… in one simple step: forget to connect up the centre channel on 5.1 surround sound.
The result? Since most of the vocals in a movie go through the centre channel, as well as most of the “on screen” sound, you get some strangely quiet actors.
Oops.
Fix, restart, apologise over the mic (I hate doing mic work - I sound like a cross between a dalek and a helium-abusing monkey, if you can imagine what that would sound like). As I type this, we're about half way through Wallace & Gromit's “The Curse of The Were Rabbit”. We're packed to the rafters, too - almost 200 people in (compared to last week's 50-ish), which is nice. Shame the free popcorn ran out before I got there though…!
Fraggy's been snowed-under with PWs and hustings, so there's no PWs online this week (he's only just finished the printed version I hear), and I've been called in to do the film night at the last minute (hence why I was totally winging the it with the sound system and slightly came unstuck!) so I couldn't help out with it, so it's back to the printed version this week. It'll be online next week as usual, but I'm going to take this opportunity to get on with some of the updates to the Social Life section instead, tonight. Bring on the Bink!
(Title inspired by RobinB's rant about pancake-making…)
Posted by Alex on Tue 28th February 2006
If you happened to stumble into the diaries section in the last 6 hours you might have spotted that pretty much everything didn't work at some point. That was my fault - yup, me over here. Kick me in the shins if you like…
This work hasn't actually changed the appearance of the diaries, but it's made a huge amount of difference to how they work. Y'see, you could only see a member's posts, OR search by a date (or month) - not both. I'm working on some calendar code which will sit happily at the top of the bar on the right there –> which will tell you what days diary entries have been posted on (and maybe even which days have lots of entries or entries with lots of comments, maybe by putting a * next to them or something…?).
Unfortunately, to do that, I had to kinda tear the guts out of the diary system and start again on the way it handles all it's links.
So if you were silly enough to bookmark anything in the diary pages before today, you might find that the links no longer work. Oops!
Well, I'm knackered. I've been working on this and other things since 12am today - at the Union, so I haven't even been able to crawl off and hide anywhere (all the good hiding spots have been taken by the elections candidates who have started to realise what they're letting themselves in for - potentially, in some cases, for a second time round…). I'm going to stick my head out the door of the control room (at the back of Lux) 'cos DJ Alec McG (or whatever he wants to call himself, silly chap) is shaking the walls with his own particular brand of death metal/punk/rock/alternative/ whateverthehelltehkidzcallitthesedays. I might even have a McMosh…
G'night!
Posted by Alex on Tue 28th February 2006
I'm going to be re-jigging the URLs used by the diary system over the next few hours, so please bear with us if none of the links seem to work properly! Test edit
Posted by Alex on Mon 27th February 2006
Whilst awaiting a steady but angry stream of complaint e-mails/phone calls/angry mobs after the d
Posted by Alex on Mon 27th February 2006
Mass e-mails are always a bit of a contentious subject, and last night's e-mail (you can see it online here) to around 7,000 people has brought with it a few sharp responses from people whose responses made it quite clear that they didn't expect to receive them, and thought that we were simply “spamming” them without permission.
Personally, I hate unsolicited e-mails, and the Union goes to great lengths to make sure that we only send out what we say we're going to send out, and only to the people who agree to receive these e-mails.
We also do our best to make sure that the content of the e-mails is varied and interesting, but there's always room for improvement. If you would like to make a suggestion, you can e-mail us at webteam@upsu.net or add your comments below.
I'm also reviewing the criteria we use to select people for the lists; although we may end up sending out to fewer recipients, those who do receive the mailings should be the people who can actually benefit from the mailings.
You can change your subscription settings by going to your profile (you'll need to sign in first), then click “update my profile” and select the “preferences” and “JobShop” tabs to see your e-mail subscriptions. Don't forget to click the “Update” button at the bottom to save your new preferences.
Posted by Alex on Sat 25th February 2006
Well, it's been a couple of very long days. I've been tied up with the forums, blogs and commenting system. The forums and blogs have been seeing more pixel-pushing and a lot of sub-standard code has been re-written to improve the reliability of both systems.
