UNC Chapel Hill brought in more than $271 million in private gifts in fiscal 2009, its second-largest take ever.

The only better year was fiscal 2008, when the university brought in $301 million as it closed out a $2.38 billion capital campaign.

UNC-CH officials were particularly pleased with 2009 donations given the weak economy.

"Our supporters have been tremendously generous," said Matt Kupec, the university's vice chancellor for university advancement. "Despite this being a down year for the economy, they've shown remarkable dedication to Carolina."

For more, click here.

Despite the advent of several very popular classified advertising websites which shall remain nameless here, the newspaper classified site is still going strong.

Ours has been going strong for about 3 years now.  It's gotten a bit creaky, so we're launching a new one tomorrow.  Fortunately, our sister company McClatchy Interactive built the technology for it, using our existing site as a model for the features and layout.  (Also, one of our original web designers went to work for MI two years ago, and was instrumental in designing it.)

It's a bittersweet launch.  We built the current site using PHP, the then-state-of-the-art programming framework, and it's been chugging along like a faithful old steam engine.  On the other hand, with the new site, there will be bells and whistles like:

• Google mapping for garage sales
• The ability to drill down into search results by meta-info (like how many days old the ad is)
• A nice solid all-CSS template.

Check it out tomorrow - and place an ad today!

The town of Knightdale is getting ready to review its comprehensive plan.

It’s been six years since the plan was adopted, and the town has seen quite a bit of development since then.

A comprehensive plan is something like the constitution behind the zoning ordinance. Areas in the town are designated according to what type of development the committee thinks should go there. Town Council has the final say.

But as with most matters, the Knightdale residents will be able to weigh in at a public hearing.

Then the ordinance comes into place and rules are adopted. or in this case, changed, to carry out the plan.

A group of Knightdale residents have already volunteered or been selected to take on this mammoth task.

They will meet the first Thursday of every month until the job is complete.

The committee also will look at transportation issues including mass transit.

Day 2 of Cary's annual council-staff retreat began with a slightly different agenda than Day 1. Much of the first day was spent discussing largely philosophical ideals on how the council could work together as a team -- along with town employees, of course -- and identifying strengths and weaknesses within the town's overall governmental operations.

The second full day was spent in part on more meat-and-bones issues. Interim Town Manager Ben Shivar helped walk the Town Council and Cary's staff through a series of agenda items discussed at last year's retreat in Southern Pines. Shivar and other staff members provided updates on various projects and asked the Town Council to identify those the board would like to focus on in the coming year.

A few highlights:

*Find a downtown development manager. Council member Erv Portman likened the position to the kind of work a mall manager might perform, but added that anyone selected to fill such a post would need to strike a balance between the public and private sectors.

Council member Jennifer Robinson said she envisioned the manager perhaps working alongside officials at the Cary Chamber of Commerce to draw new business downtown. Interim Town Manager Ben Shivar, who will temporarily fill the role, said it was an important role.

"We need someone who can bring focus to that area and direct competing interests," he said.

*Begin planning for a new business park. Interim Town Manager Ben Shivar said that he, along with Cary's economic development manager, would likely meet with staff in Chatham County in coming weeks to discuss an idea to build a new business park that would provide economic benefits to both parties.

Some on the council liked the idea in theory. "I don't think there's anything better we can do from an economic development standpoint than to make sure this is built," Council member Erv Portman said of the concept. "It's a relatively cheap economic stimulus initiative."

But Julie Robison and Jennifer Robinson were among those on the board who urged caution in moving forward with the idea of building in a neighboring county. Both Robison and Robinson suggested as an alternative that the Town Council might want to also explore development near the NW Cary rail station or in downtown.

*Continue promoting 'green' practices. Mayor Harold Weinbrecht expressed a dissatisfaction with the amount of litter he sees along Interstate 40 and suggested an anti-litter campaign as a means of raising awareness of environmental issues.

Ideas proposed for such an initiative included Julie Robison's idea of sponsoring a cleanup day through the Haw River Assembly, a non-profit group helping to protect the Haw River and Jordan Lake. Also, Erv Portman proposed conducting an anti-litter campaign to coincide with Earth Day in April.

UNC-Chapel Hill has asked the Town Council to postpone its big-ticket agenda item tonight: the first building in the Carolina North campus. The university is planning a three-story building totaling 80,745 square feet with 214 parking spaces on an 8-acre portion of the 970-acre Horace Williams Tract. The Innovation Center would incubate businesses that grow out of UNC research and would be located at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Municipal Drive. The council is likely to continue the public hearing until Nov. 24. In a memo to the council, town staff members assured council members that the Innovation Center proposal is consistent with preliminary results of the town's long-range transit study and that the building's future owner, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc., will pay property taxes on the value of the building, even though the university-owned land will be tax exempt.

