Class of 2013: Freshman Blog

Hey everyone! Welcome back to the Class of 2013 blog, and welcome to the new home of all of the Student Admissions Advisory Board Blogs (including Admissions_Daniel’s blog, Hopkins Insider)!

If you recall the mysterious project that I was mentioning in my previous blog post, this is it: the transfer of EVERYTHING from our old account on Typepad to a new, private domain where we have full control over the blogging system and the people who use it. This project actually began in the middle of last October, where we began to brainstorm what we were going to change about the blogging system. We continued to discuss what we were going to do and how it was going to be done up until Winter Break when the development actually began. Lauren and I have been working on this entire new system for almost a month now, and we were extremely excited when we made the final transfer yesterday. Overall we probably spent 20-30 hours each working on different features, but to us it didn’t seem like that at all. It’s funny because whenever we set aside time to work on things we find that we can’t think of anything to do, but when we’re in class or not in Mason Hall we end up finding a whole bunch of other things to add to our to-do list. At one point my to-do list had about 50-60 items on it. Luckily now its down to 15.

Do you remember the feeling you had as a kid where you just got a new toy and you were always excited to play with it? Well that’s the feeling that I’ve had ever since I started developing this entire new platform. Web design and development has always been my hobby, ever since I learned how to make a website in 7th grade from my high school Biology teacher. It’s just one of those things that fascinates me to no end, and there’s always something about it changing.

So let’s take a look at this new system, which runs on the WordPress Platform, and see what’s new, and why I think it’s so great compared to TypePad. Let’s start with the most obvious difference: the web address. Before you would go to http://hopkins.typepad.com/2013/ to read our blogs, and now you’re going to http://blogs.hopkins-interactive.com/2013/. Why did we do this? Well we knew from the start that if we were going to be using WordPress if we were leaving TypePad behind, and for us to be able to use WordPress with all of our blogs we needed our own domain name (thats what hopkins-interactive.com is). Eventually we’re planning on doing some cool stuff with this domain name. One example is we’re going to eventually make the address for our forums http://forums.hopkins-interactive.com/ instead of the current URL http://z14.invisionfree.com/Hopkins_Forums.

The next noticeable different is the look and feel of most of the blogs. When Lauren and I were transferring all of the data from TypePad, we realized that the themes were going to be the one thing that we couldn’t transfer. Most of the bloggers aren’t very attached to their themes, so we just decided to start from scratch with them. Daniel was a different case, he and Lauren worked long and hard on the theme for his blog so I made sure that his blog looks almost exactly as it did before. Check out the before and after blogs:

Before: http://hopkins.typepad.com/

After: http://blogs.hopkins-interactive.com/

One thing that made all of us really excited that we didn’t have before was something that every site needs: SEARCH BARS! Can you believe that our TypePad site didn’t have those?! I didn’t until I actually needed to find a post on Daniel’s old blog and I had to go through all of his posts until I found the one I was looking for. But that was all part of the fun of the transfer.

Unfortunately most of the drastic changes that occurred can only be seen by those of us who are blogging (for example,security: our system is 10x more secure and spam resistant because of the plugins available). Most of the things that I used to customize WordPress were made by online developers. It’s extremely easy to make a WordPress plugin because WordPress is open-source. That means that anyone can go and download WordPress’s source code and modify to fit their needs. TypePad wasn’t like this.

Don’t worry, I did make sure that we had a bunch of plugins installed that would make the overall site experience better for our users. The first thing on my list was the search bar, which will soon be available on all of our blogs (Lauren and I are still putting all of our finishing touches on the system, everything will be finalized by next week). Next I wanted to make sure that we had something snazzy for our images, and I found just the thing. What I am talking about? See for yourself below:

It's a lobster in a santa hat! As soon as I stopped laughing I knew I had to take a picture of this so I could share it with the world.

The first thing that you’ll notice is that the picture is surrounded with a border that almost makes it look like a polaroid. Daniel loved this because of the polaroids that we use on the main Hopkins Interactive site. The other thing is something you may have missed right away. Go back and click on the image and see what happens. Wasn’t that awesome?! Pretty much all of the bloggers love this feature since it looks really nice and it allows you to see the image in a bigger size. On our old site you would simply click on an image and it would open in a popup window. I think that this feature is 10x better. What’s even cooler is what happens if I put multiple pictures on the blog. So I’ve added another picture below, but I want you to get to it in a different way than by just clicking on it. Click on the image above and then hit the left or right arrow on your keyboard, click on the next button that appears on the right side..

This is a picture of most of my graduating class on our senior trip to the Poconos.

Personally I think this is even cooler than the actual image feature (maybe its because I’m amazed at the coding for it), but it’s just great that it links all the images you have in a post. As you can see there are a few problems, such as: it loads the image full size and doesn’t scale down to fit your window, and it loads all of the images from all of the blogs depending on the URL you’re accessing. These are actually going to be fixed in the next day or so, so if you don’t see the issues don’t worry about it.

This is probably my favorite picture of my graduating class. It was the day we found out that our high school was ranked 4th best in the nation.

Another feature that is different for the users is the commenting system. Before you couldn’t comment until you click on several links, typed your comment in the box, then you had to click on a bunch of other links to bring it back. Now all you do is simply type your comment in the box, and click the submit button. That’s it!

Aside from all this I have a bunch of monitoring scripts running to see if any of you happen to get an error that a page cannot be found. While I’m pretty confident that right now all of the links on our blogs are working, we have set up an email address that you can send your problems (or comments!) to, and that email is: webmaster@hopkins-interactive.com. Our site is also running Google Analytics so we can see how much traffic (and also what kind of traffic) we’re getting so that we can see how successful certain pages and features are with our site. This is even better than the analytics system TypePad had because, well simply because it’s made by Google!

Eventually all of our blogs are going to have the menu that you see at the top of this blog, as well as the footer at the bottom of this blog. We love consistency with our blogs, and this is a way to unify them no matter what their theme/content may be. It’s also my goal to have a search bar that will search through everything that we have on our Hopkins Interactive site as well as our blogs and forums.

Well that’s about all I’ve got to say about our new system (for now). The great thing about this is now that we have full reign over it, we can constantly update the platform with new features or change the look and feel. So don’t be surprised if you come back to our blog in a few days and see that something’s a little different. Thanks for reading all of this, I felt like I needed to jot all of this down for people who actually want to know about our new system.

Remember if you run into a problem or have some comments about the new system, send a email to webmaster@hopkins-interactive.com.

Thanks again for reading, and look for my next blog post (which will be on one of my regular topics) around the 23rd!

Edit: I just made a bunch of silent updates that fixed a bunch of problems that we had (unfortunately most of them are for the bloggers again). The problems that I mentioned with the plugin that is activated when you clicked on images has been completely eliminated, and it actually functions much nicer now. For example: try clicking on one of the images above and then scrolling with your mouse wheel, the plugin scrolls through the images for you! Aside from that you’ll notice that all blog posts now have a “Share This” button at the bottom of them. Right now we’re not too happy with the positioning of this, but that’s going to be resolved next week. Finally here’s something I know Daniel is going to love. As of yesterday the bloggers had to venture into the HTML realm of WordPress to add YouTube videos, but now thanks to this new plugin I have all they have to do is the the link to the YouTube video, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpxiCxO5k0g, and put a “v” between the “p” and the “:”. Watch what happens when I test it out:

The other plus to this is that you can position the text in the exact way that you want the YouTube video to be positioned. The best part about it is that we can control exactly how the video is going to function on each of the blogs now. Well that’s all for tonight, enjoy the video of the Baltimore Local Weather Forcaster freaking out about “Snowpocalypse”!