Category Archives: UT Dallas

Launch of the new UT Dallas Debate website in WordPress

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Where I work, at The University of Texas at Dallas, the Debate program is an important part of the university’s identity, likewise with the Chess program.

In fall of 2010 I launched the redesign or the Chess website in one of our new templates, which we call Venus. It was coded using Adobe Dreamweaver templates.

Since then, we have started rolling our some new sites using the WordPress MU platform, which is the multi-user version of WordPress.

The UT Dallas Debate website is the first site I have redesigned using WordPress and it just launched this past week. It also uses the Venus template, which first had to be imported into WordPress. It was the first Venus site our team in University Web Services had done so there was a big learning curve getting the template into WordPress in the first place.

It’s not totally like creating a WordPress template from scratch, which I have not attempted, because you are not using any widgets like most templates would use.

It was essentially chopping our already coded template up into the various php files that make up the pieces of a template. It was complicated by the fact that our Dreamweaver templates share CSS and other code from a templates directory on our server and that had to be preserved in case there are changes to the template down the road which will change all sites using Venus.

I think the site worked out pretty well and you cannot tell that the Chess site is static HTML and the Debate site is WordPress.

Has anyone else tried to do this with their different sites and what was your experience?

Stream your music on your iPhone or mobile with the free Audiogalaxy app

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Want to listen to your large library of music without putting the collection on your mobile device? I was looking at some apps for my iPhone 4 in the iTunes App Store using the Genius tab, which suggests apps based on apps you already have and came across this cool free one.

It’s called Audiogalaxy and lets you stream your music library from your computer to your iOS or Android device. It works over WiFi or 3G service.

When you sign up, you download a small helper file to the computer where your music is, in my case my iTunes music library with almost 7000 songs on my iMac at home. That’s where my master music collection resides. It works on both PC and Mac.

Once you have your free account, you can login to Audiogalaxy in your browser (works on most browsers) and it will start scanning your music in. Go have a cup of coffee and surf the web as this will take a while.

After the music is scanned in, the fun begins. You can play your music from the browser on any computer that you have logged into Audiogalaxy with. You can now also stream your music from your mobile device using the free Audiogalaxy app you download. Your computer with the music must be on and not in sleep mode for it to work.

I tried this at my job at UT Dallas, where they have a robust firewall and it worked great all over campus switching from 3G to WiFi as I went on my daily walk across campus with my headphones on. I never lost the streaming signal.

When you open the iPhone app, you get lots of choices of how to view your library. As you scroll through your collection it streams the little album icons if there was one (fast). Here you see it bringing in the last two in this page of albums.

The only thing I see missing is a view by song name, which would be helpful like I get in my iPod app on the phone. You can also save playlists of songs you have listened to in the app.

The Audiogalaxy web site gives all the details of what the service can do better than I can here, so go take a look. SeeĀ Audiogalaxy in the Apple iTunes App Store and Audiogalaxy in the Android Market.

Yes, Audiogalaxy was a file sharing service back in the early 2000′s, which was shut down. It has been resurrected by three UT Austin former students, two of whom, worked on the original file sharing site.

Is there a reason not to download and try out this free app? I can’t think of one.

Simple panoramic images in seconds with the iPhone app 360 Panorama

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I purchased an iPhone app for photography a few weeks ago called 360 Panorama. It was late at night, so I tried it out from bed and the light was so low that the results were really poor, so I promptly forgot about it amidst the glut of apps on the phone.

So a few days ago I was doing my daily campus walk at Ut Dallas, where I work as a Web Designer and I found myself in the center of the campus, which had recently been renovated and redesigned. I remembered 360 Panorama and pulled the iphone out and took a quick full 360 degree photo from this spot.

Panoramic image of the UT Dallas campus

Well, in the phone itself, it’s pretty hard to see if the shot was good, but when I got back to the office I emailed the photo to myself and opened it up on my iMac and it was really nice. It comes out with this odd white border all around the shot where the app mixes the pieces of the shot together. A quick trip to Adobe Fireworks, my editor of choice, and the result was a great panoramic shot of the campus!

The full-size panoramic image is available if anyone wants to download it.

There are not too many controls, you choose either a white or black background for the uneven edges, push start and slowly and carefully move the camera around.

My boss thought it was cool and wants me to try it in a few months when the greenery comes back and to use a tripod. I’ll do that with the little iPhone 4 accessory I purchased recently called the Glif, which allows you to attach the iPhone 4 to a tripod.

360 Panorama is only $1.99 and well worth it in my opinion. Anybody else tried this app yet? What are your opinions?