Around these parts, universities are always raising money. We write about the big campaigns. And the really big campaigns. And the not-as-big-but-still-important campaigns.

Which gives us just enough confidence to say that if we were ever going to try to raise money for a university, we wouldn't do what Framingham State College did recently.

To summarize: In an attempt to make light of the poor economy, this small, Massachusetts college fired off letters to 6,000 alums that read in part:

"With the recent economic downturn and loan crisis, it has become even more important for Framingham State College to receive your support. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

 

As the local paper noted,  the word "blah" was used 137 times.

As one alum noted: "It just doesn't seem like something from a legitimate university." 

Peace College will unveil a $30 million capital campaign this morning that will focus largely on raising funds for expansion and renovation to its facilities.

The small women's college was a junior college until just 13 years ago, and a campus official told me this week it is still trying to get its infrastructure in line with the needs of a modern, four-year institution.

A $30 million campaign would top the college’s previous best, a $15 million effort that concluded in 2000. The college has been in a silent fundraising phase for more than four years now and is alreadly two-thirds the way to its goal.

The campaign’s top priority is a $3.7 million renovation and expansion of the Lucy Cooper Finch Library. The library project will add 2,200 square feet and a technology revolution of sorts with the addition of a “learning commons” with computer stations and other workspace.

Peace will also offer, for the first time, a bachelor’s in science degree next year and is updating science laboratories in preparation. In all, more than half the $30 million Peace hopes to raise will be spent on renovation and new construction.

“This campaign is a lot about bricks and mortar and refreshing our campus,” said Michael Magoon, Peace College's vice president for development and alumnae affairs.

Read more about the campaign in today's News & Observer.

This morning, UNC's public health school will be renamed for Quintiles CEO Dennis GIllings and his wife, Joan, who have pledged $50 million. That's the largest single gift to the university from an individual or family, and as I reported today, the gift makes some folks at the school a bit uneasy.

But while some students and faculty have criticized the gift and what they think may give the Gillingses unreasonable access or control over academicsand planning at the school, university officials have vigorously defended the gift, noting that it has been properly vetted and will receive plenty of oversight. 

This is the first in what we hope will be an ongoing series of conversations between our readers and the N&O Design, Development and Content producing teams. We want to keep you informed about what we're working on and interested in, as well as what's up and coming on our websites.

We hope you'll find it to be an interesting read, and look forward to your feedback as we continue to move our online Triangle journalism and community building efforts forward.

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I work on the Interactive Media team as a front-end designer, making the sort of design choices that impact what you see on your screen. Be it the logo on a new site or an advertisement, there's a good chance that I've worked on something you've seen.

Today I want to write about something that I am not an authority on - Javascript. That's one of the common types of code we use in our sites to add interactivity. It rotates to the top articles on the TriangleMom2Mom.com homepage and switches between the tabs on the newsobserver.com homepage. It also allows for many of the cool effects on Triangle.com.

As a designer I've often distanced myself from writing Javascript code, believing it was the realm of code-writing developers. Why should I write code? I can use Photoshop to design all the interactivity that's needed and let someone else take care of the math. I followed this path right up until a few months ago when a developer at our partner company, McClatchy Interactive, showed me jQuery.

jQuery is a Javascript library (a collection of commonly used code) that makes adding interactivity and effects to a page almost a joyous event. Unlike other Javascript libraries which require in-depth knowledge of coding, jQuery is fairly easy for a web designer (such as myself) to use.

To me its been more akin to having a friendly conversation with the boxes, images, and text on a page, versus sending them a complicated series of instructions that I have to write in Esperanto.

Within an hour of being shown this new technology, I was adding interactive elements to a web page with great ease. Boxes appeared and disappeared. Lines of text were highlighted and tabs faded in and out. It was still design, but now I was able to control it from another point in the process.

When we installed jQuery on newsobserver.com (in order to get our new story commenting feature up and running), I knew it was time to see where else it could be utilized.

We used it to load the newsobserver.com homepage more quickly. jQuery allowed us to take the pieces that take a little longer to load and move them to the end of the queue. This allows the page to show the breaking news stories much more quickly, sending our readers to where they want to be without removing anybody's favorite features.

Using this bit of code:

$(document).ready(function(){
$("div.fc").appendTo("div.stocks");
});

We were able to tell the page to load everything but the stock ticker, and then load the ticker and move it into its usual place.

Kind of like when someone at Target shouts 'Register 3 is now open, no line and no wait'.

What does this mean for our readers?

It means that going forward our in-house designers and developers will more quickly be able to add interactivity to our web pages and features. Javascript libraries are not going to save the world or move journalism to the next level, but it is one of the ways we're constantly working harder to make our sites the best in the Triangle.

We have an RSS Feed for this blog too, so you can keep up with what we're working on!

A story I wrote last week about unusual street names prompted some funny conversation. Have a look over at our Wake County blog.