Today I had the privilege of delivering a talk at the 2012 What’s Next DC conference. Held at George Washington University, the 1 day conference provides digital communication and social media professionals with real life examples on peers tackling commons projects.

Run by the indomitable Tod Plotkin, the conference has a fresh active format with plenty of breakout sessions for smaller groups to review together. Overall, I am very excited to be apart of this conference and to spend some time in DC with the tech community here.

The presentation today combined a solid use case from Steven Mau and some strategy tips by myself on building a “developer toolkit”. Steven Mau is the Director of digital communications at NYU Stern School of Business. He has been very forward-thinking in building a team that could rapidly iterate and produce a stunning redesign for NYU’s premiere graduate school.

Special thanks for all the attendees today who came to our talk and the Q&A session afterwards.

If you have a minute, give us some feedback (or love!) on SpeakerRate along with anything that’s helpful in reviewing our talk. I have posted the “Developer and Marketing Website Strategy” slides to Slideshare for download – feel free to contact me with any questions or for more detail.

Tonight’s closing What’s Next DC reception is over at the British Embassy on Mass Ave near the Naval Observatory – hope to see you there!

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- C

Grabbox – Simple screenshot sharing for Mac

http://grabbox.devsoft.no/

Instant sharing of your screen – that is the essence of Grabbox: It does one simple task and it does it so well.

When I am working with a colleague or reviewing comps with a client, I need the ability to share portions of my screen in real time while typing on instant message clients like Skype or iChat. For me, it’s been a bungle to configure screen sharing since I cannot guarantee that the other person has the right equipment or software to review what we are working on.

The beauty of GrabBox is that is takes a few tasks and combines it into a lighting fast 1 second action.

When you take a screen shot of your display, a particular window, or a selection, GrabBox takes the image which by default lands on your desktop and throws it into a screenshot folder in your Dropbox public directory. In addition, it adds a bit.ly-fied link to your clipboard so you can paste a link to your contact instantly.

A side by side comparison:

Looking through the steps above, GrabBox streamlines the process of rapid screen sharing. It’s a simple script and it just rocks.

From an archival perspective, all your screenshots are stored in one folder named “Screenshots” which makes it SO convenient to retrieve a clip that you shared. Also whats really useful is that you can delete an image or replace a certain image. This is more of the outlier use case but think of when you send someone a link to you screenshot and it is shared (which you can see thanks to bit.ly’s metrics!) – all you need to do is delete the file from you Dropbox.

For the Windows people among you, I have heard that http://tinygrab.com/ is a comparable script for Windows users.

Few tips (and a word to the wise):

If you want to use this tool – go ahead and get yourself a free Dropbox account here: http://db.tt/B7yycHX

By default, GrabBox makes incremental filenames such as 1.png, 2,png, etc. Definitely want to change that so links are always unique and your contact doesn’t try to change the url paths to find other images that were not intended for that audience.

Basically just look at my preference pane and adjust your settings:

All I can say is one time I sent my boss a url and it unfortunately was the wrong screenshot — “smooth move, Ex-Lax“. The “Random filename” URLs takes care of this, which returns files names like 87d8.png.

Beyond these basics, I think you’ll find this to be an awesome time saver and super straightforward tool.

NOTE:
If you are already a hardcore GrabBox user – help Jørgen P. Tjernø out and support his development efforts! http://pledgie.com/campaigns/13553

Walking into the Learning Studio is an immersive experience in itself. Coming towards the entrance, it feels like something out of a startup – the dream rockstar type startups. Thanks to a generous grant from AT&T, Abilene Christian University was encouraged to explore new ways for integrating mobile and multimedia into the learning experience for all students.

Through planning, design, and with the right resources in place – an internal team of professors, architects, and digital media professionals spearheaded the building of this new space. Filled with collaborative rooms and digital lab environments, this is a great place for brainstorming as a team. In addition to collaborative rooms, the Learning Studio is equipped with audio booths for podcasting setups. To top off the setup, they have a state of the art dSLR powered video production center for creating more complex multimedia packages.

With a setup like this, I had to find out what’s the overall goal for this space. Turns out through the partnership with AT&T, the Learning Studio is focused on increasing digital competency while providing the university community with three specific tangents: “create, collaborate, and explore”.

In their own words:

“AT&T’s pioneering gift supports three related approaches to teaching and learning innovation at ACU. The Learning Studio provides a laboratory for experiments in mobility and media across the university curriculum. Mobility and Media Specialists will work with students and faculty to impact learning through studio production as well as mobile media creation in the field. ” Source

Another aspect I found really intriguing is their mission to facilitate the act of digital storytelling. Currently this is a hot topic among top tier Universities – many who have been inspired by NPR’s ‘Story Corps’ along with the first school to nail it – MIT’s Tech TV. The majority of schools are using it as a fundraising tool to foster community among the alumni groups reliving collegial memories. What’s awesome about ACU’s approach is the level of authenticity that comes with their mission – to equip students to go out and create their own digital stories.

The kickoff samples are stunning:

Digital Academy – Gruene, Texas

Thanks to the Learning Studio for putting me up this week and I look forward to seeing more incredible work from your studio!

Learning studio links:

• http://blogs.acu.edu/learningstudio/
• https://twitter.com/#!/learningstudio
• http://www.youtube.com/user/aculearningstudio?feature=watch

It’s been quite the whirlwind these last few months.

