• The importance of a strong corporate culture cannot be overestimated. As David said, “Corporate culture is the only long-term, sustainable, competitive advantage within your control.” Are we picky when it comes to hiring? You bet. We only consider people who truly embrace our core values by being positive, self-starting, and supportive. As a result, we are able to provide unrivaled customer service. In addition, due to our focus on team work and collaboration, there are no silos. That’s why it’s not uncommon for an engineer to get on a support call, or for our support manager to answer questions on a consulting call. Because of our unique company culture, we are able to foster autonomy. For instance, we don’t track vacation days, and we also allow our team members to work on special projects of their choosing. If you would like to learn more about our corporate culture, check out Holly’s blog post.
• Always be open and transparent. Some may wonder why our knowledge base, our GITHUB code repository, our videos, and even our pricing are accessible to everyone. The reason is a simple one. We subscribe to transparency as our philosophy, and we put our money where our mouth is. You don’t have to be a customer to have access to our pertinent resources.
• It’s more than content management--it’s about content empowerment. We are firm believers in fresh, quality content. Your content is the heart and soul of your web presence, and it’s the reason why people visit your site. Therefore, it’s of utmost importance to provide tools that not only help contributors manage their content quickly and easily, but to empower them to maximize the effectiveness of their content. We are committed to continuing to enhance your ability to optimize your content and to analyze what works best.
• You have to understand content in order to build a great CMS. In order to be able to build not just the most powerful, but also the most useful content management and empowerment solution for your customers, you have to develop a strong appreciation and thorough understanding of the importance of content and content strategy, as well as modern marketing concepts.
• Collectively identify new opportunities. We involve every department in our product road map brainstorming sessions, since we believe in taking every Cascade Server user level into account. In addition, we are thankful to our large Cascade Server community and the amazing ideas that they bring to the table. It’s important to us that our product road map process includes suggestions and feedback from a wide variety of users, so that we can identify the features and improvements that make each stakeholder’s life easier. If you haven’t signed up for our idea exchange, please feel free to do so.
• Find the right fit. Every organization's needs are different, even within a specific sector, such as higher education. Over the last decade, we've learned to identify organizations that are great fits for Cascade Server as well as some that may not be able to fully benefit from its flexibility. Since nothing is more important to us than providing value to and establishing a long-term relationship with our customers, we will not talk you into an investment that may not be the best solution for you in the long run.

In an office full of software developers, you can imagine that the distractions available are quite plentiful, but one of my favorite distractions is a friendly game of rock paper scissors with one or two of my fellow team members. Over the last several weeks, this has evolved into an almost daily ritual, complete with a scoreboard at the desk of Eric, our Spectate Product Manager.

You’ll notice that Eric’s track record boasts more tally marks than anyone else. There may be a simple explanation for this: Eric is better at Rock Paper Scissors than anyone else. OR maybe... just maybe... there’s another, less obvious explanation. Maybe Eric has just played way more than anyone else. After all, the scoreboard is at his desk. And if you look closely, you can see that only wins are accounted for. There’s absolutely no penalty for losing a game.

This got me thinking. Among other things, Eric is a salesman. In sales, nothing is more important than your number of wins. It doesn’t really matter if your win/loss ratio is poor, so long as you’re winning a good total number of deals. Obviously, there are rewards for winning more often than losing: you can make more money or work fewer hours. But as long as you’re winning a good raw quantity of deals, the success rate is less important. Maybe that’s why Eric created the scoreboard this way, from a sales team-biased perspective.

So, back to Rock Paper Scissors. I've come up with a few strategies to help me beat some of my co-workers. At first, I used to throw people off by calling it Paper Rock Scissor or Scissor Paper Rock. This had people thinking that I had no clue what I was doing and that any wins were just lucky coincidences. However, there were only so many people I could pull that on before I had to “learn” the real name of the game. Next, I started trying to psych people out, talking trash before we played, pointing to my tally section (which has the second highest number of tallies--after Eric’s, of course). This worked too, until people heard me complain about Eric’s record and the fact that losses are not recorded. Turns out this worked against me in the exact same way.

Our Sales Engineer, Charlie, uses a technique where he decides what he’ll play in advance before he sees what his opponent will play. That way, he is unaffected by the mind games of his opponents. (Turns out he pretty much plays Rock, Paper, Scissors, in that order--just about every time.) I’m not convinced of the efficacy of this strategy, though it does seem to be working for Charlie. Alas, other than trying to figure out where my opponents will go after a series of shoots (the "out-wit, out-play, out-last Survivor Strategy"), I am out of ideas.

Does anyone out there have any Paper Rock Scissors tips for me? What strategies do you use? What do y’all think of a Paper Rock Scissors station at the User Conference this year? Please leave your tips and suggestions in the comments section below.

One last thing--if you don't have anyone to play with in your office, there's a very fun, online alternative: Play Rock Paper Scissors with a Robot from the New York Times. 

Here’s what I’ve learned about how to blog for SEO:

Create a Search Engine-friendly URL

If you’re using Cascade Server, then each page is automatically given a search engine friendly URL. However, you can always improve it. Take out any unnecessary articles in your URL and make sure your keywords are prominent. The part after your domain name is called the Post Slug, and it is one of the most important signals to search engines about the nature of your content.

