University Blog Service

UBS stewards are in the process of archiving inactive sites.  A site is considered inactive when there have been no updates to it in over a year.

It is very important to us that UBS administrators be made aware of any actions or scheduled actions to their site.  In this effort, we have sent notifications to administrators with sites that are involved in the archive process.

If you are an administrator on many sites that have become inactive, you may have received a large number emails from the UBS service.

Hello University Blog Service customers!

The University Blog Service (UBS) has completed its transition to its new domain name sites.utexas.edu! This change highlights the service’s content management and general Web publishing functions; the new name was approved by the Web Technologies and Infrastructure governance committee.

Are you a current customers of UBS? You can rest assure that you blogs will work as they did before and will continue to be powered by WordPress. Plugins and themes will work as they always had. The domain change only affects websites with the URL blogs.utexas.edu/[websitename]; these can now be accessed at sites.utexas.edu/[websitename].  UBS websites with a custom URL have not been affected. 

Worried about published links with blogs.utexas.edu? Don’t be! All traffic to blogs.utexas.edu will be automatically redirected to its new location on sites.utexas.edu until August 2016.

Are you new to campus or only becoming aware of UBS? Sign up here for your own WordPress website!

Be sure to send your blogs related questions to help@sites.utexas.edu and stay tuned for updates!

Humbly yours,

The University Blogs Team

Goodbye to the widget called: “Twitter”. Hello to the new widget called: “Mini Twitter Feed”

We have disabled the older widget called “Twitter” because it is outdated and no longer supported by the developer.

Fear not! We are introducing a new Twitter feed widget called: “Mini Twitter Feed”.

With the new widget, you will also be able to display your Twitter feed in any post or page you wish using a WordPress shortcode!

1. First, activate the “Mini Twitter Feed” plugin from your Dashboard > Plugins > Click Activate.

2. Then, go to Appearance > Widgets and add the “Mini Twitter Feed’ to an area in your sidebar or footer.

3. Now it’s time to configure the widget: In the miniTwitter widget, click “Create a new widget”.

This will take you to your Twitter account. Login and click on the blue button: “Create Widget”

You will be presented with a small bit of HTML code, something like this:

-------------------------
<a href="https://twitter.com/SharkWeek" 
data-widget-id="365134152221200385">Tweets by @SharkWeek</a>

<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id))
{js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"
;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");</script>

-------------------------

The box maybe difficult to see but the text will be selected. You only need to note the data-widget-id number and your Twitter username.

4. Copy and paste the code into a blank Word document or the text editor of your choice.

5. Look for the numbers assigned to “data-widget-id” as well as your Twitter account name.

6. Copy the data-widget-id into the Twitter Widget ID box.

7. Then, type your Twitter user name into the “Username” box.

8. Click Save.

Putting Mini Twitter feed on a page or post instead of the sidebar

If you want this on a page or post, use the Widget’s shortcode;

[minitwitter id="SERIESOFNUMBERS" width="250px" username="YOURTWITTERUSERNAME"]

Your shortcode will look something like this;

[minitwitter id="365134152221200385" width="250px" username="SharkWeek"]

Now your Twitter feed will appear inside in your post or page.

Have fun!

For more information about this widget, please see – https://wordpress.org/plugins/mini-twitter-feed/

As always, feel free to send an email at help@sites.utexas.edu if you have any questions.

It’s time for new themes! We have reviewed the themes available in University Blogs in order to evaluate:

• Are they outdated and/or no longer supported by the theme developer?
• Does WordPress.org still offer them from their site?

We found a large number of our themes do not meet this criteria, so they will be removed from use.

University Blogs Approved Themes

The themes below will remain in our service:

Will my blog be affected?

No. If you are currently using a deprecated theme (not listed above), it will continue to be activated for you.

More themes soon

We have already begun evaluating and testing new themes for our service. Our plan is to have two new themes up and available in the coming weeks.

Moving forward, we plan to regularly evaluate and test new themes for our service in order to build up our Theme library. We are also committed to creating more UT-branded themes as well.

Thank you for your patience as we work through this process. The new themes will be a big improvement towards more modern, mobile responsive and accessible theme designs.

Per the University’s Web Accessibility Policy, all affiliated sites must comply with accessibility standards. For blogs using the UT Responsive Theme (both standard & small header design), we identified and fixed a number of elements to improve accessibility. You likely won’t notice any difference on your UT Responsive blog; you’ll simply have less to do to keep your site accessible.

What we improved

• Font sizes are now set as “em” instead of “pixel” declarations
• Text has a higher color contrast ratio
• The footer is white by default, improving color contrast

Compare the changes

Footer Before:

Footer After:

Header Text Before:

Header Text After:

Does this mean you don’t have to think about accessibility anymore?

No. Many elements that you control contribute to making an accessible website, including ALT text for images, font sizes, table headers and captions, and keyboard navigation. We encourage reviewing the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.