Time-saving and more time-saving
One thing that really bugged me about the way this site runs is that, whenever you use the “back” button in your browser, the page re-loads. This isn't a standard thing - if you go to, say BBC.co.uk and click a link at the bottom of the homepage, then use the back button to go back to the homepage, you'll still be at the bottom of the page and you won't have to wait for it to reload. On UPSU.net, every time you visit a page it re-loads; this is great for making sure you see the latest version of a page, e.g. the homepage or the forums, but it's terrible for our bandwidth and your page load times.
Because one of the main things I'm aiming for with UPSU.net is to make it as fast as possible to navigate around, I've decided to try turning off the code which tells your browser to reload the page each time you visit it.
Another thing we've added is the “sign in” box in the navigation bar of every page; now, if you need to sign in to the site, you can find a username and password box at the top of the page. Fill them in and click “sign in” and you're automagically signed into the site. At the moment, you're also returned to the page you were just browsing, but I think it will be better to send people to their profile homepage since this is where you can look after your account; I've been trying things out the former way for the past few days, and I'll be deciding later whether to try it using the latter method for a while to see if it's a better way of moving people around the site.
As always, I can't test each page on every type of browser, so your feedback is always welcome - just add your comments below as normal - if this post is greeted with the eternal sound of tumbleweed rolling across the comments box, I'll assume that everything's gone to plan and no-one's suddenly found UPSU.net isn't working for them anymore… ;o)
Posted by Alex on Thu 25th May 2006
Homepage tweaking and tracking
Not much to report on the site's surface at the moment, but two little things I think need a brief mention:
- The search in the “Best bet” links box has been moved from the bottom to reflect the fact that more people seem to feel most comfortable searching the site than clicking our “best bet” links. It's also had a bit of a refresh and I'll probably adjust the layout more in the coming weeks as we gear up for the homepage redesign proper.
- The homepage's most important links are now being anonymously click-tracked, so it should help us to build a relatively complete picture of peoples' browsing habits as they step through the site's front door.
Why bother with all this? Well, knowing how people are using the site - clicking mainly on text or mainly on images, titles or smaller text, and so-on, helps us work out which parts of the page are catching peoples' interest most effectively. From that we can work out if there's useless fluff on the page that we can do away with (or work out why it's not meeting it's intended purpose and do something about it in a more constructive way than deletion…).
Ok, so it's “only” a students' Union website. But with over 10,000 members and around 100,000 visitors a week, it's nice to make sure the content we're providing can do it's job properly.
Posted by Alex on Tue 23rd May 2006
Could UPSU.net flickr…?
I have to admit, I'm a bit late in realising what flickr (the massively popular photo hosting website) can offer anyone and everyone who can be bothered to sign up for an account, for free. Possibly the easiest and most noticeable feature of the site is the ability to “tag” your photos (add keywords) and then show all photos from flickr with matching or similar tags. The other very clever toy is “tag clouds”, which shows a list of the most-used keywords in a group of photos, sorted alphabetically, and sized proportionally to their occurrence on the site.
To be honest, it's easier if you just read their explanation on what flickr is/does, or take a browse around some of the (often absolutely stunning) photos on the site.
So I've been sitting here wondering if we can adopt some, if not all, of the great ideas they're using to make it easier to browse around UPSU.net's photo galleries, or even being able to allow every single member of UPSU.net to have their own photo galleries (possible), tagging system (also possible), and photo groups (uhhm, probably possible…?).
Of course, like the forums, there's no point to it all if no-one really uses them, so starting next term we need to do a bit of fairly ruthless marketing.
That said, I'd like to increase UPSU.net's usefulness to members a lot first - the homepage redesign, for example, should mean UPSU.net can be used as your homepage if you like a homepage that…
- lets you carry out a Google search straight off
- lets you create and categorise an unlimited list of links to your favourite websites - no more having to remember your favourites every time you change computer on the University network (although I'm told your web browser history now follows you around the Uni's computers… spooky)
- helps your studies by providing links to free research tools (if you trust the internet as a research resource - for those of us that don't yet, maybe we could find some links to sites that help guide people new to online research?)
- lets you see the latest news headlines from the UK, the World, or various Sport feeds (and remembers your preferences)
- lets you quickly go to your student portal account
… and from a UPSU.net point of view…
- lets you see your latest forum posts, diary entries, news articles and anything else you contribute to UPSU.net
- and lets you see the latest Union news, photo galleries, forum posts, and what events are coming up at the Union.
That's a good list to begin with, but I want more - more things you can customise, more information, more usefulness (although not necessarily in that order of priority). Oh, and I want it all to load in a flash.
The question is, what would you like to see on your homepage? What can't you live without on the www, every single day? And what - if anything - could we do to make you consider setting UPSU.net as your homepage? (If that's not too ambitious a goal.)
Posted by Alex on Sun 21st May 2006
First Dave Pearce, now the Scratch Perverts…
This year's been a record-breaker for the Grad Ball - apparently (and I'm happy to be proven wrong on this…), the Grad Ball has never sold out before. Not ever.
