In my spare time.

**WE ARE LIVE**  It took a couple of days, but now we are officially LIVE in Google Earth!  Check it out by downloading Google Earth 4 and fly to “1 University Dr, Springfield, IL” and we will be there!  Make sure you enable 3D Buildings as well in the lower left hand “Layers” box.

**My Jing account only has 1GB of bandwidth that apparently I reached after 5 views yesterday…I’m going to work on fixing that today, but if you cannot view the video, my apologies.**

I’ve had something lately that I haven’t really had for a while: spare time. I’ve decided that I wanted to put some of that time to good use. I stumbled across a video on YouTube about the University of Colorado in Boulder, CO.

So I thought, why not do that for my campus?! I really enjoyed my 3D design class, so I told myself, “Self, you’re gonna do this!” I went to Google Earth to figure out what to do. They have a program called Google Sketchup which I downloaded, and after a couple days of testing and trying to figure it out, I was able to construct something that I thought looked pretty good. Watch the video below that I made using a service called Jing, something I had forgotten I was able to get. @Joe, Jing allows me to do screen captures for free! *Shakes head…

For now, I cannot embed my screencast video. Click here to view the screencast of my Google Earth Video.

I plan to be able to complete all the buildings within a month or two (it took me about 4 days to do UHB). It may not be a very widely used service, but I think some students will enjoy going in and playing around with it. Plus, it gives our online population the ability to see our campus without having to actually travel here. 2D photos can only do so much. So go download Google Earth and type in our address “1 University Plaza, Springfield, IL” and play around with it. Let me know what you think!

 

New Blog Unveiling!

Hey everyone! I’ve moved my blog over to WordPress. Leave your feedback and let me know what you think.

For the time being, I’ll still be double-posting to my blogger blog, but after a month or so, that one will be archived. Update your RSS feeds to stay up to date!

 

Keywords search

This morning I have spent some time looking into what people search for when they view websites. I decided to review some hits my blog has received and how they got there. If you aren’t using Google Analytics, you really should be! It’s easy to set up and easy to use. The data you get is fantastic!

Anyway, I found some interesting things while reviewing the keywords and these are some that popped up:

“wow uis”
“‘my car bounces’”
“mobster art”
“real deal cheap broadway tickets”
“shuttle from spi to bmi”
“uis rims”

Those are just a few of the ones I found interesting. My friend Brad J Ward over at SquaredPeg posted a topic about Google Alerts this morning. As with just about everything that google does, I tried it out. Already got one alert from Nicholas’ Blog! Nice to see it works. I’ll review Google Alerts later after I play with it some more.