a lot of fine-tuning and Ffmpegx, for example, always seemed to make my videos darker, which wasn’t good.Today, I tried out Adobe’s Media Encoder CS5.5 to take a QuickTime H.264 and get it into FLV. Media Encoder CS5.5 is really geared towards exporting right from Premiere, but it will take external inputs, which is what I did. I was pleasantly surprised by the experience – the process couldn’t have been simpler – I dragged in my file, selected a preset output and hit go. Seriously, that was it.

After the render, I tried the same conversion again, this time changing the preset values and doing a second pass-through at the highest quality level. I was surprised at not only how fast the encode went*, but the file size was very reasonable for this file – which was originally 1280×720 high definition.

Likes:

I like the ease of use and the very large number of presets available in Media Encoder. If doing a simple transcode, it’s easy to get going yet you can also heavily customize the experience. There are presets for video sharing services such as YouTube and Vimeo, which is nice. It will even take Photoshop files, image files, MP3′s and more.

While I haven’t used it with Premiere, I like that you can bring in other file formats and set up a render queue. Setting up a set of renders for web, mobile, and TV usage is a breeze.

Finally, I like that you can set up a watch folder and Media Encoder will start a pre-determined set of actions if a file appears. I could see this being useful if you, for example, had it watch a shared Dropbox folder and then spit out a mobile-friendly video back into that folder for your team.

Recommendations:

Adobe, if you’re listening, I had a few ideas in using this software.

I like that you can have Media Encoder FTP a file to a destination once it’s complete, but it’d be very handy if you could also set Media Encoder to send a file to an Amazon S3 bucket. This would be a nice piece in a workflow if a video could be put in the cloud automatically upon render.

Second, one thing I liked about Final Cut back in the day was the ability to set up a few computers using XGrid to distribute a render to a few different workstations. We’ve got a few machines sitting around that could potentially be used as a pseudo-render farm. It would take the load off my machine and make transcodes much faster. A double-pass, highest quality encode of a 3 minute HD video from H.264 to FLV still took 12 or 13 minutes on my pretty decently powered iMac. To split that off to a few machines would be nice, especially if I’m doing several sizes/flavors/versions of a particular video.

TL/DR:

Adobe’s Media Encoder CS5.5 is simple to use and has lots of presets, yet you can customize it and it will work with video, audio, images and more. It is going to be a piece of software I see myself using quite a bit.

Here are some screenshots from the app. Click on each one to see a larger version.

* – to be fair, my iMac has 12GB of RAM.

Disclosure: Adobe provided me a copy of Media Encoder to try. This did not influence my thoughts on the product or this review. No payment was accepted or offered for this review, nor was there an expectation of one.

$25 for $50 (or $50 for $100) Worth of Clothing and Accessories at American Apparel, either online or in-store.

This week, I’m stepping from out behind the curtain to try being a contestant in a local social media contest.

A local Saab dealership is holding a contest where 100 people each week receive a Saab to drive around. Our goal as drivers is to get people to be our “fan” on a contest page and to snap the 2 QR codes on the car, one on each of the back windows and one on the interior (which is worth more points.) Contestants also receive points if someone scans a QR code on the car and then visits one of the contest sponsors where there’s another code that earns the customer a discount or benefit. The people I’ve shown the car to so far have been most excited by the fact they get a free coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts if they scan the car. Finally, I’ll receive points for each time I post a photo of the car. I’ve put up a few so far, and the process has been smooth and easy.

After a semi-final round, finalists will select 1 of 5 boxes, each containing a key. If the key opens the Saab, you win the car. Personally, I don’t really need a new car, but I could use the money to re-do our basement, trashed this year in floods.

Anyways, to play the part of good contestant, I need to ask for your help and tap into my social capital. Here’s how you can help. It’s okay if you’re not in the northeast Ohio area or even in the USA, you can “like” me from anywhere, as well as scan the QR code. You might not get a free coffee, but you’ll be helping me out.

First, visit my contest page. Scroll down to the lower right, where you’ll see this area:

Click on that “become a fan” link, where you’ll be prompted for an email address. I’ve been promised the emails won’t be spammed by the dealership, but to be safe, use that second or third Gmail account you have for stuff like this.

