I wanted to share some stats from a recent email we did to High School juniors and seniors. It appears that mobile and desktop are now at 50/50. Below is a report from five days after the original send date. We generally see that mobile peaks early on, then desktop catches up later on down the road. We typically see a desktop tail of about 30 days, with the mobile tail only being about 36 hours.

We are sending them to a two-step form, and only tracking when they complete. Mobile users are getting a mobile friendly version.

Let me know what you guys are seeing in the comments, or feel free to ask questions.

With the huge growth in smartphones and tablets it is time for our campus map to go responsive. We have embarked on a project with our partner New City Media to replace our Flash based campus map with a new responsive maps based upon HTML5 and CSS3.

Here are some screen shot previews:

I started playing with CloudFlare last week, since they promise to “super charge your website.” And would wouldn’t want that, right? Website load and response times has been a bit of an obsession with me lately, and CloudFlare looks like a great way to squeeze some additional marginal performance out of our site.

Content Delivery Network

The biggest benefit would seem to be leveraging CloudFlare’s CDN. This means they are putting content closer to the user, theoretically speeding up delivery times. Everyone from Google to Facebook to Amazon are setting up CDNs, so this seems like a smart choice.

Website Optimization

I have done pretty much all I can by hand, by constantly running Google Page Speed and following the recommendations. CloudFlare takes care of the rest, without having to worry about the heavy lifting.

Web Security

This I didn’t expect, but I think makes the service 100% worthwhile. They stop the bad guys from coming to your site. Like most places we have been hit by spammers and hackers, and I know that I would be sleep better at night knowing that someone is keeping them off our site.

You can see in their analytics exactly how many people are getting stopped, and it is remarkably high.

Baby steps

We have several hosted domains for blogs and such (this one, our campus news blog (rcnewsblog.com) and our IT blog (rcitblog.com), I have set up CloudFlare for all up off the blogs. I have been trying to use our Pingdom reports to see if I can see any significant changes, but am not finding the exact option that I am looking for. But it looks like load time went from about 6.46 seconds to 1.78 seconds. Which is pretty significant.

Next steps

Next I want to get it one some of our internal domains, starting with our mobile site at m.roanoke.edu

I would love to hear what other people are thinking about CloudFlare. Drop me some feedback in the comments.

The new graphapi makes getting Facebook connect super easy, but putting all the pieces together is a little tough.

What you need to do is set-up the Facebook connect button, and let it save the cookies for you. From there you can get an access token, required to get information back from the API. You can use cfhttp calls and get JSON back.

Step one is to follow Facebook’s instructions to get the Javascript set-up for the Facebook Connect button, found here:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web/#login

Note: You need to request the permissions that you want in the button HTML, for example ours looks like this:

<fb:login-button perms="email, user_education_history, friends_education_history, publish_stream, offline_access">

Once this is done, you can use some ColdFusion to read the cookie and get the accesstoken.

<cfset left = Find("access_token=",cookie.fbs_239625941285)+13>
  
<cfset right = Find("&",cookie.fbs_239625941285,left+1)>

  
<cfset accessToken = Mid(cookie.fbs_239625941285,left,right-left)>

  
<cfoutput>Access Token = #accessToken#</cfoutput>

And to get the Facebook ID:

cfset left = Find("&uid=",cookie.fbs_239625941285)+5>
  
<cfset len = len(cookie.fbs_239625941285)-left>

  
<cfset SESSION.FBID = mid(cookie.fbs_239625941285,left,len)>

  
<br><cfoutput>Facebook ID = #SESSION.FBID#</cfoutput>

The next thing is to use the Graph Explorer tool to find the syntax for what you want to pull:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer

For example to get e-mail we use the code:

<cfdump var="#cookie#">
  
<cfhttp url="https://graph.facebook.com/100000929135466/?#accessToken#" method="get" /> 

  
        <cfset response = DeserializeJSON(cfhttp.filecontent) />

  
<cfoutput>

  
<p>email = #response.email#</p>

  
</cfoutput>

You can try an example here:

Example

And I have uploaded the CFM files here:

http://webapps.roanoke.edu/michael/fbconnect/facebookconnect.zip

Let me know if you have questions or comments!

I have been working to replace our internal SMS notification system with one that was not dependent on our servers, power and applications being up.

I found Twilio a while ago, but never had time to play with the service. Long story short, we finally got things up and running this week, and it really is awesome.

I put our our code on a Dreamhost account we have for our WordPress blogs. Basically we wanted anyone on the IT Staff to be able to send a text message and have that message rebroadcast to the whole IT Staff, so we could all be aware of developing situations and problems. So, even if network or power is out on the whole campus, we can send a message.

The Twilio tutorials gave us exactly what we needed, and pricing is a very affordable 1¢ per message, you pay $1 a month for a phone number.

We also, added a password protected page that had a web form that our students assistants could use to notify staff.

I am looking at where else we can utilize Twilio for other services campus, and replacing some of our other higher cost SMS services. (We currently let users sign up for text messages reminders of calendar events and students get SMS reminders for course evaluations.)

Drop me any questions in the comments sections. Also, I would love to hear if you have used Twilio or another service and what your experience has been.

We are working on add a new (third) row of icons to our mobile home site. Right now they are:

• Admissions
• Alumni
• Majors
• Awards

But, of course this is subject to change. Check out some screen shots below, and hit up the comments link with your feedback.

Admissions:

Alumni:

Majors:

Awards:

Our new Fat Footer went live yesterday afternoon. Check it out at http://www.roanoke.edu. I think it is a huge improvement, and has several features that I have wanted to implement for long time.

Just a quick note to let you know we have upgraded our blog to use Dreamhost’s VPS (Virtual Private Server) service. So far seems to be running much better.

Roanoke has several Facebook groups for prospective students and a very active group for accepted students.  We have current students help answer questions in these groups.  Lately, there have been lots of questions and my intern was spending lots of time writing lengthy replies.

This is a fabulous shot of my office. You get the idea.

So, we decided to do video responses to their questions.  We ordered a basic webcam and voila, problem solved.  Now my intern just replies via video directly within Facebook and while time saving for us, it’s a very cool and personal touch for the prospective student.  We’ve gotten rave reviews from the recipients.

And, the best part, this was my intern’s idea.  I love her.

Roanoke College was named to the Top 100 Social Media Colleges list, published by Student Advisor.  We were ranked #22 to be exact and were the only school from Virginia in the top 25.

We are in good company with Duke at #18, Brown at #20, Yale at #24 and Dartmouth at #25.

Their comments about Roanoke were: “Exceptional use of video on their site. Even the Roanoke web team has a great blog.”

They compute the rankings by looking at how schools engage their audiences on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media tools.  The methodology takes into account the size of each school, among other things.

Read the article.  See the top 100.