Awesome SNL Parody
This was an excellent parody on SNL, sorry it has taken me so long to get this posted.
UACCB Unveils New Website
This is the official press release regarding the recent launch of the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville’s new website which was developed by Pleth, LLC.
BATESVILLE – The University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville recently unveiled its new website at www.uaccb.edu.
During the construction process, the campus held several meetings with faculty and staff to determine needs for the site. Focus groups were conducted with students to determine what they liked. After completing a request for proposal, Pleth, LLC, an interactive development company located in Batesville, was awarded the project.
“Our goal in redesigning the website was to make it more user friendly, informative, and attractive for our students and the community,” said Brian Berry, vice chancellor for enrollment management and student services. “I hope everyone will find the site helpful and visit it often.”
The new site is easier to navigate and includes additional information. New to the site are news central and important events. The site also uses a Twitter feed, which is a free service that lets individuals keep in touch with what’s happening at UACCB.
“Pleth was excited to bring an updated site to our area for UACCB. UACCB has so much to offer,” said Stephen Smart, partner. “The new site takes the UACCB campus, staff and opportunities beyond the physical location with a more efficient and informative site able to tell the UACCB story to potential students. We are proud of the end result and are excited for UACCB.”
University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville | UACCB unveils new website
Automattic Acquires IntenseDebate
This is pretty cool news for fans of the Wordpress Platform. Automattic, the makers of Wordpress software have acquired the software company IntenseDebate. In my opinion, IntenseDebate has lead the market in comment software for a while now.
Here’s a snippet from their blog:
We’re extremely pleased to announce that IntenseDebate will now be joining the Automattic team! This is a big day for us and we couldn’t be more stoked about what it means for the future of IntenseDebate.
So what does this mean for you, our valued users? A couple of things:
1.) We will be temporarily going back into private beta. This won’t affect our current users, but new installs will require an invite code. This is just to give us a little time to ramp up the hardware and get our ducks in a row as we join the Automattic team.2.) You’ll be seeing IntenseDebate a lot more often. We’re really excited about the distribution possibilities this opens up, so expect to see our comment system and use your IntenseDebate profile on a lot more blogs.
3.) You can look forward to tighter integration with some of the other Automattic joints including Akismet and Gravatar.
But don’t worry!
You will still be able to use IntenseDebate on Typepad, Tumblr, Blogger, Movable Type, and other platforms with more to come! We will continue to improve our comment system and your commenters’ experience. IntenseDebate will continue to enhance and encourage conversation on your blog and build your reader community.It’s business as usual except we will be ramping up in size and features, and integrating more closely with other Automattic properties to provide an even better commenting experience. The IntenseDebate name and logo isn’t going anywhere – it’s just going to get way more Intense! It’s been a long road to get here, but we’re just getting started…
Posted by Jon Fox
IntenseDebate – Official Blog » Automattic Acquires IntenseDebate
(WP) Contact Form 7 Plugin
Tonight I ran across a contact form plugin that I really like. There are multiple contact form plugins out there but this one is by far my favorite. Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms on the fly and you can edit recipients, fields and orders for each of these forms.
This plugin supports multiple forms, ajax-powered submission, CAPTCHA, and works alongside Akismet spam filtering. Click here for more information from the plugin directory.
(WP) Events Calendar Plugin
I have been looking for a good events calendar plugin for wordpress that could be used to manage upcoming events for an organization like a church or a city.
I have tried to integrate a few variations of this plugin into my projects in the past and honestly, I haven’t had a whole lot of success until I ran across this plugin.
Here is the description of the plugin from the Wordpress plugin library:
Events-Calendar is a diverse replacement for the original calendar included with WordPress adding many useful functions to keep track of your events. The plugin has an easy to use admin section that displays a big readable calendar and lets you add and delete events. The plugin is widget ready so you can easily add a small calendar to the main sidebar with the ability to roll over the highlighted event day to see a brief description of the event or click the day to get a full description of the event without ever leaving your current page. If you are not using a widget ready theme, you can still have the calendar on your sidebar. Simply place “” in the sidebar file. The widget can also show a specified number of events as a list. You will find these options under the widget option.
The ability to add a large public calendar is now available by posting a page and adding “[[EventsCalendarLarge]]” to the page content to create a stand alone calendar page. Also, when entering an event from the admin section, you can check the box saying “Create Post for Event”, which will cause a post to be created with the event information.
