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Did you by chance read User Interface Engineering’s article “Design Cop-out #2: Breadcrumbs?”   I’ll admit that I am a little bit late getting back around to this topic, which I originally read sometime back in… oh… August?   October?  Regardless, right after reading it I knew that I needed to offer a counterpoint, because while not completely incorrect, I felt that the original author was not entirely even handed with the topic, and in some cases sort of dropped the ball.

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Raise your hand if you see your budget on the chopping block for next year.  The current topic de jour has been how so many school’s are being asked to do more with less.  Budget crises from state to state have everyone scrambling to find ways to cut corners, and trim fat.  Some people are lucky enough to be well past a recent redesign, and have frameworks and tools in place for the future.  In those cases, be glad you got on the boat early.  But, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still a lot of schools needing to evolve, or looking to retool.  One thing that is seeing renewed interest, are the potentials of open source software to help drive web sites.  For nearly any tool you use: CMS, calendar, E-learning, project management - there is some kind of open source alternative.

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It’s time for you to give a little back, and help me with some research I’m doing for some presentations to follow up in the future.  But it will be worth it, because in helping me, I will help you by taking all these numbers and stats and turning them into something cool, hilarious, and informative.  One thing most all of us deal with in some capacity on a day to day basis are student workers of one kind or another.  The question is how we deal with them, and what they do for us.  We all have our own tools and systems in place, and I want to try to lay that all out a little for people.

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Yesterday I had an interesting discussion with our other web guy.  We recently underwent a fairly large redesign of our web site, which included the addition of new features and tools (read: more work for everyone).  One of these is the addition of a home page centerpiece linked to stories about the people of the college: students, faculty, and alumni.  The thing is, it’s not our job to write the stories, and it’s not necessarily PR’s problem that it was determined we need lots of these.  And so the two groups talked yesterday about the scenario.

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Welp, another week, another conference.  Time to say goodbye to most of you for another few months.  Next on my book is the Open Minds dotCMS user conference in February, but most of you won’t be at that.  More pictures are up from the Discovery Center excursion last night.  My Buddha that food was good.  Except the dumplings on the 4th floor.  Those were… unpleasantly textured.

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Sorry, it’s day 3 and I’m starting to drag a little bit.  And I didn’t even drink at the Brew Co. last night.  I did, however lose at pool.  Scratch on the eight ball.  How humiliating is that?  I did get some of the new pictures posted to Flickr, and I’ll have some Flip videos up once I get home (wifi here not so robust for video uploads).  We also broke the eduWeb sushi record and got what I counted to be 30 people into the place.  That poor waitress.  It was pretty good.  The Crunchy Lobster roll I had was the biggest sushi roll I’ve ever eaten.

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Good time last night, you totally missed out.  I know there are possibly some incriminating pictures of me floating around in a wig with my Superman patch out for all to see.  I got bested by the Guru himself at the Guitar Hero contest.  Next year… I’m coming back Rocky style.  For those of you following from here, my planned course is to hit UAD1, SAC2, APS3, TPR4, TPR5, TPR6, APS7, APS8, UAD9, UAD10.

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The time has come for another installment of the liveblogger chronicles.  Actually, this is the first time I’ve done it for .eduGuru, since normally I just did it at my old site.  But that would hardly be as fitting now, would it?  HighEdWeb will be great this year, if only because I did not have to fly for a change, and Springfield is actually closer than driving to Kansas City to fly anywhere.

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There was a point, about three years ago, where I was seriously wondering what job security in a jack-of-all-trades style web job was really like.  Was there value in it?  Was there a future in it?  These kinds of questions are inevitable when you consider where you are, where you can go, and what you can do between here and there.  The web is a big place, and those darn kids that won’t get off our lawn are sharper about web stuff than they used to be.  Are we destined to become a dime a dozen, especially at universities where we are effectively training people to replace us every day?

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