I finally added content to the footer design that has been sitting there empty for a year now.  On the left I created a “Connect” section, since social networking is all the rage.  Currently I’m listing twitter, facebook, my blog’s rss feed, digg, and youtube (ok…not much on youtube but I might add things later).  If anyone has ideas for other icons to put or wants information on other things I use (xbox live account, music, etc.) let me know.  On the post-it note on the right, I added in a simple script to gather the “popular” posts and display them.  This is simply listing posts in order of how many comments they have.  It’s kind of skewed at the moment, but if this site picks up any steam that should become fairly accurate.

His name is Matt Branam, who has an experienced career as an executive in the private and non-profit sectors. He will serve while the search is underway for a permanent successor to Dr. Jakubowski. Branam is a 1979 civil engineering graduate from Rose-Hulman and started his career early at UPS. Since then he has been a vice president at UPS and chief operating officer at the American Red Cross.

Matt Branam

On Wednesday the 22nd, Matt Branam made a visit to Rose-Hulman Ventures to be a part of the summer distinguished speaker series. He personally greeted and spoke to all of the summer interns, staff, and many of the professors that showed up for the event. His speech constituted of “Things I’ve learned” and highly focused on having a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. Branam quickly talked about his childhood, his time at Rose-Hulman, and how he got his roots at UPS. The later half of his talk was about his opinions and ideas on how he is going to move Rose-Hulman in the right direction during his year stay to maintain the college’s prestigious #1 ranking by U.S. News and World Report, which is for any college or university that offers the bachelor’s or master’s degree as its top degree in engineering. Matt stressed that the Institute needs to establish a clear vision to accomplish this goal. Specifics on how this will be done were not mentioned, but he will pull from his background in private and non-profit leadership to find a solution. As one of his speech morals, Branam stated that having a clear established vision is the key component to success in almost anything you want to achieve.

First impressions from meeting Matt Branam for the first time and from his speech seemed very reassuring. He appears to be very intelligent and delivered his speech very well. It sounds like he already has some plans and goals in mind for Rose-Hulman, and is determined to see them through. It’s going to be a nice change to have a more gritty business attitude leading our college than one simply focused on academics and how to collect more money for the Institution.

The current economic situation is a birth to new businesses. College seniors are not finding the jobs that they once were right after graduation. A candid source from the human resources department at Rose-Hulman casually stated that job placement of graduating seniors is down 10% from last year’s average. Knowing that some are not going to be able to make the money necessary to pay back college loans, seniors are choosing to start their own business or go to grad school.

One such student is Matthew Fouts, a junior at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (Ranked #1 ten years in a row by USA Today as the best Undergraduate Engineering School in the country), who said, “Knowing job placement will most likely still be low by the time I graduate, I wanted to take control of my income and not rely on other companies to make a living.” With his new start up, Rose-Learning ( http://www.Rose-Learning.com ), he provides struggling high school students a new means to get help on academic studies. Utilizing Rose-Hulman students to teach others in the Terre Haute, Indiana area he is helping students reach their academic potential. According to his website, the subjects that a student can receive personalized one on one tutoring help with are: Math, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. ACT/SAT and Advanced Placement test preparation are also available.

Now that more people are using the web instead of the newspaper or phone book to find services, Matthew has expanded his services and added an interactive online whiteboard to his website. This enables the student and tutor to be online together drawing and typing on the same screen even though they are hundreds of miles apart. This new technology by Twiddla makes it possible to tutor locally and nationally across the web. Rose-Learning is helping to provide jobs, help struggling students, and improve test scores. Rose-Learning can be contacted via phone at 812-241-5653.

As expected, the chatter on campus for the rest of the day was about this email, and everyone wondering why he decided to leave on such a whim. Plenty of rumors went around about him getting into some sort of trouble, arguments with the board, etc…however none of these ever proved to be true or false. The very next morning another email was sent out by Dr. J, addressing the fact that his first email was well, “vague” at best. Included was his future plan, which is taking the position of provost at The California Maritime Academy starting this summer. I looked into this some and it appears that he’s downgrading on jobs with this move, so there has to be some underlying reason for the transfer, but I’m not sure if anyone will find that out.

Dr. Jakubowski has been the President at Rose-Hulman all three years I’ve been there, so it’s sad to see him go. He did a great job at running things on campus, being involved with athletics and events, and being genuinely excited about the college and community. There will most likely be a new president, if just a temporary one, announced later this year or in the summer.

Anyway, last night I spend a considerable amount of time designing what my page will look like, and then took a plunge and designed the entire footer image.  I learned numerous new photoshop techniques and think it turned out quite well.  Credit to:

• http://kaoz-tutorials.com/ours/postit/
• http://www.avivadirectory.com/photoshop/creating-crumpled-paper/
• http://www.screenfrog.com/photoshop/scotch-tape-in-photoshop-tutorial/

Now when I have some time I will need to design a matching header and navigation menu for this site.  I’m also thinking about moving the search box up to the top right and combining it with some kind of area that looks like it is paper-clipped onto the website.  Some other things I might look into are things to optimize my blog for search engines.  I’ve heard a lot about the SEO pack and sitemap generator  plugins.

I had another idea for a sub-category of this site.  I was thinking about posting guitar-tabs, and more specifically ones that either I have written, modified, or think are very good.  Would anyone be interested in that?

The first problem I was immediately faced with was, what am I going to use to manage all of this…or better yet, I need a website to put online!  I quickly discovered WordPress and fell in love with it.  Things are so easy to do and I like how the entire admin interface is setup.  Adding, editing, and creating themes is fairly simple too.  I really like how you can switch between your themes with about two clicks in the admin controls.  As for a site layout, I’m starting with this torn paper theme that I found and was free.  It’s getting me started but I plan to re-do just about every single image and the code to make it my own.  I’m also looking into the different widgets and plugins that you can utilize through WordPress.

My plans for this website are fairly vague right now, I’m keeping it open to any and all ideas.  What I’m thinking about for starters is to write up reviews for various media (movies, tv shows, music, etc.) and post them here on this website.  I might even look into posting those reviews elsewhere, such as bigger name sites, to attract traffic to this site.  I’m also considering making either tutorials or various web graphics and wallpapers that I could host here.  Once I have the time I really want to make a WordPress theme free to the public and get it posted onto the WordPress site.  I think that would be something cool to do, and it might help draw in traffic to my blog.

Plenty of work ahead of me to make this website worth viewing!