Showing all blog posts tagged as tutorialclear filter

Managing YouTube on Your Network in 2016

Since we released LiveStream 5 in 2014 YouTube’s changed a lot. This affects how we approach content filtering and safety with Youtube.

YouTube have removed some safety tools and added more sophisticated ones. They’ve also doubled-down on protecting users’ privacy with encryption.

How schools use YouTube has also evolved. It’s become a vital teaching tool. The wealth of quality educational content means it’s no longer as simple as blocking the whole website for young kids.

The bottom line is YouTube wants to move all of your content controls into the YouTube ecosystem, rather than allowing for any local control inside your network.

If you’re in charge of managing access to YouTube’s content for a company or a school, here are the changes you need to know about.

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Express Yourself

When sysadmins want to block or unblock something it's usually the domain or URL that's easiest to target—it's right there in the address bar after all. Our web filter, LiveStream 5, also provides a more advanced evaluation tool called Expressions. Expressions define a pattern with which to match against a string of text. URLs are the string of text in our case.

Expressions let you cast a slightly wider net when trying to catch a particular type of content with your filtering rules. Of course that also means they can easily cast too wide a net if you're not careful. The name of the game is identifying what the URLs you want to target have uniquely in common.

With that in mind, I wanted to highlight a few uses of expressions in LiveStream 5 that we were impressed with, along with our own advice.

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Samsung Shaped Spanner

Android devices come in many shapes, sizes and price points from many different manufacturers, for the most part Google have created an Android development environment that handles this well but every now and then a spanner falls into the works.

The One

We recently rolled out an Android build of School Days to a new school, everything was going well, users were coming onboard thick and fast, until we got word of one user who couldn’t launch the app. Instead, it would crash the instant they tapped the icon. But why? No one else had this problem.

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New Age School Communication Tools — which one should your school use?

Newspapers and newsletters are a dying breed. Well, in the sense of the physical pieces of paper you and I grew up with. These days, you’ll find most people with heads down and thumbs flicking away on those handy little devices we call smartphones.

So let’s assume and even accept that smartphones are here to stay and well, everyone has one or will get one in the not too distant future. As a school, how can you communicate with your parents and whole school community leveraging this trend?

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Google Analytics Ecommerce + Business Catalyst

Business Catalyst is our CMS of choice for website projects. Its built in reporting is pretty great, but augmenting those with Google Analytics has its own advantages:

  • Goal Flow and Funnel Visualization
  • Remarketing
  • Third party campaign tracking

This is a technical guide on doing just that. It also includes some code using the new liquid template tags.

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