This past Monday I finished up the Photo Gallery for The BG News.


The above film strip is on both the Network Home Page and the BG Views Home page. Be sure and check it out!

One of the new features of the Housing Guide is the Area Map. It is a Google Map of Bowling Green with markers dotting the map. Each dot has a link directly to the entry in the Housing Guide. Click this thumbnail to enlarge.

I am very happy to report that the problem we have been having, for what I am guessing is a month or two, is finally resolved. I have no idea why they have had to, but they have whitelisted bgviews.com and bgviewsnetwork.com in the BGSU mail servers.

Why was this such a big problem? Take a guess where the majority of people registering to write and comment on our network sites are? Yep, you got it, BGSU students and staff. I have a bunch of unverified accounts because when someone signs up, they must click on a link to verify their account. Not good.

But now new registrations get their verification emails, and things are good in the world.

Another part of the BG Views Network is now complete, and better than ever. When we were doing our daily classifieds in CP5 there was no way to search them, and no way to (easily) view them on a mobile device. You can see the site here, and the mobile site here. The mobile site is now linked up on m.bgviews.com.

Click to see the thumbnail of the mobile site. Daily classifieds also has its own RSS feed, which it did not before. Next up is to get the Community Classifieds site complete, which should be done soon.

Lots of work has gone into the Housing Guide this past week. The Browse page and the Category Listing templates are now complete. This leaves the Advanced Search template to complete.

Sadly I have found out from Six Apart support that searching Custom Field data is not a built in feature. This is baffling to me, quite frankly, but at least there is a 3rd party plugin. I have yet to dig into working with the plugin yet.

But this update is not about that stuff, it is about the Mobile site. My goal is to have all functionality that can be done on a desktop browser mimicked on a mobile phone. Hopefully the custom search will work on mobile too.

Click on the thumbnails for the full sized screen shot. The first shot is the Home Page of the Housing Guide. Next is the Browse By Category page. Last is the Apartment Listings page (of course there are not many listings in yet, but there will be when I move the listings over from the Joomla site).

Thanks to those on Twitter and Facebook, and those who have emailed me as well, the response to the Wibiya toolbar we are testing out has been very good. The developers are very aggressive at bringing new features, and they take feedback into account every step of the way, which is great. They have taken a number of my suggestions into consideration when making updates already.

Not only have all my issues been addressed, but I received a personal email, and they have offered to customize the toolbar for BG Views. The search in the toolbar no longer has Google search, and it no longer says "Blog Search." It also no longer uses the default search engine that opened in an AJAX layer. Now the search says "Network Search" and is piped through our Google Custom Search Engine. I am just thrilled it works with out Google CSE, it makes the toolbar even more useful because we control that search engine.


The big new feature this week is the update to the Twitter Dashboard functionality. It now allows you to tweet, not just read, from the toolbar. Here is a look at the features:

• On the right side users can see all the information about our Twitter account including your latest tweets, there is also the option to search Twitter all without leaving the site. Trending searches are listed, too.
• On the left side users can see all the tweets posted by other people talking about the the page they are on and track the Buzz. In this side users are also able to connect to twitter and post a message about the page (the URL is shortened automatically) or anything that's on their mind.
• When clicking on a Twitter user names or hash tags the right side will refresh with all details and latest tweets.
• Each user can easily Reply or Retweet to each message without leaving the website.

That is all pretty impressive stuff. Tracking the buzz is powered by Backtype (which is a great service itself) and pulls in references even when people use URL shortening services such as tinyurl, bit.ly, ow.ly, cli.gs, digg, etc, and seems to be pretty accurate.

I have been testing the toolbar on different browsers, and will likely be publishing the toolbar on one or two sites at a time, before it is deployed on all sites in the BG Views Network.

Yes, even BG Views uses Get Satisfaction.

You may or may not have noticed the "Feedback" tab on the right side of the page, it is because BG Views now has a Get Satisfaction support community. This is a much better way to handle support over a form that goes to a single email. I have even set up different product categories on the support site. Check it out, and please use it if you want to give us an idea, or find a problem.

Who says we all take the day off! Today we are introducing the BG Views Business Center. Note, that URL will change but it will always be linked under Guides in our navigation menu. The Business Center offers information on credit reports, credit scores, credit cards and loans, as well as wire news on the subject, and business news on Twitter.

BG Views has partnered with CampusRd to bring this service to our users. You can research and compare right on BG Views, without leaving to another site. If you decide to sign up for any of the services, you will be taken off site to complete the transaction. We hope this information is valuable to the students and community members who visit our web site.

Incidentally, in introducing the Business Center, we are also introducing the not-ready-yet BG Views Business Directory. While the Housing Guide requires a contract with us, the Business Directory will be free for anyone to list information in. The Business Directory will be launched in the fall, if you would like to be informed when this happens, you can sign up for that.

Facebook recently announced usernames for both profiles and fan pages. At the last minute, Facebook changed their requirement for fan pages from 25 to 100 fans required - this did not amuse many. Thankfully we have the best fans in the world! We were able to pick our username for our Page at the first availability.

BG News
http://www.facebook.com/bgnews

BG Views Page
http://www.facebook.com/bgviews

Credit where it is due, my friend Jason pointed me in the direction of a site that had a snazzy toolbar at the bottom that had support for Twitter, Facebook, and Google Translate. I figured it could not be home grown, and it took little digging to find it was Wibiya.

My biggest takeaways is that it is not obtrusive, and has a really unique take on using Facebook Connect. It also keeps Twitter, Facebook, (including our Page) Translate, Recent Posts, Subscribe to RSS, Bookmarking, and Flickr -- yes, a ton of stuff -- in a very minimal and very nicely designed interface at the base of the page.

I think it is really important to keep Twitter and Facebook front and center for organizations like ours, and this toolbar does that. Oh, yea, and Wibiya is in beta, they are still making changes and additions. From reading through their Get Satisfaction page, they have already added some changes suggested by the community.

On the Developer Blog here you will find the Wibiya Toolbar, as I am testing it and making sure it works and does not brake things. I have requested the opinions of our Fans on Facebook as well as our Alumni Group, and would like anyone else viewing this to tell me what they think of the toolbar at the bottom of the page. You can even vote in the poll to the right!

Hit the jump for a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo.