Month: September 2009

We had a few inquiries about the potential to continue to receive new content notification from the Graduate School Blog. In response to those inquiries, we have added the ability to subscribe via email, in addition to the RSS and Atom feeds. You will be able to manage your email subscription to the blog individually. Near the top of the right side quick navigation area please note the updated “Subscribe” section that will allow you to choose how to keep up with the Graduate School Blog.

I have also fielded a couple of calls asking about RSS. Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a standardized “feed” of information. This allows you to use a feed reader such as Google Reader, or the reader you may find within Outlook or your preferred browser. These tools typically allow you to assemble any number of feeds to effectively create your own newspaper with the content you specifically want. Using RSS can save you time by narrowing the information you are looking at, and allowing you to skim content more effectively.
The Graduate School offers a number of feeds, and we hope to add more to our list shortly. https://secure.graduateschool.vt.edu/GSITWiki/Wiki.jsp?page=RSSFeeds

We are excited to announce that the Graduate School is now publishing upcoming final examinations on our home page.  This information is published from Banner, live. We know your program may manually publish this information already.  We have several options to do this an automated fashion so that you may avoid some of that effort.  We are providing the name, date/time, location and thesis title currently.  Students with a confidential record will not be posted.  Future enhancements may include providing the committee members, a historical listing…  We would really like your feedback, so feel free to comment on this post to help us identify useful data or functions to add.

For those interested, you may subscribe via RSS. Website content publishers may use our widget to feed information for specific programs.  Alternatively we offer a JSON feed for you to customize the presentation of this information on your website.  Please see our wiki page for more details on adding this content to your website.

The Graduate School is updating the usage of our blog tool to conform with how blogs are typically utilized.  Specifically, we will be posting entries with information as they are relevant, rather than waiting for a formal publication. This will ease your search for relevant information, rather than finding relevant information within a publication.  This will also make tools, such as RSS readers and the myVT portal feed, more useful to scan whether posted information is relevant to you or not.  Since many items in the News and Announcements section of the Graduate School home page have historically been placed in the Monthly Memo, we will be using the blog tool to highlight information in that section, rather than a distinct posting.
Historical Monthly Memo posts will remain for your reference.
As always we welcome your feedback by using the comments function of the blog- or through email.