myUMBC Quick Update: October 6, 2011

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 11:44:48 -0400
groups, myumbc, notifications, subscriptions, topics, vimeo, youtube

Here's a little midday present for you all... an UPDATE.

Group Notifications

When posting content within a group, you have the option on whether or not to send notifications to group members.

Group Subscriptions

Group admins can modify subscriptions to external feeds to not send notifications when pulling in content.

DEPRECATION NOTICE: If you are pulling in an RSS feed to myUMBC, we have be including a hidden iframe within myUMBC so that when someone loads an article, it also records a hit on the original site. This was done so that folks could track the usage of their site using their existing analytics tools. On November 1, 2011, we will no longer be providing this service and instead will provide a view tracking mechanism within myUMBC. This is to make myUMBC friendlier on browsers (they won't have to download two entire pages) and minimize any security risks associated with pulling in external sites.

Video Content in Posts

We now support the new YouTube iframe embed format.

Topics Menu

We've reverted the Topics menu back to its original format. For the first month and a half we tracked how long it took people to find items in the Topics menu using three different types of layouts. Based on the data, we found the original layout to be consistently as fast if not faster for people to find what they needed.