1. Kendall Hall
2. Trinity Hall
3. Meriam Library
4. Performing Arts Center

CAS is awesome.

So, there it is.

I will be trying to post as much as I can here and there will undoubtedly be some commentary on twitter.

Enjoy.

University Home Page

• 2007/08 – 9,289,385 visits as defined by Google Analytics

Yearly Unique Portal Logins (based on daily logs)

• 2005/6 – 1,905,225
• 2006/7 – 2,215,433
• 2007/8 – 2,415,444

Yearly Total Portal Logins (based on daily logs)

• 2005/6 – 3,377,752
• 2006/7 – 4,089,277
• 2007/8 – 4,359,887

Random

These numbers are based on whatever date range we happen to have numbers for.

• We have 23 Spaces and 372 users in Confluence, our enterprise wiki.
• 1,492 JIRA issues were created in the 2007/8 fiscal year.
• 32,915 visits on January 29th, 2008 was our high water mark for the Portal
• Portal browser stats (9/21/2007 – 6/30/2008) IE 60.47%, Firefox 29.53%, Safari 9.6%
• Home page browser stats 2007/8 fiscal year – IE 76.18%, Firefox 23.47%, Safari 8.7%

Curious about anything else?

1. Install webkit2png

If you are on 10.5, you won’t have to install anything but this script.

2. Script Your Shots

I’ve got a small shell script with an array of 23 URLs and a for loop that passes each one to webkit2png.

SITES=( http://www.csub.edu/
...
http://www.csustan.edu/ )

SITENUM="${#SITES[*]}"

for ((i=0;i< $SITENUM;i++)); do
   webkit2png -F -W 1024 -d -D /Users/pberry/Projects/csushots/ ${SITES[${i}]}
done

3. Profit!

From there, you could just cron the script up and let it run. The -d option will put the date in the filename, so you aren’t blowing away your archive of screen shots with each run. I decided it would be nice if I could organize these in iPhoto and I didn’t want to manually import my shots each time my script ran. I’m no good with AppleScript, so I turned to Automator.

I created a workflow that creates the directory, runs the shell script, imports them into iPhoto (iPhoto is set to copy on import) and then deletes the directory. The extra steps were really just to make the workflow happen. I’m guessing there is a way to do it without creating/deleting, but I was in a hurry. I then created a Smart Album based on the unique parts of the file names (by default webkit2png will use the URL for the filename) for each campus. Using iPhoto also lets me do “fun” stuff, like create movies showing how a page changes over time (QuickTime).

Now I’m able to spot trends and changes in our system. I could extent the process to grab other pages as well, but for now I’m okay with just the main page for each campus.

Caveats and Misc.

The webkit2png script can have trouble with Flash, so screenshot will look “unfinished” if they use a big Flash movie to show photos. /looks at Bakersfield

If you don’t have 10.5, you’ll have to install the PyObjC bridge. It sounds nasty, but it’s easy. Double-click and you’re on your way.

You could do the first two steps on linux with khtml2png.

The result on January 8 was the busiest Portal day ever. (Pat or Scott will hopefully speak to the details of the usage numbers and Portal system performance.)

Clearly, the message was in the right place for a sufficient amount of time and helped to fulfill the compelling need of students to see their grades as soon as they were available. This was the first semester that the message went up at the beginning of finals week. It was also the first time that the message was nearly alone in terms of other content in the channel. My guess is that those were the chief contributing factors to the effectiveness of the announcement.

• It didn’t go out in the finals week edition of the Student Announcements.
• It wasn’t in any of the finals week Campus Announcements.
• The Student Records site didn’t mention it.
• We didn’t put it on the Student Computing front page.

Just out of curiosity, I thought I would compare page-views during dead week and the first part of finals for the campus home page from Spring ‘07 and Fall ‘07. It’s interesting how closely the numbers compare to each other.

Finals Week! Winter Break is just around the corner…

Update

Here’s a nice little graph that tracks the popularity of query “finals schedule”

Update

• Part 2 of our guest blog
• Part 2 of our guest blog

• Confluence (Enterprise wiki)
• JIRA (Issue tracking and project management)
• Ruby on Rails
• uPortal

My name is Patrick Berry. I’m short, blonde, and wear glasses. I should be easy to track down.