• Binary files: Non-text based files such as images, Word Documents, Excel documents, PDFs.
• Dependency Manager: Manager that keeps track of file names, locations, and revisions. If a PDF which is referenced on 100 pages is now renamed, the OmniUpdate Dependency Manager will automatically fix the links to the pdf on those 100 pages and prompt you to republish the affected pages.

When you upload binary files, they will now show up in the Staging Server. These files will not be viewable to the public until you publish them to the production server.

To publish them you may click the lightbulb to check it out and then click the publish symbol,

or, when you publish a page that contains a link to an unpublished binary file, you may simply check Include unpublished dependencies checkbox. This will automatically publish the page along with any associated images and/or documents.

We are a very small, very awesome team that works closely together on all projects. We’re looking for someone equally awesome to join our team.

This position will be responsible for building and maintaining sites within the University’s two content management systems (OmniUpdate and WordPress), providing training and support for users of those sites and providing overall support for the university’s primary Web presences.

In addition, the Web developer will provide training for users of the university’s two content management systems, will respond to help desk inquiries, will often be responsible for migration of content from pre-existing systems to our systems, and will develop screencasts and screenshot-based tutorials to assist users with functionality of our systems.

The ideal candidate will be comfortable managing 20-30 open projects, enjoy working with clients and possess a strong desire to learn new skills and tackle new challenges.

View the full job description and requirements (and apply) on Vanderbilt’s HR website »

We've lost our minds. Please send help.

UPDATE: Apparently the week of April 8 is Squirrel Week, and our furry foray into the world of squirrels was recognized by the Washington Post. We’re doing important work here, people.

Every year, universities around the country take great pleasure in April Fool’s pranks. And every year, we sit back and watch the madness unfold and say to each other: Next year. Well this year, we pulled the trigger. What started as a “hey that might be cute” idea turned into our office doing almost nothing but planning, writing, editing and animating for an entire week.

The result? Squirrelcast.

Working off of the popularity and ubiquity of Vanderbilt’s weekly online newscast VUCast, Squirrelcast imagines what would happen if we decided to increase viewership by reaching out to a large, untapped market: our (also ubiquitous) campus squirrels.

We published a news story on myVU, the university’s faculty/staff news site, and shared the heck out of it on our social media channels.

This was a true collaboration from our office and our colleagues in News & Communications. The news release was written by Melanie Moran; the Squirrelcast script was written by Amy Wolf and me; the squirrel images were created by Lacy Tite and Kelsey Wynns; the audio was recorded by Amy Wolf and Mike Todd; our fearless leader Beth Fortune tolerated our insanity; and Kelsey put it all together into a video form. He also wrote the background music!

We may have gotten a little squirrely assembling this, but our nuttiness is worth it.

We present to you our news release, and Squirrelcast:

VUCast video goes to new format to reach burgeoning demographic

Posted on Monday, Apr. 1, 2013 — 5:30 AM

The popular VUCast newscast featured on the Vanderbilt homepage has gone to a new format to reach a previously untapped campus audience – squirrels.

Former VUCast anchor Amy Wolf

“At first it sounded nuts, but it turned out to be a no brainer,” said former VUCast anchor Amy Wolf. “When you look at the sheer numbers of potential viewers, the squirrels have it.”

Finding enough squirrels to staff the revamped newscast was not a challenge, Wolf said, but getting them to focus was.

“And they almost invariably wanted to bury the lede.”“They have lots of great ideas, but were constantly running off in every direction,” she said of the first shoot.“And they almost invariably wanted to bury the lede.”

These challenges aside, Wolf believes the Vanderbilt squirrels clearly have a leg up on those found at other top universities.

“Vanderbilt squirrels aren’t ordinary squirrels. They are extremely competitive, but also highly collaborative,” she said “They already have started digging in to stories about squirrel seating on the new berm in the football stadium and research on how to finally crack the squirrel-proof cages popular on bird feeders.”

VUCast might just be the first step for these furry campus denizens. Unconfirmed reports indicated plans for a squirrel-only Munchi Mart in the new College Halls are in the works, and that university mascot Mr. C has been polishing his resume in anticipation of a possible squirrel replacement.