Second, scan this QR code on your phone:

If you don’t want to go through all the trouble, just visit this link, which the QR code takes you to. You’ll be asked for your location, so it can find the closest sponsor location to you.

So, that’s how you can help. Now, let me put on my marketing hat for a bit.

So far, the contest has been managed and handled very well, which is key. They held an orientation session last week for participants where the rules were explained, forms completed and there was food. There have been constant email communications from the dealer to participants with updates and schedules, which has been helpful.

On Sunday, when I picked up my car, there was a good check-in system, where the last of the paperwork was completed and any questions I had were answered. From there, I was off the pick-up area, where my car was brought up from the lot. I was walked through the vehicle and off I went. All in all, a good system was in place and there were plenty of people staffing the various areas so there was no wait. I’ll return the car on Saturday and expect the same setup upon check-in.

From a technology standpoint, the contest site is set up well, works well in mobile browsers and image uploads by contestants are stored and served from Amazon S3. I don’t know if this is being run by a national company that sells this product to local dealerships, but it’s put together very well and the design is nice.

So, I’m two days in so far. The car’s fun to drive (and fast, thank you, Turbo.) I wish it had a hookup for my iPhone, like my Hyundai does, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Thanks for your help. I’ll update later in the week on my progress.

This week, I’m stepping from out behind the curtain to try being a contestant in a local social media contest.

A local Saab dealership is holding a contest where 100 people each week receive a Saab to drive around. Our goal as drivers is to get people to be our “fan” on a contest page and to snap the 2 QR codes on the car, one on each of the back windows and one on the interior (which is worth more points.) Contestants also receive points if someone scans a QR code on the car and then visits one of the contest sponsors where there’s another code that earns the customer a discount or benefit. The people I’ve shown the car to so far have been most excited by the fact they get a free coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts if they scan the car. Finally, I’ll receive points for each time I post a photo of the car. I’ve put up a few so far, and the process has been smooth and easy.

After a semi-final round, finalists will select 1 of 5 boxes, each containing a key. If the key opens the Saab, you win the car. Personally, I don’t really need a new car, but I could use the money to re-do our basement, trashed this year in floods.

Anyways, to play the part of good contestant, I need to ask for your help and tap into my social capital. Here’s how you can help. It’s okay if you’re not in the northeast Ohio area or even in the USA, you can “like” me from anywhere, as well as scan the QR code. You might not get a free coffee, but you’ll be helping me out.

First, visit my contest page. Scroll down to the lower right, where you’ll see this area:

Click on that “become a fan” link, where you’ll be prompted for an email address. I’ve been promised the emails won’t be spammed by the dealership, but to be safe, use that second or third Gmail account you have for stuff like this.

Second, scan this QR code on your phone:

If you don’t want to go through all the trouble, just visit this link, which the QR code takes you to. You’ll be asked for your location, so it can find the closest sponsor location to you.

So, that’s how you can help. Now, let me put on my marketing hat for a bit.

So far, the contest has been managed and handled very well, which is key. They held an orientation session last week for participants where the rules were explained, forms completed and there was food. There have been constant email communications from the dealer to participants with updates and schedules, which has been helpful.

On Sunday, when I picked up my car, there was a good check-in system, where the last of the paperwork was completed and any questions I had were answered. From there, I was off the pick-up area, where my car was brought up from the lot. I was walked through the vehicle and off I went. All in all, a good system was in place and there were plenty of people staffing the various areas so there was no wait. I’ll return the car on Saturday and expect the same setup upon check-in.

From a technology standpoint, the contest site is set up well, works well in mobile browsers and image uploads by contestants are stored and served from Amazon S3. I don’t know if this is being run by a national company that sells this product to local dealerships, but it’s put together very well and the design is nice.

So, I’m two days in so far. The car’s fun to drive (and fast, thank you, Turbo.) I wish it had a hookup for my iPhone, like my Hyundai does, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Thanks for your help. I’ll update later in the week on my progress.