Choose your Keywords Wisely

When I am hoping to generate new traffic to our website with a particular post (like this one), I use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find the best keywords to emphasize in the post. For this post, I searched for a number of variations on the title before deciding on “How to Blog for SEO”. I chose this of the different options because it had a high search volume and low competition.

Use Images and Name Them Correctly

One way to emphasize your keywords to search engines without “stuffing” them into the body text is to name your images with your main keywords. Additionally, make sure the title tag and alt tag use the same keywords. If you use multiple images in a post, you can name them different variations of the your keywords, as long as those keywords apply to the images you are using.

Create Both Internal and External Links

This is a two-parter as both are beneficial but in different ways.

1. Internal Links

Within your post, be sure to refer your readers to other posts on your website. This is a good general practice, but it makes even more sense when you are blogging for SEO. You are intentionally trying to drive new traffic to your site. New visitors, by definition, have not seen the rest of the amazing content on your site, so make sure you mention other related posts that might be interesting to your readers. You can also put other internal links at the end of your post in a “Related Content” section, as we’ve done below.

2. External Links

SEO experts argue over whether linking to other credible sites gives your site more credibility from a search engine’s perspective or not, but that does not mean that there are no widely accepted benefits to linking to other sites. For starters, your readers will appreciate it if you refer them to other sites on the web to help them continue learning about the topic they are researching. Additionally, many experts believe that by including your keywords in the anchor text of your external links, you make them even more apparent to search engines. Finally, if you link to other blogs, there is a good chance that those bloggers will see traffic coming from your site, and if they find your content worthwhile, then they may in turn link back to your site.

One important thing I do when linking from a post is to set up my internal links to open within the same window but to set up external links to open in a new window or tab. That way, if a user clicks on a link to another site, they still have my site open when they want to keep reading.

Add Meta Data

Although it is unclear whether search engines still look at meta data to determine rank, it is still important to getting clicks after you appear in the search results. Your meta data is displayed below the link to your site, and it’s the content most searchers scan to decide whether or not to open your site. It should be under 155 characters, include your most important keywords (these appear in bold in the search results when someone searches for you), and entice the searcher to read your full post.

This was a post written in December about CMS predictions for 2012. One thing I think helped this post reach the top of the search engine results is that we published this post a few days before several other similar posts were published, giving it a leg up in traffic over the others.

Use Headers and Sub-headers Appropriately

Rather than bolding all your headers or simply increasing your font size, use the H2, H3 and H4 tags to distinguish this text as important. Search engines weigh this text more heavily in determining how relevant your content is to searchers, so don’t overlook this important step. If you’re using Cascade Server CMS, then these formatting options should be available within your WYSIWYG editor. Otherwise, you can add these tags directly into the HTML.

Finish with a Call to Action

Calls to action come in many different varieties. One thing we like to do is to invite our readers to give their feedback about the topic in the comments section, because we love to engage with our readers. Other options are to add a button or a form urging readers to subscribe to your  newsletter, apply to your university, attend an open house, make a donation or buy basketball tickets today! Adding a call to action may not directly affect your SEO, but providing great content on a regular basis and making it share-able (and shareworthy) will definitely help your SEO.

For more on calls to action, check out this Call-out Crash Course from Spectate. Another great post is 10 Techniques for an Effective Call to Action from boagworld.com.

Questions? Comments?

Have you found these suggestions helpful? What SEO blogging tips have you found that I didn’t include in this post? Please leave questions and comments in the section below and feel free to share this post with others who might find it helpful.

Why?

You’ve already made an investment in your technical resources (CMS, social media platforms, analytics), as well as in your human resources (web team, content managers, content contributors). So you’re already investing in the framework to support your content. It only makes sense to also invest in the heart of your website - your actual content. Considering that your content is the main reason why people visit your website and interact with your brand online, it’s a worthwhile investment to develop a strategy to ensure that your content maximally supports your goals.

There’s no standard content strategy template. You can make your strategy as elaborate or as simple as you need to. What’s important is that you start working on it. Here are some steps to get started:

