Streaming live events with uStream
We’re not doing lifecasting like Brad, but this Spring we streamed all our home men’s and women’s basketball games here at Allegheny. Now that the season is over, it’s a good time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what we can improve on for next year.
In December, our SID came to me and said he was interested in streaming our games. It was a great idea though at first I worried about how to do it easily and most importantly, very cheaply, as our budget for this process was exactly zero.
There were three important pieces I needed to figure out before we could start streaming video. The first was the video itself, the second was the networking setup and the third was how to send the stream to the world.
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Twittering in Higher Ed
The use of Twitter by institutions sure is a hot topic right now. Jeremy talks about it here. In one of his previous posts on this topic, I left a comment and he asked a follow up question regarding our use of Twitter at Allegheny.
I’m debating whether it would be good to have us out there posting info that few would read, or devote the time to something else. Let me know what your experiences with that has been so far!
I set up our institutional Twitter account in May of 2007. Twitter was still pretty new, but was gaining a lot of users. At first, I was manually updating the feed and posting stories when we had a news release. It was cumbersome, and I eventually stopped doing it.
I’ve been giving more thought to it the last few weeks and have started using Twitterfeed to push news and athletics updates to our Twitter feed automatically. By making the process automatic, I don’t have to worry about trying to find the time to post updates to it. That’s the key.
I see Twitter as being just one more club in the marketing golf bag. It certainly wouldn’t hurt any school to repurpose existing content and use Twitter as one more way of spreading the word about your school. I’m a firm believer that the more ways you spread the word - RSS, email subscriptions, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, it’s all important and it’s all a win.
Are we generating content exclusively for Twitter? No, and I don’t think it makes sense since we have, as you can see, very limited followers. We haven’t done any sort of marketing about our feed. If we do, and in several weeks or months, we have a large number of feed subscribers, I may have to re-evaluate that.
For now, having Twitterfeed push our RSS updates into Twitter is an easy first step for institutions interested in dipping their toe into the Twitter waters.
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Get thee some sanitizer
It’s always good to sanitize. I remember back to my days of working at Burger King - when I was unlucky enough to pull dishwashing duty, you would wash the dishes with soap, rinse them and then sanitize them before putting them away. You want to make sure nothing funky was left over.
Same goes for PHP code, except in reverse. Imagine your web application is the dishwashing station at Burger King. We want to wash, rinse and sanitize any dishes we get, but in this case we’re talking about any inputs we get from a user. In the case of our web app, we want to make sure we sanitize that input before we go and wash, rinse, query, insert and update our data. We certainly don’t want to process compromised inputs, and we certainly do not want to write and store that code in our databases.
I was reviewing some code written by one of our students and saw this:
$catid = $_GET['cat'];
$select = mysql_query(”SELECT * FROM categories WHERE id = “.$catid);
Friends, that’s bad. That’s a SQL injection waiting to happen. It looks innocent enough - we’re taking in whatever input string included in the variable $_GET['cat'] and then querying our database in the next line. It would be very easy for someone to try something nefarious (and trust me, they will and do, often).
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