I’m going to be honest here. I haven’t been swept up in the Google+ hype of the last few months. I just haven’t, I don’t know, gotten it. To me, thus far, I haven’t seen the killer app or need that Google+ fills that Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn doesn’t. So, I haven’t spent a lot of time there, and have seen lots of duplicate content across my various networks.

This week, Google allowed brands/companies/schools to start having their own Facebook-Fan-Page-ish Pages inside Google+. I, like many other web and marketing folks, created a page for my University. The setup process was fairly simple, and I had the profile setup in a few minutes.

Now what?

Do I re-post content we’re already posting to over 5,000 fans on Facebook, or should we be creating content just for Google+? These are the types of questions that I guess many teams are now wrestling with.

Having just spent a small amount of time, I have some questions about managing a Google+ page.

1. Am I the only person who can administrate this page? I see that one the circles/streams available on my Page is one called “Team Members,” but its not clear if I add people to that stream/circle if they are given the right to post on the page.

2. My page displays the 2 people I’ve put in the Team Members circle on our home page, and shows that we have 11 followers, which isn’t bad for two hours. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing a way to see who the followers are.

I can now see who is following me, and choose to add them to one of my circles. This is a marked difference from Facebook’s model, which is more one way the two services are different. If you’re a fan of JCU on Facebook, as an administrator I don’t have access to your page and personal info. Not sure what the right model will be here on Google+.

What circles should I put them, since I’m encouraged to do that in the Google+ model. Students? Alumni? Faculty? Friends? Parents? Sounds like a minefield and a timesink having to determine what bucket a person should go in.

3. Where are the analytics? Facebook’s insights are pretty decent, but so far, I’m not seeing anything in terms of analytics for my Google page. How many times are my posts being viewed? What are the demographics, broadly speaking, of my audience on this site? What are the trends. Google has a killer app in Analytics, it should be really tied in here. If there isn’t marketing stats available here, I don’t see us really spending a lot of time focusing on our Google+ page if we can’t determine the ROI or value of having it.

4. I can add video and photos, but wouldn’t it make sense if I could link my institutional YouTube account and have videos I share there automatically get pulled in here? I could manually share them, but that’s an extra step that seems unnecessary. I should be able to hook the two together.

Honestly, at this point, I’m rather unimpressed with Google+’s page offerings. I think Farhad Manjoo said it well in his post at Slate:

I know this sounds unfair: Facebook had years to add all the features it has now, so why should we demand that Google create a perfect substitute at launch time? But that’s just the thing—taking on a behemoth like Facebook is an unfair fight. Google seems to think about its social network in the same way it thinks of any other kind of software—as a “product” that it can design step-by-step, starting with a small number of innovative features and working up from there.

We as web and marketing folks have been spoiled by Facebook and their fan page offerings, so much so that we expect any competing, new product to have all the same, if not better, functionality.

I’ll be keeping an eye on our Google+ page and placing content there, but it won’t be the first place I think to post content, which Facebook is now for us.

Here are a few videos I’ve watched last week – ones that are interesting, well produced, thought provoking or inspirational.

Jack Daniel’s Does Letterpress from Aggrodesign on Vimeo.

Made by Hand / No 2 The Knife Maker from Made by Hand on Vimeo.

TL/DR: A few videos about handmade design work and a few dubstep videos.

I fed WordPress too much and it got a belly ache.

Each year, we do a “donor honor roll,” or a listing of all the people who gave money to my University in the past year. We’ve transitioned it from a print publication, sometimes inserted as part of our alumni magazine, to a stand-alone web-based site.

Basically, it’s a ton of text broken into pages based on giving levels. Some of the pages are rather short – like those that gave over $50,000. The longest list, unsurprisingly, was our list of people who gave under $1,000. It was near 30,000 words long – which is a LOT of text in one WordPress page.

As a donor to this University (and in the under $1k group), I was able to find myself using WordPress’s built-in search tool. When I went to the full list page, it was blank. Well, our header, sidebars and footer was there, but the actual page content, the stuff being pulled by the the_content() tag, was missing.

It was in the database, but WordPress wasn’t actually displaying it on the page. At all.

After some poking, I discovered that it was too much data for PHP to do any functions/plugin actions on it before it was displayed. I didn’t really want to break it into multiple pages, so I Googled around and found other people having similar problems with very long pages and posts.