• Make a list of questions that you want your strategy to answer. This will not only give you an idea of how involved you want your content strategy to be, but also provide you with a starting framework. Some of the obvious questions to be included are, for example, “Who is responsible for which piece of content” or “Where are our content gaps?”. Other points that can really help you optimize your strategy and lead to improvements in your overall message and consistency are “What are the key messages to be delivered?”, “What strategic goals is the content meant to support?”, “What is the purpose for each piece of content?”, and “When and how will each new piece of content be promoted?”. Once you have compiled your list of questions, identify the most effective ways to capture the answers. It can be as simple as a shared Google doc to get started.
• Create an editorial calendar. One of the easiest ways to generate momentum for your content strategy is to establish an editorial calendar that captures content assignments, target review and publish dates, and optional additional information, such as keywords and promotion channels. Some of the many benefits of an editorial calendar are that you increase accountability, empower you and your team to be more strategic, and gradually make the creation of fresh content more of a habit. In addition, the by-product of an editorial calendar is a content inventory, which allows you to more easily identify opportunities for content re-purposing. Furthermore, you can look at your website traffic and correlate spikes to specific events on your editorial calendar, so that you can optimize your content based on those findings.
• Identify the low hanging fruit and address them first. “Content Strategy” is a term that seems to intimidate managers and content contributors alike, possibly because it sounds like a monolithic project. It doesn’t have to be. The trick is to get started. How about picking the low hanging fruit first? Here are some things that you can do to immediately improve your content:
  • Tackle the pain points. If you have any pages on your site that just rub you the wrong way, maybe because the message isn’t clear or the tone is not consistent with the rest of your site? Why not start there? Clearly identify the purpose of the page, as well as the reasons why you don’t currently like its content and start your re-write. You may be surprised how liberating it can be to eliminate a pain point from your site, and how much momentum you can build to further improve your content.
  • Revisit your page titles. You may find some opportunities where you can better optimize your page for search engines by either adding a strategic keyword (where it makes sense!), removing words that smell of “keyword stuffing”, or by changing the title to something that’s a little more engaging or catchy. In addition, by looking at your titles with fresh eyes, you are also more likely to spot potential content weaknesses. Are there any discrepancies between what the title promises and the post or page delivers? If so, you have now identified another chance to improve your content.
  • Fine tune your most important pages. Which pages do you want your target audience to visit the most? Which pages seem to attract the most visitors? Which pages appear to be typical “entry” or “exit points”? Once you have answered these questions, revisit the content for those pages and identify how you can improve them.
  • Ask the value question. Your content strategy not only identifies content to be created, but also tell you which content needs to be eliminated. Ask yourself, “Does this page or post provide value?” and make your content decisions accordingly. Keep in mind that value can take different forms: your content piece can be educational, it may provide answers to your visitors’ questions, it may showcase a special offer or event, or it may be entertaining. The bottom line is that your content has a purpose.

Within the next few days, we will offer a white paper on content strategy considerations for higher education, so stay tuned!

UPDATE: The white paper is out! Download Content Strategy Considerations for Higher Education.

Last month, I worked on another Javascript-heavy project, and in addition to normal QA, remembering my past experience, I made sure to make sure that the major features worked in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. Feeling more confident, I added a small side feature--almost as an afterthought--that broke the whole thing in Internet Explorer. At this early stage of enterprise Javascript development, I’ve learned a few basic lessons that I wanted to share with those of you who are just getting started in Javascript development or having issues with cross-browser testing:

1. You can’t use browser development tools like true IDE's. I still remember the first time I used an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for development; it was a revelation. The first feature I really appreciated was the ability to stop execution of code and inspect objects. Not only did it give me a better picture of the state of the application at a point in time, but often I could shortcut looking up the API documentation by looking at the methods and member variables in the debugger. The first time I used Firebug, I started back with those old habits, but quickly learned my lesson: Firefox, IE and Chrome implementations of Javascript objects vary widely, so digging through the object for an obscure method that does exactly what you want is begging for trouble.
2. Use API frameworks as much as possible. This is related to the prior point: since browser implementations of Javascript objects and methods vary, it’s important to use API frameworks like JQuery or Prototype whenever possible to hide these details.
3. Develop in one environment; test in another. My favorite browser is Chrome, and its development tools are great, so I found myself using it both to develop and QA my work. In retrospect, it’s clear that this is a bad habit, but it’s easy to see how one can fall into this trap. Going forward, I plan to do all my testing in my most troublesome browser: IE.
4. If something feels like a hack, it’s a great candidate for breaking in some environment. My first iteration of the Twitter Feed Block used what felt like a hack at the time. It added a new script object to the div which would perform a refresh when loaded. It felt like a hack, but I got it from the blog of a guy much smarter than me, so I ran with it--at least for the prototype. Almost immediately, it broke in an older version of IE due to an issue with adding objects to the parent object of a script. When working with finicky environments, good practice is even more important than normal.
5. BrowserStack is fantastic. BrowserStack is a great tool that allows you to see how your website renders and runs in several different versions of all major browsers in different operating systems. I first used BrowserStack to avoid booting up my virtual machine to do some IE testing on my Macbook, but now I’ve found that it makes it much easier to test your page in multiple browsers quickly and in multiple versions (something essentially impossible with even a few different computers). It even gives access to some development tools, allowing you to debug problems.

Doing this unfamiliar work has certainly been a humbling experience, and I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes, but I’d love to learn from you as well. What are some tools and practices you use to avoid browser issues? What are some more general Javascript best practices?

