Employer: Missouri State University
Role: Centralized User Support Specialist
Duration: January to April 2009
The Help Desk had an XHTML strict website that required coding for any type of content change. Because none of our User Support Specialists were familiar with web development, they weren’t able to extend the functionality of the website, and they frequently wiped the site accidentally when trying to update content.
Social media wasn’t exactly new in 2009, but the university hadn’t adopted it too much yet. Because I had been running WordPress as my personal site for a couple of years at that point, I was familiar with its capabilities and wanted to bring more communication capabilities to the Help Desk. I wanted to build a site where anyone could write a blog post and have that automatically go to RSS, Twitter, and email subscribers without them having to take any further action.
I built a server for virtual hosts, then built the web server, and set up WordPress on a LAMP stack. I also built a mail server and set up the backup routine. I did the design and theming for the site, the integrations with social media, and wrote the initial content.
Matthew Stublefield 