Brian Payst on August 28th, 2009

I’ve gotten asked a few time lately to document how we integrated Joomla with Shibboleth authentication. It turned out to be fairly straight-forward, primarily due to the awesome Joomla Auth plugin from Sam Moffat .
The first step is getting your Apache server configured to use Shibboleth. The main Shibboleth site https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/SHIB2/Home is your best friend [...]

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Brian Payst on May 11th, 2009

The fine, fine folks at MIT have released the first version of their Mobile Web project as open source code. I’ve been messing around with it for a bit today and it is quite impressive. We’ve been up against budget crunch issues for continuing to push into mobile on campus and this platform may be [...]

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Brian Payst on February 17th, 2009

We had a bomb threat the other evening on campus. It turned out to be a hoax, and the situation was handled very well by our campus police who cordoned off the area, evacuated buildings and put the safety of our students first.
The post-event discussion has centered around the process we used to notify [...]

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Brian Payst on February 10th, 2009

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the so called “digital native” label so often assigned to college students, the idea that they are fully versed and skilled with technology. I’m just not convinced it’s true. I work with a lot of students and student organizations and I would say that by and large most [...]

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Brian Payst on September 15th, 2008

For the past few years we have provided Mambo based sites for the over 600 recognized student organizations at UNC Chapel Hill. In a month or so we will migrate to Joomla and convert existing sites on a by-request basis. Managing these sites hasn’t really turned out to be that much of an issue, although we do [...]

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Brian Payst on March 28th, 2008

This solid article in the NY Times really does a nice job of encapsulating a lot of the challenges coming for higher ed. We constantly seem to be struggling with communicating with our students. Mass e-mail is fairly ineffective, at UNC we really have no functional portal (and in the age of search, I’m not truly convinced [...]

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Brian Payst on March 17th, 2008

Danny Boy, the muppets and new media.

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Brian Payst on March 12th, 2008

In my inbox just now:
Dear Friends,
I would be very glad if you accept to be appointed as my business associatein your country and earn 17% as commission.
If interested,get back to me.
Note this is not a SCAM.
Yours truly,Dr.Geets
 

Continue reading about Somehow I just don’t believe him