For starters, my wife, daughter, and I packed up and moved from Boston to Sunnyvale, CA late October. Beginning early November, I slid into my new role at Evernote  which has so far been an *awesome* experience. Working in downtown Mountain View is fun all by itself and the office is the bomb.

We have been trying to explore San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area on the weekends. There is a ton to do here dining and outings wise and our baby daughter is having a blast running around everywhere. It’s been really tough to move away from family and friends back home in Boston – we miss them incredibly. Also I should add that Harvard has some ridiculous employee benefits that I definitely took for granted (gym, paternal leave, vacation, tuition coverage, etc).

Have more updates and posts to launch soon enough, just checking in.

TL;DR – All is great in in SF and 2012 has a lot in store.

After some exciting developments over the course of this summer, I have some big news. After 5+ years at Harvard, I will be resigning my positions at HPAC and as the chair of the Harvard Web Working Group. It’s been a great experience being apart of the community we have here at Harvard and specifically the role that the web working group serves at the University.

During this time, our team rebuilt the Harvard Gazette, launched a live video site for commencement, created a news sharing widget for our network of sites, and of course the whole team plus many more successfully launched the new Harvard.edu.

It has been an incredible experience working at Harvard along with enjoying the community and opportunities that were presented over the last few years. I had the privilege of working with some incredible co-workers and team members. Now that I’m leaving, I can honestly say that I had an amazing boss who challenged the heck out of me and pushed me to always try harder.

As for the upcoming adventure, I have accepted a position at Evernote as Senior Web Developer. Located in Silicon Valley, this is a solid team that is rapidly iterating and improving the best note syncing tool on the market. The projects at Evernote will challenge me in ways that only a start-up can.

This also means that my wife daughter and I will be packing up over the next week weeks as we prepare to move cross country. We had the opportunity to visit San Francisco and the bay area beforehand and honestly we fell in love with the place. Living and working in Silicon Valley has been a dream of mine and we could not be any happier to take this plunge and look forward to a wild ride. Ahhhhhhhh!

Look forward to sharing dispatches from the road and beyond.

p.s. I had to buy this SF Local 415 shirt from Pixelworkers Union.

Here are the details:
Title
High Performance & Social Distribution Strategy

Event
Interactive 2012

Format
Solo

Organizer
Chris Traganos ‐ Harvard University

Description
As organizations interact directly with their online communities, the need to create a solid framework for dialog is critical for success. Chris will review methods and demonstrate tools for supporting Harvard’s online presence. Using insights gained from specific examples and lessons, the talk will aim to provide tangible steps and best practice for your sites.

Questions Answered

• How do we respond to patterns in our site’s traffic?
• What methods are used to scale and distribute content online?
• What steps should our design and communications teams take to work together more tightly?
• What tools will support our online strategy?
• How do I prepare for traffic spikes to my online channels?

Category
Content / Content Strategy

Tags
design ux, online strategy, Social Engagement

Thanks a ton, looking forward to meeting up in Austin!

The approach they take involves exploring the plugin directory to match a need they have for the site. Once they find a close match, they begin to dissect the plugin to see the inner workings and overall structure. From their findings regarding the quality and customizations in the plugin, they determine if it’s best to patch or build a new plugin.

They stressed that the inherit value in this approach is taking advantage of the community in a way that leverages hundreds of developer hours as their baseline. From the beginning, they have to choose between light tweaks, rebuild, or to create the solution they are seeking.

Main examples from Marc and Wes’s talk were Navis slideshow and a social media integration tool. They are actively working on delivering new plugins to the open source community. These efforts also fit into the mission of NPR and CPB, which fund their network of sites, Project ARGO. You can read more of the project here, here, and here.

Special thanks for the talk and the rest of the speakers at WordCamp Boston 2011, it was an amazing time.

Slides from the presentation are embedded below:

(Note: Found a good review of the talk by Daniel Bachhuber here.)

Held at Boston University, this year’s WordCamp Boston will be full of presentation tracks, catering, expert workshops, and of course the night time after-party over at the Microsoft NERD center!

If you are attending the event this weekend, make sure to high five the volunteers – they will be rocking the navy shirts and orange lanyards.

The dream team volunteer crew is listed here: http://twitter.com/#!/ctraganos/wcbos11vollies

4 days till show time!

Typically, the meet-ups for Build Guild in Salem number around 30 mainly developers and designers. This month brought in a serious crowd that made the event a lot of fun. The night had 13+ sponsors that covered an opening beer tab, raffle giveaways, and a decent sized job board.

Organized by local developers Marc Amos and Fred LeBlanc, “Build Guild is a monthly gathering of web folks that enjoy chatting over drinks.” It really aims to be the ‘anti-talk’ in that you will not find a presentation, lecture, or row style seats anywhere. This is meant to pull together technical and non technical people with the aim of bridging networks and making useful connections. Often you bring questions or experience to these meet ups and will walk away inspired. The inherit value of conversing with those in your industry whose work you respect is invaluable.

Looking forward to these events and definitely suggest you stop by if in the area. Remember they are the second Tuesday of each month, check here to be safe.

As the in-house web developer, this project involved building out a site that would handle multiple social and video integrations along with taking full advantage of revised Harvard-wide identity guidelines. Comps, design, information architecture, development and launch were completed in short order.

Credits
Harvard Live Stream

Presentation
Live streaming Harvard’s 360th Commencement: Video & Web

© The President and Fellows of Harvard College