Additional features are being added regularly so make sure that you keep up to date on upcoming changes and new features by subscribing to the RSS feed – http://www.lukehowell.com/feed.
Probably my favorite thing about this plugin is that inside you will find a CSS directory that allows you to basically manipulate the way the calendar appears on your website but also how the management area is displayed inside the Wordpress control panel. There is also an option of adding a snippet of code inside of a wordpress page to display an actual calendar, this has a lot of applications as far as I am concerned.
Pleth Launches UACCB Redesign
My partners and I couldn’t be happier about the recent launch of the newly redesigned website for the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville. UACCB approached us a while back to develop a redesign for their existing website and they had a pretty clear direction that they wanted to take the website.
My partner Greg took the lead on this project and did an awesome job! He worked closely with UACCB’s newly formed website committee to hammer out the mechanics of the website and with some of our strategic partners who assisted with project management and to content development. Select Shots, a Batesville area photography studio provided photography for the project. To preview the website, please visit http://www.uaccb.edu or click on the screenshot below.
Please note that we will post a formal press release for the media and on our corporate website in the very near future.
University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville | Home
Noodle = Intranet, Social, & Wiki
A few years back my partners and I formed a partnership with Vialect. Since we maintain multiple office locations we were in need of a flexible intranet solution. Not only were we impressed with the product and adopted it as our own product but we also signed on to become authorized resellers for the United States.
Vialect makes a great product and it should come as no surprise that their latest release Noodle appears to be a very promising product. I devoted a few minutes this morning to getting up to speed with Noodle and this is what I found.
Why Use Noodle?
Your employees are going to one url for the Intranet, another for the project calendars and yet one more url for the corporate Wiki & Blogs. Noodle solves this problem by providing all of these valuable applications within one url.
Not only does Noodle provide all these applications in one URL but it also contains features that will ensure your site is a success. The Corporate Wisdom feature encourages people to contribute and review the content within Noodle.
What’s your Corporate Wisdom?
Many collaboration and intranet projects fail due to inactivity. This inactivity is the result of outdated information, hard to use tools and employees not being encouraged to review and contribute to the overall success of the site. Noodle solves this problem by monitoring the Corporate Wisdom of each employee.
The Corporate Wisdom is calculated by the total amount of items an employee reviews and the total amount of items the employee creates. These numbers are then added together and compared to the total site content and this produces the users Corporate Wisdom percentage. Corporate Wisdom also fluctuates as new content will lower a users percentage.
With the Corporate Wisdom feature you will be able to monitor success of the site and employees will use it to monitor their own success within the site. We have found people are naturally competitive by nature and want to have the highest Corporate Wisdom percentage in the company. This will benefit your company as the employees will be educating themselves about your business.
Ayatollah’s Website Hacked
It looks like international website defacing is on the rise, I have heard several reports over the past few days of international websites being defaced, most of these were religiously oriented sites. On CNN tonight I found out that the Web site of Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric was hacked Friday, with the attackers’ messages saying they are Sunnis upset over fatwas, or edicts, issued on the site.
A entity called Group XP placed a video of comedian Bill Maher making fun of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and his advice to the Shiite faithful, as well as posting messages on the site.
The hackers said they are upset at the sexual nature of the advice given to faithful allegedly by al-Sistani through a spokesperson. Those who have studied the attack believe that the Maher video is meant to illustrate how such advice promotes mockery of Islam.
SQL Truncate & mt_rand()
For anyone that may have wondered why the upgrade to 2.6.2 was so important, here’s a pretty good explanation I found on Wordpress Developers Blog tonight. It has to do with a SQL column truncation issue that could basically alter users login credentials, etc.
Stefan Esser recently warned developers of the dangers of SQL Column Truncation and the weakness of mt_rand(). With his help we worked around these problems and are now releasing WordPress 2.6.2. If you allow open registration on your blog, you should definitely upgrade. With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password.
The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password. Stefan Esser will release details of the complete attack shortly. The attack is difficult to accomplish, but its mere possibility means we recommend upgrading to 2.6.2.
Other PHP apps are susceptible to this class of attack. To protect all of your apps, grab the latest version of Suhosin. If you’ve already updated Suhosin, your existing WordPress install is already protected from the full exploit. You should still upgrade to 2.6.2 if you allow open user registration so as to prevent the possibility of passwords being randomized.