The main bulk of today's work was getting the commenting system ready to turn on. The basics were already in place - people could write a comment and click a button, and an administrator could then decide whether they wanted it displayed or not.
However, a fundamental part of the blogs system is that the owner of a blog… sorry, diary entry should also be able to manage their comments. This means that, when someone comments on a news story or diary entry, the author of the item gets an e-mail telling them, and they can then go and see the comment. Not only that, but they can approve the comment, edit it, or delete it.
Another important part of this system is the ability for anybody to make a complaint about a comment - it's an unfortunate fact of life that websites tend to attract the bad with the good, and because it's impossible to guarantee that no comments which breach site policy will slip through the safety nets we have in place, there's a mechanism in place which allows anybody to report a comment to a member of the site administration team. This system has been written to cover anything on the site, so you can now also complain about forum posts if you wish to.
The last stages of testing the commenting system will be taking place over the next few days, and I'm hoping to have it ready to launch by Monday, along with the diaries. This year's election candidates are going to be my first guinea pigs in the system, and I'm hoping this proves to be a valuable help to their campaigns. That said, it might turn out that no-one wants to make use of t'Interwebnet to promote themselves. Only time - and some gentle prodding - will tell.
Other happenings lately - or not, in a couple of cases - are the re-vamp and mahoosive update of the Social:Life section I've been asked to tackle. It's a shame it's taken a bit longer than I'd hoped to get the information out there, but this update will hopefully set the trading side of things up more-or-less until the end of the year, which is handy. No word on the Grad Ball yet, but I'll be sure to relay that here once I know some more.
The RAG website is still not up - entirely my fault (and I hang my head in shame). All the graphics are more-or-less done; I just have to slice and dice them, and squeeze them into a new template. A couple of things are bugging me at the moment about the colours; I want to stay true to the black/orange of the RAG publicity, but there's nothing quite like trying to read light text on a black background to put anyone off. Ideas on a postcard as to how I can tackle this - the writer of the best suggestion gets to buy me a pint (that's fair, isn't it…?).
The Course Reps mini-site is also on the to-do list and I fear I'm going to have to let it slip past the March 1st deadline. Luckily, I'm still waiting on the text - without that, it's a bit hard to know how to divide it all up, but the layout and colours I've yet to decide on, so myself, a pack of felt-tip pens (and maybe some playdough…) and a camera will be off on a mission to find some inspiration tomorrow. Just how inspiring the Uni halls of residence are though - at least when sober - is another matter entirely…
We're also starting to get on our feet with the mass-mailing system (although some of you may have missed out on last week's JobShop e-mails - this mistake will be rectified this week, and I apologise!) and should be sending out some reasonably uniform-looking, easy to read mails from the various departments on a more regular basis starting next week. The charity side of things is especially in need of a mass mail being sent out as they have oodles of stuff going on.
Another “thing” happening soon is the NUS Conference elections. Just after the Union's elections, we're going to be selecting 8 people to go to the NUS Annual Conference. It's a democratic selection procedure, so we're thinking about allowing people to vote online using the survey tool. Could be interesting…!
All in all, it's going to be a very busy couple of months for UPSU.net and the Union in general, and I'm looking forward to pushing mountains of pixels around the UPSU site. I've also got a degree to get, so I'm not planning much sleep at all. Oh, and I've managed to catch the horrible head-cold going round at the moment, so sleep is only a distant memory. I'm crewing in the Union tomorrow night, so by Saturday morning I'll be doing a pretty good zombie impression I reckon. Bring on the weekend!
Footnote: I've just spent an extra 2 hours trying to find out a) why comments are mysteriously showing up and then not showing up (possibly a cookie session problem…? … mmm, coookieeesss…), and why the complaint button doesn't work in IE (turns out it doesn't like the diaries template and works fine when you want to complain about something in the 4ums…!). How very strange…
Posted by Alex on Fri 24th February 2006
I've been pushing more code around the blogs diaries (when will I learn it's not a “blog”?!) part of the site. This is more for my reference than anyone else's, but feel free to take a nosey and (once enabled) post a comment. Here's the latest changes…
After “miniminogue”'s request for a singles/dating/lonely hearts section (whichever title you prefer) I'm also wondering whether it might be a good/interesting idea to add the option to say whether you're single or not, male/female, what you look for in a person and who you are. Could be good. Or it could simply end up as a nice bit of space on UPSU.net where you can hear the gentle rustle of passing tumbleweed…!