• Get more people trained on Cascade Server. As Penny Harding, our Services Manager, announced, we are determined to expand your training options even further. That’s why we are now offering free monthly Cascade Server Bootcamps. During these two-day trainings, technical users will get a comprehensive overview of the system. Please read Penny’s post for further details.
• Cascade Server 7 and beyond. Now that Cascade Server 7 has been out in beta for a couple of weeks, we can’t wait until its official launch. Cascade Server 7 is arguably the most powerful release to date. In addition to the Twitter feed module, deep site copy (my personal favorite), inline regions, and a new and improved asset chooser, brace yourself for a surprise or two! We have big plans for Cascade Server 7 and beyond and cannot wait to reveal them to you. As always, our Idea Exchange is a significant component of our product road map, so let me just say “Thank You” to everybody who continues to submit suggestions and ideas, and to everybody who participates in the discussions and voting. Cascade Server is built for you, which is why your feedback is invaluable to us.
• Even better user conference. As smoothly as this year’s Cascade Server user conference went, we always want to go bigger and better next time. It’s going to be hard to top the quality of presentations of the 2011 conference, but I have all the confidence in the world that both our amazing customers and our team will be able to wow participants with examples of how they push the envelop with Cascade. Furthermore, after our first annual Cassie award ceremony, I expect that the competition to win one of these highly prestigious trophies will be even more fierce in 2012.
• Help web contributors get more out of their content. You’ve probably heard the phrase “Content is king” many times by now. It’s simple. There is nothing better that you can do for website’s SEO and for your inbound marketing than to provide fresh, quality content. After all, your content is the main reason why people come to your site in the first place. We’ve been advocates of content marketing for a long time, and we strive to find ways to help you not only manage your content, but also empower you to optimally leverage your content. Stay tuned as we reveal more information over the next few months!
• Grow the community. Most of you already know that we are all about fostering community, as evidenced by the fact that we are so open and transparent that everybody has access to our knowledge base, our help forum, our user conference videos, and even our GITHUB code repository. It is our intention to provide even more resources next year. We have already identified two major projects from which our customers would be able to benefit immensely.
• Continue to provide a wide spectrum of valuable content. As I mentioned above, we are firm believers in the “content is king” philosophy, which is why we provide what we hope to be valuable content to you on a regular basis. For instance, you may have noticed that team members from all of our departments contribute to our regular blog posts to ensure that you receive a wide spectrum of content, ranging from highly technical concepts to strategic best practices, from unique insights into the Hannon Hill culture to tips for administrative users. It’s important to us to deliver quality and diverse content to you, and we are determined to take it up another notch in 2012. Watch out for new white papers, frequent webinars (both hosted by the HH team and, as always, by our customers), and presentations and talks at various conferences (at this point, I’d like to take a moment for shameless self promotion and invite those of you who will be at the Sungard Summit in March to come see my discussion on agile strategies on March 27, 2012).

Thank you to all of our customers, competitors, and team members for helping us push Hannon Hill and Cascade Server to the next level. I wish you all a happy, healthy, and successful 2012.

Cascade Server 6.0 introduced a revolutionary game changer into the content management system: Sites. A unique and efficient way of segmenting, categorizing, and structuring your website. A Site in Cascade Server works as an entity unto itself – complete with its own folder structure and administrative assets. We’re talking wholly unique, completely separated and distinct areas. Mind. Blown. Think of the possibilities at play here – you can have distinct organizations all updating their own sites at the same time within the same system all pushing their pages out to the same server. It’s harmony – it’s like The Police wrote and performed Synchronicity III.

But alas – all is not well – sometimes departments can’t be trusted to have tastefully appropriate web pages. Sometimes, they want a professional page to look like a 14 y/o girl’s Tumblr dashboard. Well, we for the sake of humanity, for the sake of standardization, we just can’t let that happen. So how do we set up someone with their own Site, so that they’re completely insulated and responsible for their own content, without making them responsible for the design or layout? Why cross-site asset sharing and linking of course (like you couldn’t tell from the title of this post)!

So – how does it work? Well I’m glad you asked. I’ve included some useful tidbits of information to help you get started and get going on setting up your cross-site asset sharing experience. This is a useful blog post! Huzzah!

• Set up a _common Site. At the end of the day, the majority of your pages are going to look the same – or at the very least – you’re going to want them to look the same. Further, you would also want to keep your administrative files – your CSS, JavaScript, rich media content files – out of the way of some of your users. You know the ones. The ones who delete your folder of images. Setting up a common site provides you with an easy to use area to house all of these assets as opposed to the Global area.
• Keep your images together. It sounds odd – maybe you don’t want one of your departments putting up their office Christmas party pictures online. But look at it from the other side – those developers look pretty awesome as Santa’s tipsy elves. Keeping a central repository of images prevents duplicates of random background images and also promotes sharing across departments. Aww!
• Keep your page types within each Site. While each of your page types can essentially use the same metadata set, configuration set, and data definition – if you have a copy of these page types on each Site, you can then tie those outputs to your destinations (which are Site-specific). This comes in handy for mobile sites or outputting different layouts of pages to different areas.
• Rewrite your links. The best part about Cascade Server is that it keeps track of all the assets in your system. Every asset has its own ID – file, page, block – it doesn’t matter. So why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of this functionality? When uploading a file to Cascade, you have the option to “Rewrite Links in File” – this essentially will rewrite an image or page link to point directly to that asset. So, should you ever move the image or set up a new Site for all of your common elements, your files will always be pointing to the proper location. Nothing goes missing! Ever!
• Use the Site name. When cross-site sharing, many users will forget to mention the Site when writing out a path name in their formats or CSS files or templates. Don’t forget this! How is anyone supposed to know what Site these files are coming from? Cascade Server isn’t Hogwarts. This also comes in handy when pulling out node information from your assets. For example, did you know that an asset path will give you the relative path information (specific to that Site) while an asset link will give you the full path? Fascinating, right?

There are lots of different ways to implement a cross-site sharing platform. I’ve provided some general Best Practices cases but for the most part, you can set up the assets in a way that makes the most sense for you. If you don’t want to share images, then you don’t have to. If you do want people to have access to CSS files, then go ahead. The beauty of Cascade Server is that is provides you with several options without explicitly limiting you to any one of these. So give it a shot.

