July 23

Sunday afternoon I skibbled off to Atlantic City to attend EduWeb 2008, a conference for Web development professionals in higher education.

July 14

Until recently I was one of the only nerds who had yet to upgrade to Firefox 3. I'd been waiting until I could find an easy way to install it alongside (rather than in place of) Firefox 2. When I'd tried doing this a few months ago—with the beta version of Firefox 3—it hadn't worked properly, so I'd put the idea on hold.

June 18

There comes a time in every Web maintainer's life when the boss or client asks to see the Web stats for the past 6 months/year/5 years or what have you. Ideally you or your server administrator set this up long ago; you—being equally keen to understand the usage patterns of your site, and to use that knowledge to improve your content—check them on a regular basis, and can provide the information immediately. Then again, if you've been busy building and updating sites, this may be one of those projects that has been patiently waiting on your to-do list. If your server doesn't have analytics software pre-installed, and you've not yet installed any yourself, now—before the boss asks—is the time to do so.

June 8

Something interesting happened last Sunday. Plurk, a new social network, grew it's subscriber base from a handful of beta users to over 2,000 in one day. Since then they've continued to grow exponentially. As a marketer, and one of the 2,000+, I think it's been a fascinating process to watch. In this one week we've seen some very effective marketing strategies in action. Back in March I shared my reflections on social media networking and marketing, but that was more a tale of slow growth. Plurk's rapid growth gives us a chance to look at some of the techniques they used and see how effective they can be.

June 6

Registration is now open for summer classes at CaseLearns. Whether you're building your first Web site, adding video to your blog or just want to learn something fun, CaseLearns has a number of options available.

May 28

While driving home tonight I began pondering this week's blog entry. As I considered various topics, my mind wandered back to the events of the day—events that included more than the usual number of e-mail and phone calls, many of which included some mention of the blog. Sitting in traffic I started thinking about how this blog has impacted the work I do here at Case Western Reserve. This in turn made me wonder how blogging impacts others. To find out I'm starting this meme.