This was one of those A-HA! projects that come out of nowhere and then takes over your life—but in a good way. Lacy and I were brainstorming about something or other when we had the idea to create a site that focuses on the people at Vanderbilt. Faculty. Staff. Students. Alumni. Not the research they’re doing, or awards they’ve won, but about the people themselves.

Working in higher education communications brings plenty of joys, and also some challenges – one of which is to get people to see “Vanderbilt” as more than an institution, a hospital, a set of buildings, part of the SEC, an area of town. There are real people here— ~37,000 of us—and when you get to know us, you get to know Vanderbilt. We all have an interesting and unique story. When you compile all of the interesting and unique Vanderbilt people, together they tell The Vanderbilt Story.

These stories are being written about and recorded all over campus, but we needed a way to gather them all into one place without reinventing the web. What Lacy came up with is a microsite that is powered by the Vanderbilt News site – which is itself powered by WordPress. Any story that is published on the News site that fits our Story-telling criteria, we simply tag it and it feeds the Vanderbilt Story site. We can include stories not published on News by adding them to our WordPress site as an external story. Using some nifty jQuery on the backend, the grid slides into place with each story—and can be easily filtered by using the buttons just under the header for videos, faculty, students, staff and alumni.

One of our main goals for this project was to share it—any website on campus that would like to be telling the Vanderbilt Story is free to use our content. The Office of Undergraduate Admissions, for example, pulls videos from us into their homepage Stories tab and links to the full Vanderbilt Story microsite from there, so their visitors can browse, for instance, only stories about faculty.

This microsite is an evolving presence — with new content being added on a regular basis as more and more cool stories about Vanderbilt people come along.

The Vanderbilt Story — Go immerse yourself in stories of the people of Vanderbilt.

We kept the site in WordPress and redesigned it, adding a larger header with a clean, vibrant look and a photo slider to showcase the various initiatives, trips and all-around fun things the Provost does.

As part of making this site the center for activity related to our academic mission, we’ve added a feed of all news stories related to faculty and their accomplishments.

Provost Richard McCarty also has a Facebook presence now – we recommend you give him a Like.

Many thanks to Susan Barge, Kevin Bradley and Kara Sundar – it’s always a pleasure to work with such organized people!

Fun fact: Vanderbilt’s Nashville site was the very first site we moved into our content management system, OmniUpdate, in June of 2010. We’ve come a long way, baby! For this latest refresh, we moved the Nashville site into the latest version of our templates, found some more up-to-date and gorgeous photos of our fair city, updated the design, re-wrote some of the content and gave the site some of the oomph that it deserved.

One fun new feature we added is a feed from our partners in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. They do a regular series, Know Your City, about all of Nashville’s (or Nowville‘s, if you prefer) great neighborhoods. It’s a fun read whether you just moved here, are planning a visit or even if you’re one of those rare natives (like me).

So to paraphrase WSMV Ch. 4: Hello, Nashville – Vanderbilt loves you!*

*Warning: Very old-school Nashville promo video with a jingle guaranteed to get stuck in your head.

They’re the words that every project manager dreads, and hears about once a week.

We understand: Work piles up, deadlines sneak up on you, you plan an entire publication around a website and then forget to ask someone to create said website. It happens.

With Web Communications‘ very small team (three) and very long open project list (88) and ongoing support of complete sites (350+), chances are someone, somewhere is ahead of you in the queue.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t help you!

Re-introducing*: my.vanderbilt.edu – “providing a platform and tools for Vanderbilt faculty, staff and students to build and maintain their own Web presences” – aka, a do-it-yourself website. That you can start on immediately. And have completed TODAY.

The my.v.e – as the cool kids call it – runs on WordPress and is extremely easy to use. If you can use Word or Outlook, you can use WordPress. We also provide monthly training classes just in case.

Aside from procrastinators, who/what else uses my.v.e?

• Faculty
• Research labs
  
• Initiatives
• Departments
• Student portfolios/resumes
• Classes
• Staff musings
• String quartets
• Conferences
• A whole bunch lot of people/groups (721 at last count)

Get started now. Questions? Answers. Additional help at the Help Desk and Training.

Now get going! You’re way behind schedule. :)

*We launched my.v.e about a year ago, but it’s always new to someone.