Lastly, check out some of our Knowledge Base articles for more information:

• Sites
• Cross-site relationships and rules
• Site migration wizard – moving from Global to Sites

In the spririt of the New Year's Eve countdown, here are the top 10 most popular non-user conference posts, with number one being the most read. I should acknowledge that posts published earlier in the year do have an obvious advantage here, but nonetheless, here they are:

10. 5 CMS Predictions for 2012, by Kat Liendgens (December 8)

9.  Spotlight on Cascade Entity Relationship Diagram, by Charlie Holder (September 2)

8.  Separating Media Files from Content Management, by Kat Liendgens (April 25)

7.  Things to Remember When Selecting a Web CMS, by Joel Dixon (June 9)

6.  How to Use Google+ for Higher Ed, by Holly Wright (November 10)

5.  HighEdWeb 2011: Why (Quality) Content is King & Accessibility is Key, by Joel Dixon and Penny Harding (November 2)

4.  9 Reasons to Create a Dynamic Online Magazine, by Holly Wright (June 20)

3.  Don't Surrender to the Render, by Tim Reilly (March 24)

2.  The Eternal Debate: Velocity or XSLT, by Rahul Bhagnari (August 31)

1.  Designing a Page Output for Mobile Devices, by Rahul Bhagnari (March 17)

To wrap up the year, I also thought I would share some of the fun photos of festive Hannon Hillers celebrating the holidays in style. First up is our Christmas tree, complete with many hand-crafted ornaments made by Hannon Hillers themselves. Check out some of the beauties:

A couple of weeks ago, we had a Tacky Christmas Sweater day in the office. The theme was thoroughly embraced and we took the perfect family holiday photo on the stairs of our office:

Finally, to really cap off a wonderful year, we had our holiday party at the Georgia Aquarium. We have a somewhat casual work environment here at Hannon Hill, so it was fun to see everyone in formal attire. Take a look below at some of the best shots of the team.

This is it. The last post of 2011. Happy New Year to all our clients, partners and other readers and to the higher education community. We look forward to an even more amazing 2012!

Stay tuned for the first post of 2012: Hannon Hill's 2012 New Year's Resolutions, from CEO Kat Liendgens.

You bet on us, so I’m betting on you!

Now, I don’t gamble much, but it is a tradition in my family to put a small amount of cash on the overall bowl season in a pick ‘em style game with confidence points. This year, in every matchup that includes one of our clients, I chose our client to win.

For fun, here's a list of Hannon Hill clients that have football teams playing in bowl games this year:

• University of Wyoming
• Florida International University
• University of Missouri
• North Carolina State University
• University of Texas (College of Liberal Arts)
• Texas A&M University
• Georgia Tech (College of Management)
• University of Utah (Health Sciences Center)*
• Auburn University
• University of Houston
• Michigan State University
• Clemson University
• Northern Illinois University

Congrats to all of you for being selected for bowl games this season! Stay tuned, and I’ll let you know how it all turns out!

*Unfortunately, University of Utah was matched up against another client, Georgia Tech. Fortunately, there was an easy tiebreaker--I'm a yellow jacket! (Sorry, Utah!)

Last month, hundreds of universities claimed their Google+ brand pages. Last week Emory posted a link to their Pinterest pinboard, complete with student photos, an Emory Christmas ornament, and other interesting finds from around the web. And today, over a dozen of the higher education clients we follow on Twitter posted new photos to their YouTube channels. This enthusiastic adoption of so many different social accounts poses a problem, though. How do your followers know where to look for you?

Cross-socializing, or promoting some of your social accounts on your other social accounts, can be beneficial where it makes sense. Posting a youtube video to Facebook or Google+, linking to your blog from your LinkedIn account, and telling people about your Pinterest board on Twitter all help, to an extent. But I’ve recently noticed another important way to get the word out, especially for those people actively seeking you out: Social Media Directories.

In addition to the primary social media links on most homepages, many colleges and universities have created entire directories for their social media accounts. Take the total number of colleges, sports, clubs and departments at a university and multiply that by the number of different social media channels being used, and you can easily see why a directory is so useful for students, alumni,fans, and all your other stakeholders.

Examples

Thinking about creating a social media directory for your organization? Here are some examples from our client base:

Michigan State University Social Media Directory

Albright College Social Media Directory

Philadelphia University Social Media Directory

William & Mary Social Media Directory

Emory University Social Media Directory

Many of the others I found are arranged in a grid format like the Emory, Albright and MSU directories above. One style that I find particularly interesting is the William & Mary directory. It's organized into three categories: Official, Official-ish and Unofficial. These categories each have their own page and are easy to navigate and elegant in appearance. One of the other important features that most of the examples include is a link for people to submit other accounts to the directory. 

How do you keep your social media accounts organized? We'd love to see your social media directories, so please feel free to share them in the comments area below.

The Twitter Feed Block is the first example of a new type of Block in Cascade: modules. Modules provide dynamic content that might normally require significant time and techical knowledge to put together, quickly and without programming experience. Twitter Feed Blocks allow a content author with no technical experience to set up a feed of tweets from a managed Twitter account. Also, since they are quick and easy to create and modify; a marketer could make a feed about a trending topic or a conference hash-tag in time for the content to be relevant.