The solution: change some PHP settings to up certain buffer sizes. The lines I used were this:

/** Trick for long posts */
ini_set('pcre.recursion_limit',20000000);
ini_set('pcre.backtrack_limit',10000000);

Those two lines, placed in either your php.ini file or your wp-config.php file, give PHP a bit more space and power to process large amounts of text and make sure there’s enough room to do all the processing on a post that WordPress has to do.

We host our sites on a dedicated machine, so I’m not sure what, if any, effect this will have on WordPress sites hosted on a shared server. Otherwise, I’d recommend breaking them into multiple pages or posts.

The Erie BayHawks are supporting students from the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in hosting collection sites for the National Prescription Drug Take Back Day this Saturday, October 29 from 10 am-2pm.

LECOM students will be at three sites in Erie County collecting unwanted and unused prescription drugs and the first 25 people at each location to dispose of their drugs will receive two free BayHawks tickets.
Erie area collection sites include:

• Erie City Hall, 626 State St, Erie PA, 16509
• Harborcreek Township Municipal Building, 5601 Buffalo Road, Harborcreek, PA 16421
• Millcreek Township Municipal Building, 3608 West 26th Street, Erie PA 16506

“Clutch,” the BayHawks mascot will also be on hand at Erie City Hall from 11 am to noon on Saturday to greet fans.
National Prescription Drug Take Back Day addresses a vital public safety and public health issue. More than seven million Americans currently abuse prescription drugs, according to the 2009 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Each day, approximately, 2,500 teens use prescription drugs to get high for the first time according to the Partnership for a Drug Free America. Studies show that a majority of abused prescription drugs are obtained from family and friends, including the home medicine cabinet.

The BayHawks’ first home game this season is set for Thursday, December 1 at 7:00 pm at the Tullio Arena when the BayHawks face the Maine Red Claws. Season tickets and group tickets are on sale now and can be purchased by calling 814-790-5600.

We as higher ed web people have many choices when it comes to embedding videos on our sites. More and more, we’re turning to YouTube to host these videos for us.

For the most part, I’m fine with that. We don’t have to worry about bandwidth and storage, we get decent analytics and get the added bonus of YouTube users stumbling across our videos.

That being said, I’m seeing a trend lately that’s been bothering me – and it’s one that can potentially make our institutions look bad.

People – when you’re embedding a video from YouTube, for the love of crackers turn off “Show related videos.” It’s a simple checkbox. It looks like this:

Checking that box can save you quite a bit of embarrassment. Case in point:

Georgetown University is about to launch a major capital campaign. It’s an amazing video – it’s beautifully shot, beautifully edited and is just really compelling. Here it is:

I guarantee you that video was not cheap to produce. I was watching it on their campaign site, where it was embedded, and was really engrossed in it. I was good until it ended and the YouTube player showed me related videos that it thought was relevant to the launch of Georgetown’s capital campaign. Front and center: one showing off the fact that rapper Wiz Khalifa spends $10,000 a month on weed.

I’m serious. Here’s what it looked like:

I can pretty surely say that Georgetown doesn’t want to promote Wiz Khalifa’s drug habit. I’m sure it doesn’t fit in with their mission (the embalming process video that also shows up is a bit creepy too.) I’m sure they don’t want people to leave their campaign site and videos confused why they’re linking to drug videos.

For something that’s critical to a university, such as a campaign video, I would probably host the video on my own, or use JW Player to grab it from YouTube directly.

If you can’t do that, and have to use a YouTube embed, you really should turn off the related videos. Don’t play poker with your career.

Update: Looks like it was oversight and is on its way to being fixed.

Gannon University’s third annual haunted theatre event, “Stage Fright,” will return for two spooky, spine-tingling, scream-inducing nights.

Stage Fright will run from 8-11 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Oct. 28-29 at Gannon’s Schuster Theatre, 620 Sassafras St. Admission is $2 per person.

Attendees will be led on a tour of the theatre, which will have a seemingly innocent fairy tale theme with characters such as Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel and Jack and the Beanstalk. Guests soon will learn that this “fairy tale” is more about blood, gore and the macabre.

