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Launch of the new UT Dallas Debate website in WordPress

By Dennis Guten on March 13, 2011 No Comments

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?

Categories : UT Dallas, Web Design, WordPress
Tags : Debate, UT Dallas, WordPress

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

By Dennis Guten on February 20, 2011 No Comments

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.

Categories : Apple, Cloud Software, Internet, iPhone, UT Dallas
Tags : App, Apple, Free, iPhone 4, Music, Streaming

Why am I being enrolled in email lists without my consent?

By Dennis Guten on February 12, 2011 No Comments

I’m starting to see a very disturbing internet/web practice that is getting out of control. Yes, I’m talking about those email newsletters from companies all over the web that seem to have picked my name out-of-a-hat and signed me up without my consent.

It’s driving me crazy. I already have Gmail and UT Dallas email accounts to keep up with and that alone is almost a full-time job.

I have noticed that I have mysteriously been signed up for email newsletter accounts right and left for obscure companies and big corporations and I have been spending way too much time weekly clicking on the unsubscribe link to get out of them.

So during the last two weeks, when my wife Ruthie was on a road trip with her parents to Florida, I helped them out by scouring the internet looking for good deals on hotels for cities they were almost in so they would not have to mess with it on the road. That worked out pretty good except for one time where I made it for the wrong city.

With most of the reservations I made, I asked them to email a confirmation to Ruthie so she would have the info on her iPhone at checkin. In a few cases I gave them my Gmail email for the confirmation.

Well, at one La Quinta I gave them my Gmail, but I did not get a confirmation email. I wound up calling the guy back twice more to find out why it did not come, each time I spelled out carefully the email address and he confirmed it. Nope, never did get a confirmation email from him.

It was frustrating and I finally gave up, content just scribbling down the number.

I think you see what’s coming…A few days ago I got this lovely email newsletter from La Quinta. One that I never signed up for. Odd how they have the right email for the newletter, but could not get me an email confirmation of my reservation.

I’d be curious to hear if anyone else is experiencing these phantom newsletter signups besides me? Please comment if you have any experience with this.

Categories : Internet
Tags : Email, Hotels, Internet, Newsletters, Signup
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