Homepage Survival Guide: How to Raise Content from the Dead (TNT5)
Foothills II
In this session, we’ll showcase how we used our braaaains to bring content from many different sources to life by adding an institutional lifestream to our homepage. This stream combines Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, Flickr, blog and…
Brad Mitchell (Missouri State University)
Sara Clark (Missouri State University)

I was promised zombies.

A single stream of many content sources. Facebook. Twitter. Flickr. Blogs. RSS feeds. YouTube. Foursquare. Master Calendar (decided to keep separate)

Had to decide what weapons would be in the cache. And who will use them.

– Let them come to you.
– Be thorough. Grab everything. Look for changes.
– Plan an escape route (cache)
– Focus on voodoo zombies (thought & emotion) not Hollywood zombies (not so important). Screen scraper starts with priority feeds.

Show photos, activity, source. Video and audio play without going anywhere.

Avatars show source.

Immunizations
– Problem with duplicate links from multiple sources. Only show the first one. Check for shorteners.
– Simplify long links. [visit links]

Slow vs fast zombie
– 1 post per month vs 6 tweets in 30 seconds.
– limit department to 1 post per 30 minutes.
– Inappropriate content. Just remove the source.
– Overrunning hoards. Capacity. Currently has 91 sources. Takes a minute to run.
– need to impact multi audiences before we will add your to stream. Not just current students.
– You do have to train constantly.

www.missouristate.edu/homepagesurvivalguide