The site has been seeing a few changes lately.
Most notably, we’ve opened the site to registration, and would like to welcome everyone who has signed up with us. We’re still in early beta now, but the base functionality of the site is solid. As we move toward our goal feature set, I’d like to ask anyone with suggestions or feature requests to let us know.
In addition to our new members, we’ve also got some new features. Users who registered a blog (or who are planning to) will notice that a new menu option has appeared in the administrative dashboard of your blog. The new “Polls” menus will allow users to create any number of polls for their site, individual posts, or for whatever else you may need feed back on. In talking with faculty in the English dept. it became clear that there was dearth of web tools for polling. Until recently Survey Monkey was used, I’m proud to say that our polling is much simpler, with an easy to use GUI interface, and automatic inclusion on your course or personal blog.
Less noticeable perhaps have been the inclusion of site-wide utilities. We’ve added the ability for users to change the sub-domain of their sites. So, for example, if you registered clsas.dighumanities.org, you can now correct your typo under Settings > Publishing, and begin posting to class.dighumanities.org. This feature relies on availability, so it wont bump anyone else’s blog.
There are also a few new plug ins under the Plugins menu for our advanced users. We’ve included KB Gradebook, the popular (and FERPA compliant) grade publishing tool. Any teacher keeping grades in a spreadsheet can now export class grades to their Dig Humanities site, and the student will receive a one-time use password enabling them to securely view only their individual grades. Updating grades is as easy as uploading a new spreadsheet.
Members wishing to increase the visibility of their sites will find the new “Blog Statistics” menu item under the Dashboard tab handy. Every website collects user information- it’s a function of the servers they are hosted on, and essential to making the internet function dynamically. This information is anonymous, and helps websites do everything from display information correctly, to provide website authors with critical information. With this in mind, Dig Humanities now allows users to track visitor trends, technical demographics, incoming and outgoing links, and most importantly, what search terms brought visitors to you. Of course, these features are typical of any web statics, and barely scratch the surface of more advanced analytic programs like Google Analytics… Good news everybody! Dig Humanities will be implementing a Google Analytics plugin shortly that will allow advanced users to gather the most precise visitor data available. More on that later.
Dig Humanities has also been working hard on help and tutorial videos for you. It’s a lot of video editing, so bare with us, the tutorials will be worth it I promise. For now though, we found some Google videos that have been making the academic rounds. Enjoy.
This video is an interesting look at how Google Documents can made editing papers easier. The example used is an editor for a neighborhood paper, but it doesn’t take much of a stretch to see how we could use this for editing publications, news letters, or even student papers. Often times, professors want to see the editorial process of their students. Google Docs will show not only submitted document revisions, but if you wish, it will allow you to step though all the of minor changes a student makes to see their editorial process. Best of all, there are no files to corrupt, lose in the email, or get lost on a faulty hard drive. Take a look.
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