Several months ago we made a change to our default search experience on google.com — when you’re signed into Google, we add SSL encryption to increase the privacy and security of your web searches. The change encrypts your search queries and our search results page, which is particularly important when you’re using an open, unsecured Internet connection.

With Twitter and Facebook also starting to go SSL by default, it got me thinking. Is it time for our .edu websites to go all SSL? We currently encrypt some areas, but making all our webpages be secure, whether they are collecting data or not, may be something to start considering.

I think it would show some credibility to users, and would add an additional layer of protection for forms that currently aren’t secure, such as event registration, feedback forms and surveys. Yes, some this data is not the most sensitive, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry[1].

Implementing SSL on a site is trivial, and not terribly expensive. NameCheap.com offers SSL certificiates starting at $9 USD a year and going up from there. That small cost, even at $125 USD per year, is worth the piece of mind.

Will adding SSL give your website a performance hit? This used to be the case, but not as much anymore. It’s nothing that can’t be offset by a little  optimization on the developer end. Even something as simple as GZIP’ing and minifying your CSS and javascripts may balance out any (perceived) hit in performance due to SSL. Adam Langley of Google writes this about SSL performance:

In January this year (2010), Gmail switched to using HTTPS for everything by default. Previously it had been introduced as an option, but now all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that.

As a test, we’ve been using SSL in our WordPress admin areas. I haven’t noticed any difference in performance, and it was a good first step in rolling it out site wide (which at this point would be just checking a box.)

[1] If you have bad code, forms or not, on your website, it won’t matter if you have the best security in the world. Bad code is bad code.

Bret Victor invents tools that enable people to understand and create. He has designed experimental UI concepts at Apple, interactive data graphics for Al Gore, and musical instruments at Alesis. Amazing stuff in this video.

For more on Bret, see http://worrydream.com.

This talk was given at CUSEC 2012.

I can add a new thing to my higher ed career list – taking a TV commercial from inception through editing and into production and onto the air.

The spot was written by our marketing team here at John Carroll University and shot and edited by my long-time friends at Route1a. It aired on cable and broadcast TV in a few midwest cities.

An awesome experience from start to finish.

They’re using Geolocation and GeoIP services to customize content based on where I’m coming from. When I loaded the page, I was greeted with content specifically geared towards Ohio, where I’m located. It looks like this. You can click on it for a larger version.

Using a few web proxies, I got a message and graphic for a few other states, such as the great state of Delaware.

What up, Delaware?

So far, OKC is just using this to show a graphic and a message telling me they love my state, which to be honest I don’t know if I even do yet, but it does present an interesting opportunity.

It would be easy to display content directly related to my state, such as the admission counselor assigned to my region, if they’re going to be in my area for interviews or college fairs, or some current students and alumni from my state.

Something to keep in mind with this type of customization is that it’s not always easy to tell where the user is from. As Steven Bell, who developed this for OKC noted, testing for this type of content is tough. Often, you’re the best guess of where the IP is located, and if you’re near a state or country border, you may get the wrong results.

Despite the challenges, it’s a pretty neat implementation of geolocation.

Wufoo is very full featured, with a robust API, a myriad of reporting options an several embedding options. We’ve been using it quite a bit as part of recruitment communications to customize and personalize forms as well as emails back to a user when they complete a form, which is really handy.

When we’ve had a support question or issue, it’s been answered and addressed quickly, which is nice.

So I’m 100% down with Wufoo, but I find myself wanting a few things that would take it to the next level.

1. Let me bring my own storage

At the level we’re at (the carpe diem plan at $69 a month), giving us only 3GB of storage is pretty silly. That amount of storage costs less than a dollar at any of the cloud storage services. Please, Wufoo, let me connect easily with my Amazon S3 account, where I could store as many files as possible and worry about the cost myself. I can think of a few forms where we’re asking people to upload a hi-res photo, and if a few hundred people fill out that form at a time, we could potentially get close to the limit. This should be a trivial fix.

2. Pagination

For surveys and other longer forms, it’d be really swell to break a form up across several pages. We have some applications and surveys that are so long I fear users see how long they have to scroll until they reach the end and they give up and go away. But a break in there would be nice.

3. Conditional Questions

The ability to ask a follow-up question only if a user selected a certain option in a checkbox or radio field would be nice. We’re getting this question quite a bit from people on campus.

4. A level between “Carpe Diem” and “Ad Infinitum”

It feels like there really should be one more level between their Carpe Diem plan (20 users, 3GB, 15,000 entries a month, $69.95/mo) and their Ad Infinitium plan (60 users, 10GB, 100,000 entries, $199.95/mo). We need about 40 users to cover everyone across campus. It’d be nice if there was a $99 or $129 plan where I could get 40 users, 6GB and 50,000 entries.

Wufoo, keep on keeping on. We’re huge fans of your service and so are our campus users.

Update from Wufoo::

To celebrate, they’re lowering the price on incoming file transfers from $0.10/GB to $0.03/GB, so now’s a good time to try it out and upload some huge files.

From the Amazon Web Services blog:

We owe the success of the service to you, and on the 3rd anniversary of Amazon S3, we’ve decided to say “thank you” with a few more “3s.” We’ll be offering “data transfer in” to Amazon S3 for only $0.03 per GB (vs. the standard $0.10) for the next 3 months, April through June. As always, data transfer between Amazon S3 and EC2 within regions remains free, and all other pricing dimensions are unchanged. At the beginning of July, prices will return to normal, so if you’ve been thinking about moving a new project into Amazon S3, now might be the time.

I started it to both fill what I saw as a need in the higher ed blogosphere as well as for selfish reasons. I wanted to learn WordPress and I wanted a place I could flesh out some ideas and explore topics that interest me. I think I’ve accomplished that thus far. I celebrated the anniverary this week by re-skinning the site and adding in some new features.

Here are the 5 most popular topics from the first year of this site:
1. Season Your Passwords With Salt
2. Have you made your FriendFace profile yet?
3. Do you have an iPhone icon for your school?
4. QR Codes: Is it time?
5. YouTube Goes Widescreen and HD

Thank you for reading this siteand for leaving great, though-provoking comments. Thank you for subscribing to the RSS feed. Thanks for following me on Twitter. Thanks to Brad and Matt for including this site in BlogHighEd.org. Thanks to Karine for including it several times in her weekly newsletter.

Here’s to a successful year two. I’ll try to bring you great content and hope to meet as many of you as I can at conferences and presentations around the world over the next year.

I’ll leave you with a song from one of my favorite albums.

Sweet Avenue – Jets to Brazil

Here’s a quick snip about the program:

The curriculum is targeted at early-stage leaders: recently appointed or aspiring IT managers or supervisors. The program focuses on the practical knowledge and skills needed to succeed in management and leadership in higher education. Topics to be covered in the first series include: interpersonal communication skills; budget and finance; managing time and priorities; project management; managing up; and performance management.

I attended the program and learned a great deal. I’d highly recommend it. If you’re in the New England region, it’s a quick trip.

I hope they create a follow-up series for the cohort I was in last fall. Perhaps the next logical step is the Educause Management Institute, which I’m going to try to get into the next time it’s offered. I missed out on the February session registration.

Here’s the page.

Thanks to everyone who has sent in their cards thus far.

I’m putting the finishing touches on ours as we speak. Please post a link in the comments and I’ll build a list.

Thanks, and happy holidays!