Santa Clara University

There will be a short interruption in Commonspot authoring access, now planned for Wednesday (4/15) morning.  The system operators will be upgrading and patching the authoring server, which will require stopping authoring and Commonspot replication for about an hour.  This was originally planned for Tuesday afternoon, but has been rescheduled.

The "SCU Experience" presentation is now live on the SCU home page - each of the core attributes contains two features, including video and image slideshows.  The base template has also been modified - the university seal has taken the place of the mission icon in the image at the top of each page.

Commonspot users frequently encounter problems with access to element icons in pages that have content "below the fold" - content that is not visible when the page content is scrolled to the top of the window.  Clicking on an element icon can cause the page view to "hop" to the top of the page, and you then lose access to the element's menu options.

A work-around for this problem is to press the CTRL key (Windows) or Command key (Mac) when clicking the element icon.  That should prevent the view from resetting to the top of the page.

Credit for this useful tip goes to OMC student assistant Chris.

Commonspot isn't fully functional (yet) in the new version of Internet Explorer.  Paperthin does intend to include support for IE8 in a forthcoming release, but for now you'll need to stick with IE7 on any system you're using for Commonspot authoring.

The SCU event calendar and Media Relations press releases are now available on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/scunews

http://twitter.com/scuevents

A custom element is available to display a slideshow of images from a Flickr set, or selected from tagged images in a Flickr account. The element can be found in the Content Well element gallery category. This element can be used for any images hosted in Flickr, but f you have images that are related to SCU and are of general interest, they may be added to SCU's Flickr account. Send a support request for more information regarding access to Flickr for SCU images.

If you have content in SCU's iTunes U store, you're not limited to providing access only via the iTunes client. You can include the podcast feed in a Commonspot page, using the "iTunes U Feed" element, now available in the Content Well element gallery category.

When uploading PDF files to your site, be sure to optimize the file for Web viewing. This can reduce the size of the PDF file dramatically, and ensure that viewers accessing your content aren't subjected to unnecessarily long download times.

A widget provided by Google has been added to the www web server's 404 (file not found) page - it takes the URL for the requested page and suggests close matches or alternate links, rather than simply indicate that the page doesn't exist

Several people have reported receiving email requests for SCU id and password information for email accounts, with the message indicating that the request is from "webmaster@scu.edu".  This is scam attempt - if you have received an email message with the subject line "VERIFY YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT" requesting that you reply with your account information, do not reply.  As a general rule, you should never send information of this type via email.  SCU online systems do not send requests of this type via email, and any other legitimate secure site would also not ask for password information to be sent in an email message.