Our weekly project, “Our Favorite Tweets of the Week” has been recognized in the Council for Advancement and Support of Education’s (CASE) district competition (along with some of our outstanding colleagues in Public Affairs). “Tweets” was recognized in the social media strategy and execution category.

Each project receives a Merit, Excellence or Grand Award – but we won’t find out who has won what exactly until Feb. 19 during the CASE conference in Atlanta.

The very same “Tweets” project was also recently recognized by the Strategic Public Relations blog for – and I’m quoting here – “crushing it on Storify.” Vanderbilt is singled out along with General Electric and the Smashing Pumpkins as brands that pwn Storify. Good company!

So what’s all the fuss about?

It’s all about the content curation.

We were looking for a way to up our interaction with our Twitter followers, and attract a few new ones at the same time, so we decided to start a new feature – “Our Favorite Tweets of the Week.” Every Friday, we go through alllll the Tweets related to Vanderbilt and pick a few favorites – school spirit, wit and charm will get our attention – then we load those into Storify, publish, notify the people quoted, cross-promote on our Twitter feed, the VU News site and VU homepage, and voila – increased engagement and attention to our Tweets.

The folks we single out – mostly students and alumni – seem to get a real kick out of it and re-Tweet us. It’s become so popular, we decided to add Instagram to the mix too. So it’s now “Our Favorite Tweets and Instagrams of the Week.” Who knows where it will go next?

This is one of our more fun projects, so it’s especially nice to be recognized for something we really love doing!

You can drop by our offices in Baker Building and a member of our office will assist you with your questions.

No appointments necessary — first come first serve.

More information »

Remember: Our Help Desk is still the best way to reach us for assistance with your site.

Here’s our year in review—as an infographic, what else?!? :)

This is the third Bowl Central site I’ve worked on for Vanderbilt — the first one was back in 2008 ( the first time we’d been in a bowl game in 26 years and thus the very first bowl website for Vanderbilt!) We were bowl eligible again in 2011, and more Bowl Central fun times ensued. And now, for the first time in Vanderbilt football history, we’re bowl-eligible two years in a row for the 2012 season. Bring on the bowls for Commodore Nation!

This year I wanted to take advantage of some of the amazing photos we have from this season, as well as take a slightly different approach than previous years. Instead of separate pages for all the various sections — I simplified the site into a single page — with a floating navigation bar that will slide down with you as you go to each section. Keeping the photos big gives the user a bit of drama and conveys a sense of our team and our fans.

The site is actually VERY simple on the backend. Each section (Events, Travel, Students, Tickets, etc) of the site is setup as a separate page in WordPress, thus allowing the Athletics web team the ability to edit each section individually as needed. Because it’s WordPress – it’s also dead easy for them to use. They can upload images, docs, pdfs — anything they need to have in a section.

The News and Media section is powered by feeds — the top portion by the vucommodores.com football rss feed — the bottom video section powered by a YouTube playlist, jQuery, PHP and VUFairyDust™.  Whenever something new is posted to the vucommodores site or youtube — it will automatically populate the bowl site. Currently the top portion of the site is an #ANCHORDOWN section containing a twitter widget and a countdown to the bowl announcement. Post bowl announcement on Dec. 2, this section will contain Game Day information (and the countdown will change to a bowl game countdown).

As the time grows closer to finding out which bowl we will be playing in — we’re working closely with Athletics to be sure the site is ready with bowl logos and opposing team information. We will coordinate the launch of the bowl-specific site with the announcement on December 2.

We work closely with several people in Athletics on bowl communications — primarily Brandon Barca and Ryan Schulz. It’s a great partnership! I hope building Bowl Central sites becomes a yearly tradition for our office.

#ANCHORDOWN

The majority of the Blair site is powered by OmniUpdate, while the news section is powered by WordPress, and events listings are fed by the University Calendar.

We migrated their faculty profiles and listings into our faculty database — providing the site maintainer with easy mechanisms for listing faculty on departmental pages.

As with all of the sites our office develops — we integrated our Google Search Appliance into the site to power the search — adding keymatches and fine-tuning the search to be sure information is easily accessible to users.

We worked with Kristin Whittlesey, Director of External Relations for Blair, on this project. She is, in a word, awesome; so pleasant to work with and exhibited tireless effort during the build-out process. Thanks for making this project a fun one, Kristin!