e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: From the Editors

These posts provide updates about our editorial policies as well as changes to the site itself.

  • Catching Up on the Backblog

    Work has been keeping me so busy lately that the list of postable items has been piling up on my virtual desk. I’m going to try to do some catching up over the next week.

    Let me start by calling your attention to Eric Feinblatt’s new blog. Eric is a new friend, colleague, and co-conspirator at SUNY. (He works with Beth Harris at FIT.) Eric and I are working on a project that we’ll be able to talk about more publicly Real Soon Now.

  • Upgraded to Expression Engine 1.2.1

    I have upgraded the site to Expression Engine 1.2.1, which should fix the feed updating problem with Bloglines (which, by the way, still sucks).

    As a bonus, I can now use the a desktop blogging application for authoring posts. I am writing this, for example, using MarsEdit, which I highly recommend. It’s very intuitive.

  • Trying Out the Technorati Tags Thing

    With some reluctance, I have added “folksonomy” as a sub-category in my site themes. I’m doing this specifically because Technorati will now pick up these posts as having been “tagged” with “folksonomy.” Frankly, I’m not sure this is a great idea. It encourages the proliferation of categories, which is not necessarily useful to the readers. But I’m curious to see what it does for traffic and cross-pollination, so I’m giving it a try.

  • Some SUNY Trivia

    Here are some interesting facts about my new employer:

    • The total number of students, 413,000, is pretty close to the total poplulation of the European country Luxembourg, making SUNY the largest state university system in the country.
    • That 413,000-person student body includes 40 percent of all New York State high school graduates and roughly 37 percent of the state’s entire higher education student population.
    • Despite the fact that New York has one of the highest costs of living in the Union, SUNY has the 13th cheapest cost of state university tuition, i.e., 37 out of 50 state universities are more expensive than SUNY.
    • The per-pupil cost of education exceeds in-state tuition, which means that the New York state taxpayers partially subsidize the education of every in-state student.
    • One of the reasons that it’s worthwhile for New York state taxpayers to subsidize SUNY education is because, for every state dollar received, SUNY generates $8 in total spending in NYS. For example, SUNY estimates that it had a $17.6 billion total economic impact in 2003.

    Pretty impressive, huh?

  • Welcome Back, Bloglines Subscribers

    Apparently, Bloglines hasn’t been updating my feeds for the last two months. Thanks to Amy Gahran, I found out yesterday that this was(n’t) happening. I submitted a bug report to the Bloglines team and I’m happy to report that I had a “we’re working on it” non-automated response within a half hour or so. It looks like they have at least partly fixed the problem, though I’m still seeing something of a lag.

    Anyway, apologies to Bloglines subscribers who have been out of the loop since October. I’ll keep a closer eye on this in the future.

  • Lots of Good Stuff Coming

    I’m still alive; I’ve just been immersed in my new job. I’m learning tons of good stuff and am getting close to the point where I can take a deep breath, have a drink, and make time to do a little blogging. There is some amazing work going on at SUNY and I can’t wait to share some of it.

    Stay tuned.

  • A New Job

    I have some personal news that will have an impact on this blog. After 8+ years in the consulting world, I am moving over into the world of higher education. I am delighted to announce that I have accepted a position with the State University of New York (SUNY) as part of the SUNY Learning Network (SLN). (more…)