sbulife

I’m thrilled to see some of you giving this a shot. I’m glad you could make it to my talk today. I have links to my presentation on the USG website. For those who missed out, feel free to download it and take a look. If you still feel a little intimidated or lazy, please come down to SAC Suite 202 and find my Office of Communications in room 208. I love showing off SBUlife, and I know we all need a little motivation to get started. I’m happy to give you a private workshop. I am around 15 hours/week, but you can usually find me during lunch (12:50-2:20) on any day other than Wednesday or Friday. My assistant Lucy Kang is also a web developer and she can help you out.

By the end of the year, you will be on SBUlife one way or another, so may as well get started now. We can’t accept bribes or personal favors, and we can’t give you funding just because we like you or your cause, but everybody appreciates a club committed to responsible marketing. Lets create a vibrant culture where clubs compete for attention on campus and in the community. If you want to have a real impact, start here at a public university by exercising that free speech. Get out there and start marketing!

Stony Brook University’s Office of Communications recently launched a new website for their Stony Brook Happenings newsletter. It is a decent looking website with quite a bit of content already. But best of all, they have chosen the same popular blogging software that we use for SBUlife and the USG website; WordPress! This may be a first for the university. In the past they have used various proprietary content management systems that almost always turn out to be ugly, difficult and inferior to WordPress. This is a great leap forward in the University’s acceptance of Open Source software. If you are interested in Open Source, check out LUGSB or the similar group on SBUlife.

One of the major goals of SBUlife is to provide every club with a nice looking website that is easy to use on a short URL (http://clubname.sunysb.net). The most recent club to try it out is the Soccer Club. After inquiring about the service, they were able to create this empty but professional looking website and blog in just minutes: http://sbusoccerclub.sunysb.net

To get started, think of the url you want and go to it to check if it is available.

1. http://sample.sunysb.net

2. Fill out the form on the page to create it.

3. Login to your blog’s Dashboard and poke around. Create your first blog post with Posts>Add New

4. To build the website navigation, Create a static page with Pages>Add New

5. No need to design your website, choose from more than 100 professional themes in Appearance>Themes

Best of all, anyone can make their own free SBUlife blog. Make it for your club or for yourself, and never worry about the long address and limited hosting provided by the university again. If you need assistance, we will have a team of web developers to help you customize your website. Feel free to contact me: dmazza [@stonybrookusg.org]

Starting today, you can add any event to your calendar with a new “Remind me with Google Calendar” button found on every event page under Date and Time. The feature was requested yesterday by a Facebook user. Try it out on any SBUlife event.

After more than 5 months of planning and development, 3 versions and more hours of work than I care to think about, we have finally launched a website that will organize all campus events in one place. SBUlife is a student-powered social network for clubs and organizations to reach students in an organic community that is not affiliated with, funded or managed by the university.

In that time, we have released quite a few new features, and we have a brand new version coming very soon.
Recently Added Features:

• Facebook Connect: No need to create an account, just use your Facebook account to sign in with one click. If you stay signed into Facebook, you will stay signed into SBUlife.
• Group Events: When you create an event, you can associate the event with your group, just like Facebook. The event will link to your group and your group will show the event.
• Group Blogs: When you create a blog for your group, you can associate that blog with the group, and every member of the group is instantly a member and contributor to the blog. Your website will be more active than ever.
• Friends’ Activity: A custom feed of just your friends’ activity.
• Brand New Layout: We have developed our own unique design for SBUlife to make it easier to use and more familiar for Facebook users.

New Features coming soon:

• Status Updates
• Filtered Activity Feeds
• Refreshed Look and Feel
• Facebook Status Updates
• Create and RSVP to Facebook Events
• Twitter Wire and Updates

We now support group events, just like events on Facebook. If you are an admin for any group, you can now create events for your group. When you create a new event, you will see a drop-down of your groups, and you can select one to associate the new event with your group. The event will link back to your group, and you will now see a list of group events on your group page.

This network is focused around publicizing events on campus, so this is an important addition to the functionality of the site. You can see this in action if you look at the USG group page and events.

We hope to add recurring events (like meetings) and automated notifications for attendees. The majority of the software we are using to run the site is in beta or pre-beta, so obviously some of the functionality is still missing or buggy. Please send me a message if you find anything strange.

We are in the middle of an upgrade to the bleeding edge of Wordpress MU, BuddyPress, and our Events Component. Look out for group events soon!

Update:
The upgrade has been completed. Just a few minor things left to work out. However, we will now be going through regular weekly upgrades, so the site could go down at any time.

For my fellow developers testing out the site, we are running Wordpress MU 2.7.1, Buddypress 1.0 RC2 r1324, and bp-events 0.55
I’d like to thank Erwin Gerrits for his Buddypress Events Component.

Stony Brook has changed. We spent 40-45 years as just another SUNY school, part of a system with inadequate funding and a sub-par repuatation. Stony Brook has been changing, modernizing, and enjoying its first endowment. With a few simple new ammenities like a Student Activities Center, and a School of Jounralism, we are attracting different types of students. We haven’t quite figured out what to do with it yet, but we  are making progress. The recent economic situation has been bitter sweet for Stony Brook. We see tuition hikes and budget cuts, but we will also attract a much more talented applicant pool. With that we will also see more admittd students enrolling, but that is good new for the Undergraduate Student Government, whose budget is dependent upon how many undergraduate students attend. We will have a larger budget than ever for student activities next year, but what are we going to do with it? More importantly, what are you going to do with it?

I believe that the largest factor contributing to our highest ranking, #3 for unhappiest students, is our complete lack of community on campus. Many large universities face this problem, and most simply throw money at it. We don’t have money to throw at anything. We have pleanty of events going on all the time, but it is very hard to find out about them. These events are mostly attended by friends of the club, and some aren’t even advertised. Without a great campus community, word-of-mouth doesn’t work very well.

The new Stony Brook now has the money and reputation to hold some great events and host some great speakers, but there is no central location to get the word out about them. The idea of a campus social network is still very young, but a few schools are trying out the idea. A startup at Yale developed their social network. It appears to be a great success. I thought of developing a social network as I faced the task of redeveloping the USG website. I starting looking into different software solutions, and other universities’ solutions. No other university has really developed a full social network like SBU Life, but there are some decent event-based community solutions out there. I hope to drive a new kind of campus community with SBU Life, and I will hope you will join me with this preview of the new Stony Brook.

We hope to release SBU Life before the Fall ‘09 semester.

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