Twitter Feed Blocks differ from other blocks in that the content that is displayed to users is not available at the time of publishing the page. This means that using traditional formats on these blocks won’t really work. Traditional formats use Velocity or XSLT to transform the XML or XHTML in blocks into the published HTML. However, with the Twitter feed block the actual content rendered during publish is JavaScript, meaning that while formats can be applied to the blocks, they would have to make changes to the JavaScript with string replacement. However, this should be unnecessary as every element of the HTML created by the Twitter feed block has a distinct class, meaning that Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) formatting can customize the look and feel extensively.

A diagram outlining the different HTML classes for the Twitter Feed Block

A short guide on styling the Twitter Feed Blocks is available on the knowledge base. It outlines how the default style transforms the undecorated Twitter feed block into something that resembles a typical Twitter feed that one might see on many websites.

The transformation of the unstylized Twitter Feed HTML with the default CSS

While this transformation is impressive in the extent to which it changes the look of the feed block, it is relatively sparse and doesn’t change the actual content of the block. But since every distinct element of the Twitter feed block has its own class, you can actually customize the content that is displayed to the user. For example, by adding the style “display:none” to the classes “twitter_avatar” and “twitter_author” we can hide the author of tweets. This could be used if all tweets were coming from a single managed account and you wanted to have a header with the account name / info instead of repeating it along with each tweet.

Another example might be if you wanted each tweet to be displayed in a visually distinct element. We can give each tweet a rounded border and background by applying a style to the “twitter_item” class, along with padding to separate the tweets from each other. We got rid of the list’s bullets by applying “list-style:none” to “li” children of the twitter_stream class and kept the Twitter avatars hidden to keep the avatar’s backgrounds from clashing. Download the full CSS file for curved borders here.

One more customization option is a horizontal Twitter feed along the bottom of a page. This could be fixed to 4 or 5 items, or it could be put into an iframe, so it could be scrolled by the user at will. The CSS for this is slightly more complicated, so I’ll leave out the explanation, but the CSS file for a horizontal twitter feed is available here and you can also check out the guide to setting up horizontal unordered lists here.

So while the configurability of formats is sacrificed with Twitter Feed Blocks, this is compensated for with an ease of creation of content which might normally take more time and technical knowledge. Moreover, the structure of the HTML generated by the Twitter Feed Block allows engineers to create CSS to customize the look and feel of the Twitter Feed Block dramatically.

Our accomplishments were many, probably going to be in another blog, so I will save those details. Instead, I wanted to focus on how the Hannon Hill Services Team can improve.

Since Cascade Server caters to higher education and government agencies, our users have been working with much tighter budgets in recent years. To add to that strain, turnover means that people who were trained and specialized in using Cascade Server are no longer with their organization, often leaving people who have never even logged into the system to fill in the gaps.

Coming from the public sector, I know firsthand how daunting this can be. With no budget for training and being asked to learn how to use a new tool with literally zero direction, what can you do? Often, these people reach out to our support folks who are great at pointing them to documentation that they can read to get ramped up and to my group, the services team, to consider scheduling a training session.

And here is where the problem lies--they have no budget for training. A year ago, we created the Cross Organization Bootcamp Training to make it more affordable. Only $800/person would allow these users to have a hands-on technical training and make it affordable by splitting the cost between organizations. The sad thing is that $800 still seems to be too high for a lot of our users, so we want to help! Our resolution for next year is therefore bold: Get all Cascade Server users who want to be trained trained, regardless of their budgetary restrictions.

Our plan: Free monthly training sessions!

I want to stress that these sessions will NOT be webinars. They will be hands-on technical training, often referred to as the Cascade Server Bootcamp. We have formulated some rules to have the biggest impact and make each training session a success. Those rules are listed on our Free Training page.

Cascade comes pre-configured with a number of built-in Asset Factory Plug-ins available, providing functionality such as automated naming of assets, image re-sizing and validation based on file names or extensions, to name just a few. While these built-in plug-ins provide enough extended functionality to cover most common content creation use cases, Cascade also provides a simple API for creating your own custom Asset Factory Plug-ins for more advanced functionality or use cases more specific to your own particular business process. However, while the custom Asset Factory Plug-in API offers tremendous extensibility and flexibility, it remains a very under-utilized feature of Cascade Server. This post seeks to change that.

Asset Factory Plug-in SDK Setup

Admittedly, tackling a custom plug-in project from scratch can seem a bit daunting, but luckily there are some resources available to assist in getting started. A complete Eclipse sample project is available on the Hannon Hill Github site. There is also very thorough documentation available on the Cascade Server Knowledge Base, which walks through the entire process, beginning with assembling the necessary development tools, all the way through to installation and trouble-shooting of the plug-in in a Cascade instance.

Complete, Real World Examples

Perhaps another barrier to attempting custom plug-in development is the dearth of working, real-world examples from which to learn. The establishment of the Hannon Hill Github account has begun to foster a community of code sharing among HH clients and staff, and we now have a repository dedicated specifically to real-world plug-in examples. 

Asset Fields to System Name Plug-in

The first contribution to this new repository is a project containing two distinct custom plug-ins. The first of these, Asset Fields to System Name Plug-in, extends some of the functionality available via existing built-in plug-ins to allow for automated naming of assets based on any combination of wired metadata, custom metadata and/or data definition field values. While existing plug-ins allow for auto-naming based on Display Name, Title or specified Data Definition fields, independent of one another, this plug-in offers the flexibility of constructing an auto-generated system name based on a combination of any of these, not to mention other wired and custom metadata fields not accessible in any of the above.