Stage Fright is designed for ages 12 and up. Parents with young children are asked to use their discretion.

The event is being coordinated by Gannon’s Alpha Psi Omega, a theatre honor society. All proceeds from the event will be used for a plaque in honor of the late Bruce Morton Wright, conductor and director of Gannon University’s Erie Chamber Orchestra.

Paleolithic pals Pterodactyl are announcing a fall tour in support of their forthcoming full-length, Spills Out, which will burst forth on November 15th via the Oneida-run Brah Records. Just yesterday, they premiered a new track off the record, “Nerds,” on Altered Zones. The song is an ode to the disconnect felt when life, love, and games intersect and people get lost in that strange place where reality and fantasy meet. Also, the beginning of the first verse shouts out to the first seven seconds of the beloved Zelda theme.

Listen to/download “Nerds” here: http://www.pitchperfectpr.com/mp3/Nerds.mp3

In other news, the band has been busy crafting a video for their first single, “School Glue.” They’ve been chronicling this undertaking, from making props to researching special effects to building a mythical alien city, on their Ptumblr. They’ve also begun a Kickstarter campaign to help pay for what will undoubtedly be an ambitious and visually stunning video. Take a peek into the process!

PTERODACTYL TOUR DATES:

Wed 11/2 – Portland, ME @ SPACE Gallery
Sat 11//5 – Ithaca, NY @ The Space at GreenStar
Sun 11/6 – Binghamton, NY @ Pajama/Kazama
Mon 11/7 – Jamestown, NY @ Labyrinth Press
Tues 11/8 – Scranton, PA @ Embassy Vinyl
Wed, 11/9 – Grantham, PA @ Messiah College
Thurs 11/10 – Cleveland @ Now That’s Class
Sun 11/13 – Bloomington, IN @ The Bishop
Wed 11/16 – Norman, OK @ The Opolis
Thurs 11/17 – Denton, TX @ Hailey’s
Fri 11/18 – Austin, TX – Emo’s Inside
Wed 11/23 – Santa Cruz, CA @ 105 Pioneer St.
Sat 11/26 – San Francisco @ El Rio
Mon 11/28 – Redding, CA @ Bombay’s
Tues 11/29 – Portland @ Mississippi Studios
Thurs 12/1 – Vancouver @ Rickshaw Theatre
Fri 12/2 – Seattle @ Vera Project
Tues 12/6 – Fargo, ND – The Aquarium
Thurs 12/8 – Milwaukee @ Frank’s Power Plant
Sun 12/11 – Toronto, ONT @ Parts & Labor
Mon 12/12 – Montreal, QC @ Reserve Phonique
Sat 12/17 – Brooklyn, NY @ Knitting Factory

Everyday Erie County front line employees come in contact with the traveling public and now VisitErie is acknowledging those that go above and beyond their duties.

The “Outstanding Customer Service in Erie” Awards were developed to thank/recognize those for their exceptional work in ensuring customer/visitor satisfaction with the traveling public. After receiving over 150 nominations, the winners were selected from a panel of tourism industry judges and will be presented with their awards during a special reception Thursday, October 13th at the Concourse of Union Station. The nomination process took place this summer with displays posted at area attractions, restaurants, hotels and online at VisitErie.com encouraging visitors and employers to nominate an employee who is making a difference.

Four front line employees will be recognized at the reception in five categories:

Accommodations Sherika Brunson, Residence Inn

Attractions Paul Andrzejewski, Presque Isle Downs & Casino

Restaurant Dawn Dyas, Lil Al’s-Presque Isle Downs & Casino

Behind the Scenes Chris Morey, Scott Enterprises

The Erie Sports Commission (ESC) is seeking volunteers who can contribute their time and talents to assist in ongoing research and the efforts of the commission to attract sporting events to the Erie area.

Volunteers are being sought to assist in the process of researching available sporting events, providing assistance to analyze and grow local sports events, or to assist in the administration of area sports activities.

Ron Sertz, Executive Director of the ESC noted: “We have been fortunate to have had some very experienced and dedicated volunteers who have stepped forward and contributed greatly to our mission of using sports to grow tourism and make an economic impact on our region. We have many things to accomplish, and it is very important to assemble the right team of volunteers who understand how our mission can really make a difference in the Erie community. I know Erie has some wonderfully talented individuals who love sports and can contribute greatly to our goals.”

