In the May issue of the Digital Presence and Public Scholarship Initiative newsletter, sign up for a new WordPress workshop, see how our featured faculty manages her multiple sites using subdomains, and learn about how our Plugin of the Month can increase your Google Search Ranking.
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Dear Joey,
I have a website, but I haven’t put much work into it. I can’t decide between making it my portfolio site, or a site for my Lab and specific research. Since I only have one domain, which type of site should I choose?
Signed,
Site Searcher in Snyder
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Hi Site Searcher,
Fortunately, you don’t have to make a decision! Using MSU Domains, you can actually create multiple websites. After you make your first site, you can create “subdomains”. These are sites that work off your existing domain. Your domain is the address of your website, which will be "yourNetID.msu.domains" if you haven’t purchased a custom domain name. So, your subdomain would be an extension of this domain. If you named your subdomain site “Lab”, your domain for that site would be:
yourNetID.msu.domains/Lab.
This is an easy way to have multiple sites with your single domain, and successful organize distinct content.
Should everyone get a subdomain? No, not if you could easily fit the information on your main site. Making a subdomain, especially multiple subdomains, can quickly eat up your disc space, making it impossible to backup your websites. However, if the website is hosting enough content, like a lab or organization website, then it may make sense to create a separate subdomain for it.
Good luck,
Joey Dearing
To submit your own questions, ask Joey at dearing1@msu.edu
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“I rely a lot on the digital presence of fellow linguists and academics, so I want to provide a similar service to them,” says Suzanne Evans Wagner, Associate Professor of Linguistics. Dr. Wagner learned how to move her website to the MSU Domains platform with help from her WRAC PhD student, Madeline Shellgren. The sociolinguist also credits her students Sayako Uehara and Becca Senn for their contributions to her website. In addition to the well-planned
wagnersu.msu.domains
,
Dr. Wagner tends
sociolab.wagnersu.msu.domains
,
the web home of the Michigan State Sociolinguistics Lab.
Dr. Wagner engages broadly in the digital realm with her peers, checking colleagues' homepages to keep current and following fellow linguists and other scholars on Twitter, ResearchGate and Academia.edu. “Social media is a great place to learn about a new publication, workshop or other piece of information,” says Dr. Wagner. “If I can't make it to a conference, I appreciate it when people live-tweet the talks, because then I don't miss out on cutting edge work. Social media...is also a wonderful place to share stray observations about language.”
Sharing one’s work depends increasingly on cultivating a digital presence. To learn more about Dr. Wagner’s exploration of how language changes, click on the menu item ‘Social’ on
wagnersu.msu.domains
,
and have a listen to her recent
Liberal Arts Endeavor
podcast with College of Arts and Letters Dean Long.
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Upcoming WordPress Opportunities
WordPress Help Open Hours
May 8th, 15th, 22nd, 29th: 2:30pm – 3:30pm
For more information and locations, please visit
our calendar
.
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Looking for professional images to use on your site?
CreativeCommons
is a massive web directory of images and media files for anyone to use. The new CreativeCommons Search is now live, with promises of faster load times, better navigation and filters, and easier attribution. More than 300 million images across 19 collections are available.
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Digital Presence Back to Basics Workshop
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If your WordPress site needs updating, please join us at the new Back to Basics Workshop! Designed specifically for faculty and graduate students who already have a site and in need of a refresher course, this workshop will help you jump back into designing and populating your site.
Visit us
May 10th, 11 am - 2 pm in 120 Linton
for individual assistance with your site. There's pizza, Q&As, and co-working time with MSU's WordPress pros - we'd love to see you there!
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Yoast SEO is one of the most powerful WordPress plugins available; it lets you enter the keywords or keyphrases you’d like your post or page to rank for in the search results, and check whether you’re using the keywords often enough and in the right spots. The result can be higher google search rankings, which can make a huge difference in site visitors. Search for it on the WordPress Plugin page to install!
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Digital Presence Fellows Wrap-Up Letter
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Congratulations to graduating Digital Presence Fellows! Off you go, out into the digital world, ready to dazzle it with your own domains and your WordPress wizardry. In all seriousness, we hope you are well underway in developing your online presence in way that engages your audiences, as you have thought about them, in ways that meet the expectations of your planning.
By now, you have built some pages, put up content, maybe added some images from the Commons or elsewhere. Perhaps you are taking advantage of the tools you learned about that can draw together the other faces of your digital self, wherever those may be expressed. Maybe you have gotten to the point where you have found the utility of analytics. Be sure to take a moment to reflect on all the skills you have: the ones you are using now, and the ones that will serve you later.
We hope you found the program valuable. We have not only enjoyed the time we had together, but we learned from you as well. There is so much fascinating work being done at MSU; it is our privilege to help you share it with the world. Please keep in mind that our commitment to seeing you reach the audiences you would like and sharing your work doesn't end on the eighth week. We will keep you apprised of upcoming workshops and collaborative work sessions, and we would love it if you shared with us your successes or reached out to us solve that wily WordPress issue. We hope you have a productive, relaxing, or whatever kind of summer you desire! Stay in touch --The DPPSI Team
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