10 Creative Contests Powered by Social Media

With creativity and a thoughtful connection to your audience, a contest can provide a host of benefits beyond just a list of names. GO »

45+ Excellent Code Snippet Resources and Repositories

The beauty of code snippets is their ability to save you time when developing a site. Whether you keep a file with your own often-reused snippets or turn to one of the many online repositories, snippets can really speed up your site development. GO »

The 10 Rock Solid Elements of Effective Online Marketing

au·thor·i·ty noun: the power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior. GO »

Selecting or Designing iPhone and Mobile Software for Physicians

Adam Kenney and his team have been building medical apps for mobile platforms and his insights arise from direct experience managing the design, development, and support of native applications for the Palm, BlackBerry, and iPhone. GO »

do you digg it?

have you ninged lately?

The Vanderbilt web community is on NING. Join the discussion: network with other developers, create interest groups, post videos, links, ask/answer questions on the forum, etc. GO »

cool tools

Iconfinder

Amazing resource for icons of all types. Search, Browse and Download.

Detect Mobile Browsers

This PHP function lets you choose how to manage your mobile visitors.

Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder

You can use this form to build your campaign tracking links for GA. GO »

full of goodness

These sites rock—you can't just pick one article!

One Extra Pixel

37signals Presentations

Web Design Ledger

new site?

Has your department launched a new Web site recently? Send us an e-mail and we'll tag it in next month's digidores!

next spiders meeting:

Friday, August 28
10 - 11 a.m.
Sarratt 325,327

Come with your seminar ideas for our second annual DIGITAL VU month coming up in October.

Vanderbilt Web search now powered by Google

Vanderbilt University and Medical Center’s Web sites have implemented the Google Search Appliance to make information easier to find on the over one million pages that make up the institution’s Web presence.

Information Technology Services purchased, operates and maintains the Google search appliance, while the Division of Public Affairs and the Medical Center Web Team administer it, with additional assistance from the Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center.

“Search sits at the center of our digital life, as it enables our community - from students to faculty to staff - to get the information they need to better teach, learn and discover,” Matthew Jett Hall, assistant vice chancellor for ITS and associate chief information architect for information architecture, said. “Google remains the market and technology leader in search and online
collaborative infrastructure for our community. This infrastructure grows and evolves with the needs of Vanderbilt - and it tracks with the way we work, play and conduct our research lives.”

Unlike Google’s free search and other free searches, the Google Search Appliance provides significant advantages to the enterprise as a whole and to individual schools and departments, including more accurate search results, which can be "tuned" to meet the needs of VU; quicker search response time; easy and powerful search administration; easy integration into Web sites; continuous crawling; managing customized searches of sites and search result pages, and the ability to index restricted access sites, including intranets.

The Vanderbilt Web search is heavily used, with an average of 240,000 searches conducted per month at the university during the academic year and 51,000 conducted per month on medical center sites.

The new search engine was launched in July and continues to be fine-tuned in order to return the most relevant results for any given search term. For questions or assistance with the search engine, e-mail searchsupport@vanderbilt.edu.

More information about Vanderbilt’s Google Search Appliance is available here: www.vanderbilt.edu/searchsupport/.

Have links we should feature in next month's news letter?
Save them on delicious with the tag "vuwebtips" or send us an e-mail with the link.