For more information on being a volunteer with the Sports Commission, interested parties may find the application online at eriesportscommission.com or obtain a copy of the application by calling 814-454-1000 or stopping at the offices of VisitErie, 208 East Bayfront Parkway.

Last week, in hopes of making this site more useful, I moved the “What’s new” area of the site, which features the latest posts by local bloggers into the main area. Why did I do this?

1. I want to feature them more prominently.
2. I am no longer creating daily news posts, and occasionally posting press releases and news we receive from local groups.

It seems from traffic numbers that people don’t like the change. The first day was a bit wonky with a bunch of RSS updates by accident, and I moved some heavy hitters (like the ETN, which I want to include) into its own sidebar since they seem to post many things at the same time.

What can I do to make it better?

The Community Blood Bank and the Erie Playhouse have teamed up to save lives this week. Starting Tuesday morning the first 50 donors that come to the Community Blood Bank get a pair of tickets to their upcoming presentation of the bloody good musical, Sweeney Todd. One lucky donor will win a Choice Card; tickets for 6 plays at the Erie Playhouse this season and dinner for two at the Pufferbelly Restaurant.

“We have had lots of donors request an event with the Erie Playhouse,” said Dan Desrochers, Director of Marketing at the Community Blood Bank. “And Sweeney Todd is the perfect event for October!”

The Community Blood Bank is located at 26th and Peach and is open Monday to Friday 8am to 6pm and Saturday from 9am to 12:30pm. No appointment is needed to save a life.

The following post is from Christopher Fetcko, who is part of a class at Gannon working on studies and ideas on how to best develop Erie’s bayfront area. Now that the GAF plant is gone, there’s a stretch of prime real estate that could be developed into an area that would bring people downtown, which leads to jobs and so on. Here’s Christopher:

I am an MBA student at Gannon University in Erie, PA (just graduated), that was working on a group project for an entrepreneurial class. Our group has done an extensive feasibility study on the development of an aquarium/aviary at the former GAF site along the Bayfront in Erie that would be part of a mixed-use development. Currently, there is a major push to redevelop the Bayfront in Erie.

Based on our projections, we feel this would be a great anchor for a mixed-use project, that would require around 3.5 of the 12.5 acres of the site. We believe the aquarium would create incredible synergies between the Bayfront, Convention Center, and whatever other developments that occur at the GAF site.

The Convention Center Authority is involved with creating a “concept” for the site, and is currently seeking ideas from the public as to the best use of the site. The authority will has a web-site set up where the public can offer input as to the use of the site. The link is

www.GAFBayfrontVision.com

We have met with local business people, environmental groups, government officials, and some potential investors about the project. There is a considerable amount of grassroots interest in the project, and we are hoping to capitalize on this.

You know as well as I, that there are always hurdles involved in a project like this, but we feel confident in our concept and feel that this can define the Bayfront for decades to come.

Ideally, the Mayor would like to see property tax revenue from the site, so to create a non-profit aquarium would be difficult, but not impossible. We are hoping to attract a for-profit developer who has the same vision that we have.

Presque Isle State Park is the most visited state park in PA. The park is a must for bird watchers, who come from all over the world during migratory periods. Bird watching is the largest sport in America.

Additionally, there is no AZA accredited aquarium anywhere along the Great Lakes. Our vision for the project would include an aquarium/aviary that would be situated on 3.5 acres of the property, that would showcase not only the the aquatic life of the Great Lakes and the Oceans, but also the migratory birds that settle around the area, permanently or during migratory seasons.

There seems to be a strong disconnect between the importance of the Great Lakes region, both as a resource and a habitat, and the residents that live around the Great Lakes region.

Theodore Roosevelt once said, “I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.” This very idea is what we have based the following business plan on.

Lake Erie is Erie, Pennsylvania’s most prized natural resource and we are determined to see it be utilized by its residents with the utmost respect. Our hope is to gain support to responsibly capitalize on this great resource.

