News

ETCS has recently purchased a Web analytics software package called Urchin. After quite a bit of testing by ETCS and the Web team, we feel this is a very good statistics package to replace both Webtrends and Sawmill, which we were running in parallel to produce reports.

ETCS has set up Urchin to analyze current logs, plus they fed in old logs going back to January 2005 so that you can examine trends over time for your site.

This software is different than either of the ones we were using, and new to us, too, so we're all just learning it's functionality and capabilities. If you figure out something really cool, or if you are completely baffled, please send Kate akersk@missouri.edu a note so she can post a tip about that task and/or just help you figure it out.

We added a "Calendar events" refinement to the Google custom search engine so that you can narrow your results to just calendar events from the Webapps system that match your search terms. Try this (search for "plant sale" then click the refinement option for Calendar Events) and you will see how important it is to put the event location in the title information.

Yesterday ETCS made a necessary configuration change to the web server that causes the old URLs of outreach and muextension to roll over, or automatically forward visitors to http://extension.missouri.edu. We made this change because having three separate URLs for our site has made our statistics collection and searching very complicated, makes marketing our site difficult and keeps our Google page rankings low. It has been two years since we consolidated the servers and asked people to use extension.missouri.edu as our primary URL, so we feel enough time has passed that this change is appropriate.

This change makes no difference to visitors, as the old URLs will still get them to our page. But it means that if you are editing a Web page on our server using MS FrontPage, you MUST log in using extension.missouri.edu as the domain name.

If you try to open FrontPage and get this error: "The server could not complete your request. Contact your internet provider or Web server administrator to make sure that the server has the FrontPage server extension SharePoint serve installed."

Then this is what you need to do -- follow the login procedure instructions again, making sure you use http://extension.missouri.edu/yourwebsite/ as the URL. Here are the instructions.

New guidelines for affiliate program Web sites such as Master Gardener sites, Master Naturalist chapters, 4-H clubs. Here are the new guidelines

On January 4 we implemented a new search tool on extension.missouri.edu pages (found in the upper right corner of most pages). This search tool uses a new utility offered by Google.com to search a list of Web servers where MU Extension content is housed. Two iterations ago, we were using Google, but were limited to searching only one domain – either just extension.missouri.edu or all of Missouri.edu, excluding satellite sites such as www.missourifamilies.org and www.missouribusiness.net.

A year ago we switched to using a search tool supported by MU campus Information and Access Technology (IATS) called HT:dig. This tool allowed us to specify the list of servers to search, but only used single keyword searching, not quoted phrases, so it was still not yielding very good results.

This new tool is the best of both, allowing the search to encompass all MU Extension content, plus allowing users to use the advanced search options that Google supports. In addition, we’ve configured it to offer users to refine their search in the results by narrowing down to the list of MU Extension guide sheets (and other official publications) that came up in the results. To see this option, search for a topic (“manure management”, for example), then choose
Refine results for manure management:
Extension guides

If you then click “clear refinements” it will return you to the full list of results.

Internet Explorer users may get a pop-up warning that the page is trying to access Google.com, one of your Trusted Sites. Click Yes when you see this message.

The Google search results will also suggest correct spellings of words if you happen to misspell or mistype a word in the search box.

If for some reason your browser cannot display the search results properly, there is a link at the bottom of the page to a secondary search page where the results are displayed using a simpler format. From Jan 4 to 16, only 1.8% of searches have jumped to the secondary page, so this will not present a problem for very many users.

Kate recently went through all county/regional main pages and added a server side include link that displays the copyright and non-discrimination statement. This replaces the old EEO statement and should be used at the bottom of all "main" or "opening" pages to sections of web content. I.E. county sites, newsletters, other programmatic sites.

To add this SSI link to a page that resides on extension.missouri.edu, you can insert the following line of code into the Code view of your page. In Design mode in FrontPage, place your cursor where you want it to appear. At the bottom of the design window, there is the option for "Design, Split, Code or Preview". Choose Split or Code and then paste in the section of code in the code view where your cursor appears.

	<!--#include virtual="/standards/includes/eeoada-footer.html"--> 
&nbsp;<!--webbot bot="PurpleText" PREVIEW="Copyright and non-discrimination statement. 
Do not remove." -->

If you need assistance adding this to your page, please contact Kate akersk@missouri.edu.