March 28, 2024

Srivastava Researches Marine Corps Historic Half Economic Impact

Mukesh Srivastava recently produced an economic impact report detailing how the Marine Corps Historic Half affected the local economy. Srivastava surveyed runners, vendors, organizers and sponsors on their spending habits during the event, including items like shopping, restaurants, gas and lodging. According to his survey, roughly 19,000 people visited Fredericksburg for the sixth historic half and they spent approximately $8.7 million. The University of Mary Washington was one of the sponsors of the marathon.

For more details, read about the survey in the Free Lance-Star:

http://news.fredericksburg.com/citybeat/2013/08/06/marine-corps-historic-half-prompted-millions-in-spending-study-says/

http://news.fredericksburg.com/newsdesk/2013/08/06/race-pumps-up-hearts-economy/

Comments

  1. Hi Mark,Happy to tell help in anyway I can. I acllatuy wan’t involved in setting up that course blog, but I can tell you how it’s running. Basically it’s making use of a few key plugins. The first is a WPMU plugin called Sitewide Tags which we acllatuy have activated across the entire site. This plugin allows us to set up an aggregating blog at tags.umwblogs.org into which every post on the site is automatically fed. What’s cool is that with the posts come their associated tags. We’re then able to generate a feed based on any single tag in this case bioinformatics. Finally, on the course site we use this fantastic plugin called FeedWordpress which can be configured to syndicate content from an RSS feed and republish it in another WP blog. It’s a very powerful plugin, and we use it quite a bit for all sorts of purposes on UMW Blogs. In this case, we simply feed the bioinformatics feed from the sitewide tags blog into FeedWordpress and voila, we’ve got course syndication. All the students have to do is remember to tag their posts appropriately. If you’re interested in more of this, I suggest you jump over to my colleague Jim Groom’s blog (if you haven’t alrady) at bavatuesdays.com. Jim is the glue behind UMW Blogs he gets all the credit for making what I described above possible. And on his blog you’ll find tons of info about using WPMU for a University publishing platform. You’ll have to wade through his reviews of 70 toys, B movies, and the occasional artistic video post, but I promise its worth it.