By Bob Lowe, Greensboro College SIDChair, CoSIDA Technology CommitteeGreetings from the CoSIDA Technology Committee. Saving your valuable time is what we seek to do! The following five tips should help do just that.
1). Easy Photo StorageFor some reason, it took me awhile to develop this plan.
Here are my steps.
A). Take the pictures (action or head shots). Have your photographer shoot so the jersey numbers are visible for identification. You can always crop later.
B). Download: let’s assume they were men’s soccer head shots, from camera to CD. The CD will be labeled and then stored in one of those black storage folders with sleeves.
C). Copy the images to a place on your desktop computer—let’s say “msoccer/2007”
D). Go to the “msoccer/2007” folder in Internet Explorer. In the “Views” tab at the top, choose the “filmstrip” option.
E). Right click the photos in the filmstrip within Windows Explorer. Highlight “Rename” and label the files “beckham-david-hs-082507”. This is your easily identified hi-resolution head shot photo to be used in media guides, or to be sent to newspaper.
F). After very photo has been renamed, copy all the photos and paste to your appropriate website folder.
G). Use your web management software to place and resize your images. Place the image by browsing to it. A window opens that allows you to resize and then to save to the appropriate folder on your web site. This folder is where you can access low-res images for future use.
BONUS TIP: Have a shared network with personnel in your athletics communications office? Store the hi-res images on a shared network for easy access for all staffers.
2). More Photo StuffI’ve had two instances in the past year where we’ve needed bigger photos than we normally have. Posters and the ever popular wall photos (Fatheads) are becoming more popular. Keep this in mind for specific photo shoots. Your photogs should set their cameras to the highest setting for image size.
3). Photoshop Web Photo GalleriesEver have a coach give you a disk of 100 photos and ask to have them put on the web? Me too, and I’ve long been searching for time-saving way of getting photos to the web. The solution came via UNC Wilmington’s Tom Riordan (a CoSIDA Technology committee member) on the SID Board.
Photoshop’s web galleries are the answer!
A). Open (file/open) the photos you want in the gallery.
B). Select file/automate/web photo gallery
C). A box then opens up. You can choose the style of your album and the destination for the images on your site.
D). Once the gallery is created, you can then link to that page.
4). Content Management SoftwareThis is a very hot topic in the industry. Rapid changes in technology have been a burden on colleges who are now paying for the software infrastructure to third party content management system. Their software and expertise can save time for the SID.
Just about every NCAA Division intuition is using a CMS (CSTV, XOS, etc.). Yet more small colleges are adding third parties (ICS, Presto Sports, to name a few). The swami says this will be a growth industry in the next few years.
CMS technology can be expensive; especially if you are currently using already purchased software and have assistance for your technical people when needed. If money is an issue, however, check out some of the open source CMS solutions, such as Joomla. Yet expect the money saved to result in minimal technical support and a lot hours setting up the system.
One thing CMS software can do is to place content in a number of places. For example, your team specific story can posted on the main scoreboard page and also in the bowling archive for the year. I’m hopeful we will soon transition to a CMS. However, there are time-saving things you can do to maximize your efficiency.
I pre-link the game stories. For example, link the bowling story vs. Tech from the “Bowling stories and news” before the game to our scoreboard/main page that will be updated shortly after the event is completed. That’s one less thing to do in crunch time after the game. I then go back
a day later and update the story’s headline “State Host Tech” to reflect what actually happened in the game: “Heath’s 300 Game Propels State to Win over Tech.”
5). No mopeds on the freeway!
A summer-ending vacation put me back on the dial-up highway for two weeks. Let’s just say my pages are still loading and that’s a road I don’t want to travel again! Wi-fi is more accessible now, but driving around seeking signals is no fun either. With that said, I need to take a closer look at mobile broadband.
Expect stories on mobile broadband and the following subjects.
-Adobe’s new CS3 Creative Suite
-Webcasting
-Starting your own Blog
-Using Adobe Illustrator
-More on web Content management systems
If this story. If the CoSIDA Technology Committee can be of assistance, please contact us. If there’s a topic you’d like to see covered, please email me at
blowe@gborocollege.edu and we’ll see if one of our members can cover the topic.
Alternatively, we welcome submissions from sport information professionals who are not officially on the committee. Once, again just forward your submission to the email address above.