P.s. there's a lot to be said about pixel-pushing when you've only had 2 hours' sleep and a dodgy kebob. Not much of it, though, is complimentary…
Posted by Alex on Tue 21st February 2006
While I was pushing pixels around the forums yesterday, I remembered something a friend had mentioned about the way the authentication system on UPSU.net works. More out of luck than judgement I checked the code for the commenting system and, sure enough, the code that was needed to allow comments to be posted by non-Administrators was missing.
One simple code change later and the commenting system is now working (I think… touch wood…). This is great timing for us - the elections are looming and I want to get the candidates keeping a blog of their campaigning activities. While there's nothing stopping this at the moment, it's also important that the electorate can comment and ask questions of the candidates. No commenting system just means that the candidates have a one-way sounding-off platform, which no-one is going to be interested in.
There are a few final things I need to do with the layout of the commenting system before I'm happy with turning it on; these are all layout adjustments though, rather than any changes to the underlying structure. Basically, I just want to provide a box for people to provide their name, their course/job (optional), a contact e-mail address (for our reference, and again optional), and their comment. We shouldn't make it any harder than that to comment on something you read on the site, and - as with the forums - the “simple is definitely better” mantra seems to be the way forward.
By the way, UPSU.net had 1.2 million hits yesterday. That's (almost) a record for us, and I think the site will start seeing more traffic as the semester 1 exams get out of the way and people can start taking a bit more interest in what's going on at their Union.
Tomorrow night is the first of our film nights, and we're showing Shaun of The Dead. Entry - and popcorn - are both free, and with our
Posted by Alex on Mon 20th February 2006
Last week I went back to my parents' house for a few days to try and concentrate on the website. I ended up dismantling my car's steering trying to fix some weird handling and got practically no work done, so this week has been a hectic mix of lectures and pixel-pushing.
The forums have had a bit of a tidy-up, and I've finally managed to get the “latest discussions” code working just how I want it to; now you can see what topics have been posted on lately, and the list doesn't include any repeats; plus you can see how long ago the last reply was posted, and which forum the topic lives in. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the new layout tweaks; you can add your comments here.
The site's mystery slow-down seems to have been cured by a reboot of the hosting co's firewall. I don't know (and probably wouldn't understand) why it was slower, but apologies to everyone who suffered the annoyance of a slow website and hopefully everything should be back to top speed, which is more than can be said for the annoyingly slow student portal.
With the elections fast approaching, and RAG already with us, I've got to get on with a lot of work; the RAG website especially is going to see a lot of attention from us over the next few days, as it's getting a revamp and will be converted into it's own mini-site. First things first though - I've got to upload all the Purple Wednesdays pics from the RAG re-launch. Lots of nakedness - woohoo! For the elections website, I've got to organise a homepage for all the candidates, including making sure there's an easy way for people to ask the candidates a questions - I think we'll be using a combination of the blogs (diaries) system for candidates to tell the world about themselves, and the forums for people to ask questions on.
As always, we can't make this site (one of) the best Union websites in the country without your feedback, so if you have a comment to make, click here and be as (constructively) critical as you'd like to be - trust me when I say it's welcome!
Posted by Alex on Fri 17th February 2006
Yesterday I gatecrashed one of the first of the RAG relaunch planning meetings; the RAG relaunch, which starts at Purple Wednesdays on Feb 15th, is a great excuse for a load of fund-raising antics, so I'm hoping to be able to get a new mini-site organised for the RAG people, with a load of interesting content and maybe even a way of donating some money online - maybe (maybe!) a PayPal donation thingy? Plus photo galleries, information about various RAG events, and so on.
I'm actually looking forward to getting involved with this project, but as always I'll be juggling a coursework load and doing work for the Trading team at the same time (well, hopefully anyway - it pays the bills!) so the second semester's definitely going to be hard work.
(surreptitious advert): If you're reading this and want to get involved as part of the UPSU.net webteam, get in touch! /al
Posted by Alex on Fri 3rd February 2006