Student Affairs + Technology: IHE Recap

Career Services and Social Media: Todd really says it best ;-)

@EricStoller If there is a single Student Affairs dept that could *pwn* social media it is career services.less than a minute ago via web

Let’s shift some paradigms: Introducing my new blog at Inside Higher Ed.

Challenge and Tech Support: Student Affairs practitioners and Tech Support departments…please let us be admins.

Do you YouTube? Don’t forget to add captions: Would you build a new building without an elevator? Nope… Then why would you ever create videos without captions?

George Orwell, Web Stats, and Your Site Visitors: Student Affairs + Web Stats….Nerdvana :-)

Link spammer targets higher education sites

I received the following comment on my blog a couple weeks ago:

“Yeah blogging is really a great way to help people. Great job. I salute you for doing such a great job. ;)”

link spam comment on wordpress blog

The comment felt like it was spam. The post that was commented on was almost a year old and the comment seemed like it was just a way for the commenter to get their link on a blog post on blogging and academic advising.

As most of you know, I am an avid web statistics aficionado. The same day that the spammy comment was submitted (I moderate all new comments) I noticed two inbound referral links from a couple of Google Docs spreadsheets. My concerns that the comment was from a spammer were confirmed. In fact, I had stumbled upon two link spam documents that had been left open for anyone to see. A SEO company known as “Virtual Assistant” (link is to the Better Business Bureau listing…I love the irony!) was waging a concerted link spam campaign and my site had been “selected” for one of their spam comments.

I quickly saved copies of the link spam documents.

Continue reading Link spammer targets higher education sites

Web Stats Addict (WSA)

It is public knowledge that I am a web stats addict. Web stats are a variable reward system that keep me coming back to check on my referrals, keyword searches, and recent visitor activity. I think Wendy is going to host a web stats intervention soon… Is anyone else hooked on their web stats?

Eric Stoller web site statistics from statcounter

More web stats goodness after the jump.
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Technology and Student Affairs

iStudentAffairs.com: A social networking site for Student Affairs administrators. 661 people have already signed up. The site runs off of Ning. I’m not sure if I have the life space for another website, but the discussions on iStudentAffairs.com have been interesting.

Technology panel: I’ll be on a panel for Academic Advising + Web 2.0 at the regional NACADA conference in Vancouver in March. I guess I’ll be chiming in on anything to do with accessibility, blogging, wikis, web statistics, podcasting, rss, etc. I’m walking out if someone calls Facebook an “emerging technology.”

Academic Advising Wiki:
I have convinced my colleagues that an internal knowledge base a.k.a. a wiki, would be highly beneficial for our office. I demoed an installation of MediaWiki (similar to the Oregon State University wiki) and hope to get it up and running next month. For more information on higher education and wikis, check out these videos on “21 days of Wiki Adoption“:

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Website traffic + Popular posts

web statistics chart for Eric Stoller's Blog

The web site statistics for my presence in bloglandia have increased quite a bit since January 2007. Prior to September 2006 I was primarily blogging at my Oregon State University web account. I transitioned the OSU account over to ericstoller.com in September. Web statistics for September 2006 to January 2007 were fairly consistent: 2,000+ Unique Visits and about 4,000 Page Views.

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Statcounters Anonymous

How many times have I checked today? It’s like a sickness. Statcounter.com is my home page for FireFox! I check my site statistics to see how many visits I’m getting on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. I have obsessive web statistics disorder. My dashboard in WordPress now has a menu item called “Reports.” The plugin, called WordPress Reports, utilizes my Google Analytics account and pulls information into the admin interface.

I love looking at referrals, recent keyword activity, and page views. I love “optimizing” for search engines. I have OWSD!

Go ahead, admit that you love it too.

Update: I forgot that I also have the “Live” plugin installed which lets me view my website activity in REAL TIME!!!

Update 2: Brownfemipower, Radem, Sage and VeganKid are also stats junkies :-)