The link below, explains the clean-up a bit more

http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110908/NEWS02/309089952/-1/newssitemap

This is a link to an article I wrote for the EDT about our project

http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110403/OPINION08/304039993/-1/RSS

The Gannon University women’s basketball team will be honored by the Northwest Regional Association of the American Fundraising Professionals (AFP) for its efforts to raise funds for and awareness of breast cancer.

The Lady Knights and their coach, Cleve Wright, will receive the AFP’s “Outstanding Young Philanthropist” award.

The award stems from the team’s successful “Pink Zone” games held each of the last four seasons. This past season’s Pink Zone game raised $12,500 for the Erie Unit of the American Cancer Society’s Making Strides Against Breast Cancer Fund, bringing the Lady Knights’ total contribution to $52,500.

Wright and the team members will accept the award at a Nov. 15 luncheon.

“We’re very honored to be recognized,” Wright said. “What we’ve accomplished through Pink Zone is a credit to the tremendous support we’ve had from the community and especially from our faculty, staff and students.

“Just like with the game of basketball, it takes a true team effort to make something special happen.”

The Lady Knights’ fifth annual Pink Zone game will be Feb. 18, 2012, when they host Lock Haven University at 1 p.m. at Hammermill Center.

The Erie BayHawks announced today that Kyle Goldcamp and Mike Gansey will serve as coaches at the team’s upcoming Kids Clinic on October 15-16 at Penn State-Behrend’s Junker Center.

The Clinic is open to boys and girls in first through eighth grade. Registration for kids in first through third grade is $40 and fourth through eighth grade is $75. All attendees receive instruction from the BayHawks coaching staff, a full sized BayHawks basketball, free ticket to Opening Night on December 1 and the opportunity to take part in Opening Night festivities.

BayHawks coaches Jay Larranaga and Ben McDonald will serve as directors of the Clinic and on Sunday all participants will be treated to a special performance by “Crazy George,” legendary basketball wizard who will entertain kids with basketball tricks and deliver a positive message.

Registration forms can be found at ErieBayHawks.com or by calling 790-5600. Space is limited.

Goldcamp, a graduate of Gannon University, has played the last two seasons with Erie appearing in 77 games (30 starts) and averaging 4.9 points and 3.7 rebounds per game.

Gansey, a West Virginia University graduate, played 27 games for the BayHawks during the 2009-10 season after arriving in Erie via a trade with the Idaho Stampede. He started 26 games for Erie and averaged 18.4 points and 8.2 rebounds per game. Gansey spent last season playing for CB Canarias in the Canary Islands.

The BayHawks’ first home game this season is set for Thursday, December 1 at 7:00 pm at the Tullio Arena when the BayHawks face the Maine Red Claws. Season tickets and group tickets are on sale now and can be purchased by calling 814-790-5600.

See – this is why I worry about our current economic state. It’s too easy for one person or company to do some serious damage.

See larger
Source: http://www.OnlineAccountingDegree.org

I’m not much of a finance guy – one look at my bank book would tell you that, but all this talk of European debt and bailouts and recession and US government shutdowns has me spooked. Then I went and saw this video yesterday:

And before you say that’s a fake, it most likely isn’t. Even notorious pranksters The Yes Men disavowed any knowledge of Alessio Rastani. They say:

We’ve never heard of Rastani. Despite widespread speculation, he isn’t a Yes Man. He’s a real trader who is, for one reason or another, being more honest than usual. Who in big banking doesn’t bet against the interests of the poor and find themselves massively recompensed—if not by the market, then by humongous taxpayer bailouts? Rastani’s approach has been completely mainstream for several years now; we must thank him for putting a human face on it yesterday.

So, if you’re a financial professional in Erie, or anywhere, should I start freaking out? What should I do with my money? Where will it be safe?

Our fair city was named to a list of the top 10 college towns with the worst food put together by Chow.com.

Kudos to us.

While this is surely a publicity play – so many sites do top 10 lists and so on, we did find their comment about Erie a little funny.

Dining options are so miserable in this podunk town that french fries appear on the plates of almost a third of photographed dishes reviewed in the local paper in the last few months.

