On this week's edition of the Coffee Break, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley talk about Lafayette's electronics recycling event for Green Week, announce when the Fall and Summer 2008 courses will be created in Moodle, and ask for feedback on how faculty use multimedia online. In Tech News, they talk about PayPal's decision to block visitors using old Web browsers, speculate on addition of New York Times news stories to Google Earth, and check out some new web applications for Facebook. Finally, Help News has tips on evaluating the effectiveness of your web site, as well as announcements about upcoming brownbag lunchs and workshops.

Getting the Podcast

There are several ways to get the podcast:

• Download the MP3 directly
• Subscribe to the Soapbox podcast rss feed using an aggregator (you only need to do this once; subsequent shows should download automatically)
• Subscribe to the Soapbox feed via iTunes

Show Notes

ITS News

• Electronics Recycling this week.
  • Friday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., Friday, 4/25 on the Markle Parking Deck
    
• Fall & Summer Moodle Courses
  • Courses will be created in Moodle by 5/5/08
    
• ITS web site has moved to its new home:
  • The ITS Web site has moved from ww2.lafayette.edu/~its to its.lafayette.edu.
    
• How do you use multimedia on the web?
  • We want to know: e-mail us your comments at itsblog@lafayette.edu.

Tech News

• PayPal to block users with old browsers to cut back phishing
  • http://www.macworld.com/article/133066/2008/04/browsers.html
  • Goodbye IE 3 and 4 users; PayPal's kicking you out the door (of course, you can also upgrade to a modern browser and stay around).
• New York Times enters Google Earth
  • http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/04/all-news-thats-fit-to-print-on-map-new.html
  • From Google's blog: "The New York Times offers geo-coded news, and Google Earth offers the platform for reading that news in a 3D browser. This is the first time we've endeavored to show news updated in real time, and we're very excited to work with this first-class publication to bring you the latest and greatest news."
• Facebook: Blog It
  • http://apps.facebook.com/blogittypepad/
  • New app within facebook that lets you post to Blogger, Twitter, and a host of other online services.
• Facebook introduces chat

Help News

• 7 Incredibly Useful Tools for Evaluating a Web Design
  • http://sixrevisions.com/tools/useful_web_analytics_tools
  • Found out about this one from Twitter. It includes ClickHeat for graphically showing where users click most, what's being ignored, YSlow that analyizes your page's load time, Google Analytics for tracking page stats
• Brown Bags
  • Podcasting: still cutting edge? Yes, but it's more mainstream than you might think, 12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m. , Wed., Apr 30
  • Moodle Showcase, 12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m. , Wed., May 14
    
• Workshops
  • Recording Audio and Creating Podcasts, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Thu., May 1
  • Register online for the workshop at http://its.lafayette.edu/pages/calenda

Contact Us

• itsblog@lafayette.edu