Asset Fields to Folder Structure Plug-in

The second plug-in in this project, Asset Fields to Folder Structure Plug-in, allows for automated folder placement of assets (within sub-directory structures of the selected placement folder) based on any combination of metadata or data definition field values. One potential use for this plug-in is in organizing date-based directory structures for news or blog sections. An Asset Factory could be configured with a Placement Folder setting of /news or /blog, and this plug-in could be applied to place the asset based on a custom "Publish Date" data definition value. In this case, an asset created with a "Publish Date" of 12/16/2011 would be automatically placed in the /news/2011/12 directory, if such a directory exists.

We encourage Cascade developers to visit this new repository often for additional example projects and updates to existing projects, and as always, we welcome contributions from our innovative and resourceful user community.

Additional Considerations

Finally, there are a few tips to keep in mind when developing and using custom plug-ins:

• Maintain a back up of all custom plug-in JAR files. After installation of new Cascade Server versions, all custom plug-in JAR files will need to be re-added to the [CASCADE-HOME]/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib directory.
• For major version releases, it may be necessary to recompile your plug-in project with the most current Cascade and Asset Factory API jars.
• In all cases, it is recommended to install upgrades on a test instance first and verify that all custom plug-ins continue to function as intended.

Authentication Methods

1. Normal Authentication

In this method, users are authenticated via their stored credentials within the Cascade database. This would work well for you if you are looking to do one of the following:

• Create your users manually within the CMS and let Cascade Server handle authentication.
• Automate this user creation process via a custom web services script via Cascade Server’s web services API.
• Merely import your users via LDAP sync but have them authenticate via normal authentication handled by the CMS.

2. LDAP

You can authenticate your users via your LDAP server if you have one currently within your environment. This method would work well for you if you are looking to accomplish the following:

• Create and import your users into default groups and roles within the CMS.
• Have LDAP manage the synchronization schedule for those associated Containers (which will most likely be Organization Units) or Groups (Active Directory only) with their default groups and roles within the CMS.

Here are some of the key considerations about using LDAP authentication that clients often ask about:

• If your users exist within other groups defined within the CMS but not the LDAP configuration, would you want to remove them from those other groups and roles? 
• How would you like to handle orphaned users, which are users that were imported via LDAP into the CMS at one time but no longer exist within the LDAP server? 

Both of these issues are documented and described in greater detail within our Knowledge Base.

3. Custom Authentication

This refers to any third-party authentication system or single-sign on framework that your organization may be using. This method is a good option for you if you are looking to do one or more of the following:

• Use the Cascade Server API to provide a way for developers to authenticate your users via a third-party authentication system or single-sign on framework, such as Shibolleth.
• You also want to tie LDAP authentication into your Custom Authentication system to work together with Cascade Server.

Typical New Client Scenarios

1. You have just a handful of clients (20-100)

• Best Solution: Import the users via LDAP using the configuration <authentication-mode> element set to use "normal".  If this route is taken, you will still need to provide each user with a password as Cascade will not use the LDAP password nor authenticate via LDAP.
• Good Solution: Create the users manually via Cascade Server’s interface.

2. You have one large LDAP server with an unorganized Organizational Unit ("OU") and need to import 1k-2k users

• Best Solution: Move all users that you're wanting to import into their own OU and sync against that OU.
• Good Solution: Create a free-form filter based of off a unique attribute that all of the soon-to-be-imported LDAP users possess to sync from, and place them into individual user-policies for their specified default group and role.

3. You have a large and well organized LDAP server with smaller OU’s

• Best Solution: Create individual user-policies for each OU that you want to import.
• Good Solution: Create a free-form filter based on a unique attribute that all of the soon-to-be-imported LDAP users possess to sync from, and place them into individual user-policies for their specified default group and role.

4. You have a Custom Authentication System and Single-Sign On Service already in place

• Best Solution: Import and create the users via LDAP, then authenticate all users through the Single-Sign On system for uniformity, but authenticating users via LDAP for aggregate control over users.
• Good Solution: Manually create users via the interface, then authenticate all users through a third-party authentication system.

• CMS providers will focus more on collaboration. These days, collaboration has become a more integral part of people’s work than it has ever been. The “de-silofication” of organizations has commenced and will continue to gain momentum. As a result, content management systems need to be flexible, provide easy and at the same time granular user administration, and, from a licensing standpoint, increase the number of users allowed in the system. In addition, CMS providers will need to look at workflow with fresh eyes. While the need for linear workflow will not completely go away, it’s safe to say that systems also strive to accommodate the way most people work these days - by collaborating in real time and in a less rigid manner.
• Accessibility will continue to be a priority. Accessibility has always been a top priority for organizations, but now more than ever, it has become more than just something that the webmaster takes care of. It is crucial that content contributors gain a more thorough understanding of accessibility, because their knowledge directly affects the way they create the web experience. It will be interesting to see how content management providers will facilitate this process moving forward.
• Mobile is going places. Most organizations have either already implemented a mobile site or are at least planning their mobile strategy for the near future. Therefore, it’s no surprise that in 2012, the ability to manage mobile sites with minimum effort and overhead will become a mandate. Which content management systems will provide the easiest way to re-purpose content for mobile use? How will they address Responsive Design?
• Content strategy will capture the spotlight. Content management is only the first step. Most organizations have the human resources (IT, web team, content contributors, etc.) and the technical resources (CMS, social media accounts, and analytics) in place to create, update, and promote their content, but how many of them actually have a content strategy in place? Providing value with original, helpful, and interesting content is the best thing you can do for your website and for your target audience, which is why we will see an increased emphasis on quality content, content strategy, and tools to help contributors identify which type of content works best.
• Stronger focus on inbound and content marketing techniques. There's more to content management than just being able to easily create pages. These days, organizations need to be empowered to leverage modern marketing best practices with regard to campaign management, SEO, keyword analysis, social media, and comprehensive reporting on trends and ROI. We understood these needs fairly early on, which is why our solutions help our customers meet those emerging challenges. I believe and hope that more companies will seize the opportunity to provide tools that really help organizations optimize their content marketing and their campaigns.