The french fries thing is funny – but I don’t think you can call Erie podunk in any way. We have an NBA D-League team, for God’s sake. And a lake. Now Meadville, that’s a podunk town. I kid.

We demand an apology from the “author” of this story, a person named Joyce Slaton, who has authored such gems at Chow.com as:

• 5 Good Reasons to Complain at Restaurants
• Oatmeal Is the New Cheeseburger
• The 78 Most Annoying Words to Read in a Restaurant Review
• 4 Great Infomercial Gadgets (and 2 Sucky Ones)
• I’ll never buy tampons again

Joyce, we’re waiting. Seriously. It’s obvious you’ve never heard of Erie let alone ever been here. You did a few minutes of Googling to come up with a crap article. Say you’re sorry and we’ll be cool.

As part of our rollout of WordPress as our CMS, we’ve given our users several custom post types, allowing them to create and manage assets such as rotating display banners and graphical link buttons. We want to be able to easily track actions on these banners and buttons, and want to be able to see that information easily in Google Analytics.

One of the new features in the newer versions of Google Analytics (GA) is the ability to track event actions on a link. This can be not only clicks, in our case, on a button, link or graphic, but you can setup javascript triggers when a user starts, stops or pauses a video, for example.

Setting this up is pretty straightforward. First, you’ll need to add a quick snippet to your GA embed code, if you aren’t already. It’s the trackPageview function. You’ll add it under the line in your GA code where you’re account code is. For example:

<script type="text/javascript">
  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();
</script>

That will allow you to start tracking events on your pages. To add the event tracking action to a specific element on your page, you add a line of code that looks like this to your a tags.

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 'Baby\'s First Birthday']);"

There are three fields there to pay attention to. The first is the category field. In the above example, it’s Videos. You can have multiple categories on a certain page. On our WordPress sites, we’re specifically tracking banners and small image buttons, often on the same page.

The second field is the action variable – which in the example above is Play. For our WordPress pages, we use the term Click. Through javascript and PHP variables, you can make your actions very specific, such as:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play - Mac Chrome');
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play - Windows Chrome');

And finally, the label. Above, it's Baby's First Birthday. For our uses, we tailor this to the specific banner or button getting clicked. After a few days, we realized it would also be good to know what site the visitor was on. As with the other fields, this should be tailored to the specific content being clicked on. In the video example, you'd have something like this for different videos being played:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 'Gone With the Wind']);
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 'Huckleberry Finn']);

To our user, our links look like this:

<a href="http://sites.jcu.edu/newsroom/?p=1697" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Taters', 'Click', 'Princeton Review Best in the Midwest (Site: JCU Newsroom ID: 1694)']);">
<img src="http://webmedia.jcu.edu/newsroom/files/2011/08/princeton_review-700x230.jpg" alt="Princeton Review Best in the Midwest" />
</a>

In our WordPress templates, it looks like this:

<a href="<?php echo $url; ?>" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Taters', 'Click', '<?php echo get_the_title($ID)." (Site: ".get_bloginfo('name')." ID: ".$id.")"; ?>']);">
<img src="<?php echo $img[0]; ?>" alt="<?php echo get_the_title($ID); ?>" />
</a>

We are tracking the individual banner that was clicked on, as well as the site the banner appears on. We add an additional field for our own, the actual ID of the banner asset. We do that just in case we need to find one quickly, or two banners get named the same thing. It’s happened.

That gives us a very nice report in GA that looks like this:

We can very easily filter by a specific site to see what buttons and graphics are getting clicked on. You could also add this to any static link as well, but I’m specifically interested on what specific calls to action are getting noticed by our users.

Ray Petelin is my home boy. This Facebook update from him made me sad:

Ray was one of the most entertaining weather nay news personalities on Erie TV in a long, long time. He was funny on the air, he was funny on Twitter, and yet he delivered the weather accurately and with aplomb.

Our loss is Pittsburgh’s gain. He’s off to WTAE there, where I’m sure he’ll do swimmingly and keep moving up the food chain. It’s amazing he stayed in Erie as long as he did.

Ray Petelin, here’s to you and thanks for making our morning a little brighter and our Facebook feeds a bit more lively. You’ll be missed.