Magzalez’s eyes on media

Just sent out from the University of Florida Web Administration office:

WebAdmin is looking for a student Web assistant. This position is part time during school, and can be full time during the summer if you are so inclined.

You: Enjoy developing and managing HTML/CSS standards compliant Web pages, Web servers, etc. Aren’t afraid to use the command line to get things done. Would like to work closely with designers and developers on cool Web site projects. Are looking for a challenging job where you’ll have the opportunity to solve problems and learn new skills while maintaining production Web sites in a real-world team environment.

Us: The Office of Web Administration provides Web site support and development for the university’s Web presence and critical path Web sites including: ufl.edu, president.ufl.edu, news.ufl.edu, trustees.ufl.edu, and many more! We are looking for a student Web assistant to manage and maintain professional quality Web pages and Web sites.

If you think this is a great match, please email your resume and a brief description of your development skills to webmaster [at] ufl [dot] edu with subject “Student Web Assistant Position.”

This position is only open to UF students!

Thanks,
Joe Spooner
Web Developer
Web Administration

Check it out, I mean, I don’t mind it. Check out the Web Admin blog while I’ve got you here.

I recently finished a freelance job I did for a UF fine arts professor. He asked me to turn his print, tenure package into a Web site. So I did.

I’m not exactly gushing with pride over this site, but I’m glad I did it. There are a whole mess of things that fly in the face of standards, validation and good sense, but hey, I was working with a certain customer who needed a certain finished product displayed in a very specific manner..

Some peculiarities of the job:

• Ridiculous, but I mean re-DIC-ulous amounts of content.
• Mr. Offerle was the first person I’d ever met who actually had javaScript disabled on his computer
• I only had 10 days to put this site together
• Much of the work came from ripping videos off of DVDs, cutting them into snippets and making them Web ready.

Things I am embarrassed about on this site:

• Does not validate: This is the first site I’ve made in a long time that doesn’t validate. The problem was that because he had javaScript disabled and his audience was a bunch of viejos whose computer settings couldn’t have been much different, I couldn’t use .swf object to embed video players or audio players.
• Doesn’t use a CMS: This site was a prime candidate for using a CMS, and with all the work I am doing with TextPattern I could have done it easily. The problem is that I only had 10 days to set up the entire site, edit all of the videos and audio, burn DVDs of the videos, make photo galleries and input the massive amount of text. Time just didn’t allow.
• SoundSlides demo: When crunch time came around, I needed to make some photo galleries. Unfortunately I didn’t have a registered copy of SoundSlides plus at my disposal. I had to do with the very cheap, very ugly and very stupid alternative of using the demo and dealing with the “This was made with SoundSlides Demo Version” sign. It goes away pretty quickly, but it’s up just long enough to make me want to vomit.
• I must have spent close to 70 hours in 10 days on top of my regular 40-hour work week.

Things I’m happy about:

• I got paid
• The customer really liked his final product
• I made some contacts, got some referrals and learned a bit about the world of freelance in terms of the Web.

I have been working on a Web site for a summer conference the folks at my job are putting together for early August. It is called Summer of Web.

A co-worker of mine, Al Kirby, designed the site in Photoshop, sent me the image and let me have at it. I did all of the mark up — javaScript, CSS and XHTML.

I learned a whole new way of designing Web sites by doing this small, one-pager. I found that you are almost completely unrestricted in terms of design once you have a firm grasp of the power of background images and position.

All in all, it was a very fun experience.

Launched almost simultaneously was the UF Web Admin’s new blog. I had much less to do with the production of this blog save for a few meetings where I gave my input. My duties regarding this product will likely come in the form of content. More on that later.

Check out the site, and check out the conference. It should be fun getting the whole UF Web community together for a half day. Worse comes to worse, the food is free.

Let me know what you think.

I helped an Alligator Writer, Kristin Huff, edit her first video yesterday. Kristin was the first brave reporter to offer up a video after managing editor of online media Ken Schwenke offered up his Flip video camera for the less-experienced videographers looking for something new to try.

She did a good job of keeping the camera steady and getting a story out of the interview. She asked the right questions and got some good shots.

Overall I give her an A+ for her first effort.

I told her for next time she needed to consider a few things:

• A wider variety of shots — especially some good, wide, establishing shots
• More b-roll
• Work on having the camera steady before she starts shooting because she ended up having a little less video than she thought because the beginning of every video was too shaky.

Check out the video on the Alligator’s multimedia page.

I edited a podcast — or a bit of audio for the Web which has absorbed the name of “podcast” — for alligatorsports.org last night. It is the sportscast for May 22. The topic isn’t exactly the most interesting, but it has a niche — UF softball.

Alligator Softball Podcast

The guys who put together the audio, Mike DiFerdinando and Kyle Maistri, did a pretty good job considering they’ve never done something like this before. I just edited the audio so they sounded like they knew what they were talking about even more than they already did.

I talked to the guys after I finished editing and encouraged them to try and do this sort of thing more often. Hopefully, next week I’ll get a chance to talk to them about how to make it better. I’d like for it to change from a regurgitation of information to more of a leisure conversation — more like a five-minute segment of a sports talk show let’s say.