So, for tickets to sell out in under two days isn't bad going by anybody's standards. Which just makes my next bit of non-news all the more likely to turn my hair entirely grey; this afternoon while playing on the decks, Boss ('Angry Ginge' - a term of endearment believe it or not…) saunters up and announces that I'm allowed to warm up for the Scratch Perverts at the Grad Ball “if I want to”.
Honestly, I considered my reply for all of half a second… ;o)
So there's going to be a threesome of scruffy, unshaven chaps scrambling around behind the decks before the threesome of Scratch Perverts come on stage at your Grad Ball this year - Ben “Gonzo/Rane” West (I wish he'd make his mind up what he wants to call himself), Adrian “Professa” Testa, and myself (I'm still trying to come up with a better name than Exhale - suggestions on a
Posted by Alex on Fri 19th May 2006
Using household cleaning products on UPSU.net
I always thought AJAX was some kind of Americanised Domestos thingy, but apparently it's not… It looks like a very useful way of letting us create more interactive webpages on UPSU.net, so I'm off to do some reading.
As always, we're keen to get your views and suggestions on how we can improve UPSU.net - do you want to write news stories? Design pages? Or just have a 5-word suggestion for us to take on board? Add your comments, below, or e-mail us and tell us what you're thinking.
Posted by Alex on Thu 11th May 2006
I wonder if we can use…
… Google Local to help students find things in Portsmouth?
I think I need a haircut, y'see…
Posted by Alex on Wed 10th May 2006
Photos - they’re not all great, so…
Just before I hit the button to update the photo galleries, unleashing just under 1,500 new pics onto the site, I wanted to make sure that we are making it as easy as possible for everyone to get themselves heard should they come across a photo they really don't, for whatever reason, like.
When we introduced the commenting system, we extended the complaint functionality so that any URI on the site can be the target of a complaint, simply by adding a button to that page. It was already in use on the commenting system and the forums, but it wasn't added to the galleries simply because I never got round to delving into the gallery code to work out where to put the code in.
From tonight, every picture on the photo galleries carries a “complain about this photo” button, tucked neatly under the photo. Complainers can optionally submit their name, e-mail address and a reason for the complaint; we will deal with each complaint objectively, but naturally the extra information will help us to make the best decision when we handle a complaint.
Time for another cuppa then…
Posted by Alex on Mon 8th May 2006
More changes at UPSU.net
Things have been changing on UPSU.net, but most of the changes have been behind the scenes, so there's not much point me saying much about them here, but I'll skip over them to (try to) prove I've been working… ;o)
- The news system has been tweaked again: each news article is made up of two parts; the introduction (which is shown in the news listings pages along with a picture) and the main body (which is only shown when you click a link to view a news article).
Previously, we would write the introduction and the main article separately and save it; the website would then concatenate the two blocks of HTML together, but this led to some display problems, especially when we started using templates this week and found the image in the intro text was overlapping the text in the main body.
We were also limited to using a 128px-wide image in the intro text, which looked a bit odd at the top of a news article, making it hard to work out what was in the image.
By adding a “hook” into the code which checks for a certain “tag”, we can now create our main news body and, by inserting a short word inside curly brackets, we tell the site to strip all the HTML from the introduction - leaving only the words - and insert it into the main body of the document; now we don't have to worry what will happen when out intro text is tacked on to the start of the news body, and it's completely backward-compatible. Check out the first example of this system working here. Boring, huh?
- I've also added a hook into the news and webpage system which checks to see whether an article's description META tag has been set; if it hasn't, the first 200 letters of the introduction text are used as the META description. It's crude but, for well-written articles with a good introduction, it works well.
- Another area to see some work has been the blogs, with the right format of date/author info displayed at the top of individual blog entries now - a-la blogs homepage, plus I've added a set of “< prev | main | next >” links to let you browse around a member's blog more easily. I still have to design the code for the calendar and tagging system, and also create a homepage layout and finalise the homepage's functionality, so blogs are a fairly long way from being even nearly done yet. Still, I hope it'll be a nice “thing” once it's done though!
I'm off to catch up on Lost. If you're still reading this, you really must be painfully bored… ;o)
Posted by Alex on Fri 5th May 2006
De-mystifying the PWs homepage
When we first launched PurpleWednesdays online it was good, but it wasn't so easy to put each week's version online. In fact, it was a bit of a pain to do, so we had a head-scratch and came up with the idea of putting the articles up using the existing system for adding news stories for the various clubs and societies around the site.
We've also changed the way the homepage is built up - by hand instead of automagically - so we can shuffle things around, add new bits, remove bits we don't have any news in, and generally tweak things to suit each individual issue; much more appropriate for PWs because it follows the printed version, where no two issues have the same mix of content.
All we need now to make it a really, really good magazine is plenty more club and society news stories, an extra bod or two in the office to help convert print stories into online ones, and an endless supply of beer and nuts to keep us going… ;o)
p.s. fancy a Wii?
Posted by Alex on Wed 3rd May 2006