Of course, there are many more trends to look forward to. We are excited about the future of content management systems in general, and about our Cascade Server roadmap in particular. (Check out the Cascade Server roadmap video from the User Conference.)

Let’s hear from you. What are your predictions for 2012? Please add your comments below.

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For higher education, paid search, print brochures, direct mail and other traditional (and usually costly) advertising activities are short-lived marketing events that result in potential applicants in the short run and hopefully enrolled students after some period of time. These marketing tactics are not bad, but after an ad runs--whether or not it results in higher application or enrollment rates--it is over. It does not continue to bring you value afterwards. It is an expense.

Content marketing is different. After a content piece has been created, it continues to provide value to the organization for a long time afterwards. The simplest explanation of a content marketing strategy goes something like this: Your organization produces valuable content for your target market (potential students), which they read when they are looking for useful information related to your organization. By doing this, you increase the likelihood that when your target students get ready to apply to college, they will choose to apply to your school because they already know you, like you and trust you. Trust is an asset that is hard to buy with any advertising budget and can return benefits to your organization for years to come.

Building trust takes time, and writing quality content to help build that trust is not cheap or easy. But the point is that after you make the investment to create content, that content is an asset that can appreciate over time. Fresh quality content targeted to your audience does amazing things for your SEO in addition to helping you build trust. And once you’ve made the initial investment to create a really good, really valuable piece of content, you can find creative ways to derive additional value from it with little extra effort.

For example, a piece entitled Students’ Guide to Applying to College can be re-purposed into several high school presentations, ten different blog posts, some visual graphics, a webinar or two, and even some very brief, distilled tips communicated via your social media accounts. Meanwhile, the Guide itself also continues to deliver value to high school students looking for helpful information about applying to college for months or years to come.

By its virtue of lasting longer and providing value for your organization long after its creation, content is an asset, not an expense. Do you disagree? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

If you’ve read the Database Configuration Guide for MySQL (and if you’re an admin, hopefully you have) you may have noticed this line: “IMPORTANT: Make sure that your database is configured to use the InnoDB storage engine.” Unfortunately, despite that insistent all-caps word “IMPORTANT”, it’s easy to miss a single line in a lengthy configuration guide, and installation is possible to complete even if this step is not taken. There is an issue on file to make the InnoDB storage engine a precondition for server start-up, so fixing your database engine should be done sooner rather than later. In the meantime, what is the InnoDB engine, and why should you make sure your database is set up to use it?

InnoDB has two important features that the other major storage engine for MySQL, MyIsam, does not: row-locking and referential constraints (also known as foreign keys). Row locking, in contrast to table locking, means that only accessed records in a table will be locked, preventing other users from viewing or editing them. For MyIsam, all records for a table are locked every time a single record in that table is accessed. This means that as long as Cascade is reading/writing to any given page, file, block, format or template for a user, no other user can be served any page, file, block, format or template. For Cascade instances with a low user count, the performance impacts will probably be small, but for instances with high concurrency, the performance effects can be significant.

The second, and arguably much more important, feature of InnoDB is that it allows referential constraints. Referential constraints allow database integrity to be maintained for rows from a given table that reference other rows, either within different database tables or the same table. When the referenced row is deleted, these constraints can automatically delete the referencing row, delete just the reference or stop the deletion entirely. This means that when a structured data block references a file for one of its asset choosers, when that file is deleted then the association will be automatically cleared out. If this does not happen, then the structured data block cannot be rendered.

Most references in Cascade don’t solely use constraints to enforce data integrity; there is usually procedural code which enforces the integrity and the constraint is merely a backup. However, there are currently over 300 referential constraints and occasionally bugs do mean that our code doesn’t enforce integrity. In these cases, referential constraints become necessary. This means that if your database is using MyIsam as a storage engine, then the longer this continues, the more potentially crippling database inconsistencies may pop up.

So how do we go about verifying that our database is using InnoDB for all of its tables? First, to verify that all existing tables are using InnoDB, run the following commands in the MySQL command line:

You will see results that look something like this:

For every row, make sure the value for the “Engine” column is InnoDB. 

The next step is to make sure that your mysql configuration file has the option “default-storage-engine=innodb” specified under the mysqld section. The MySQL configuration file is named my.cnf (or my.ini for Windows) and is located in the installation directory of MySQL.  

If you do find that any of your tables are not using InnoDB as its storage engine, please contact support. Custom scripts are required to fix data inconsistencies, change the storage engines and restore referential constraints. If you’d like to skip the hassle of managing your database entirely, please feel free to contact us regarding a hosted license.