Oh you cheeky bloody…
I like to keep an eye on what other Students' Unions are doing online – I'd be the first to admit that I don't know all the tricks, ideas and guidelines behind designing any sort of website, so I will happily admit that I take my cues from sites designed and run by more knowledgeable people.
However, one thing I refuse to do is to simply copy designs, ideas, etc from another website – if someone is doing something cool, for example the BBC Blogs website, then we look at how and why they do things that way, and how we can adapt and improve it to suit our needs.
It's because of these two rather conflicting principles that I am more than a little annoyed at a statement by Southampton SU's Media & Communications ossifer, Laura Fewell, who published a Union Council report in May saying UPSU.net has “ripped [SUSU.org] off something rotten”, and then goes on to say “But on a plus, they have linked to Wessex Scene Online news feed because we rock and they don’t but want to rock like us.”
Ok Laura, whether or not you're reading this, here's a reply to your statements (and please remember that this is *my* reply – not that of UPSU.net, Portsmouth Students' Union, or anyone with any actual say in anything at all whatsoever, so if you want to send an angry mob to Pompey, send them to me, and not my bosses… ;o):
- On the subject of (allegedly) ripping SUSU.org off:
What makes you think we have? Is it that we have a news section? Or that we have a big advert on our homepage? Or a list of links to common areas of the site on the homepage?
Is it that we provide forums for students to chat on? Or … Well, I'm stumped, so tell me – what have we “ripped off”?
Admittedly, my questions are a touch flippant, but that's purely because I really can't see how we have taken any great influence from your site in our design process. Yes, SUSU.org has a huge range of content – varied in style and generally consistent in being of good quality – but then almost every Students' Union which has made a commitment to providing a comprehensive online presence has similarly well-developed content.
- And as for linking to Wessex Scene online:
When I was involved in the design process for UPSU's news section, I wanted to include news and information which was up-to-date and relevant to all of our students. I am no snob, and nor are my superiors – we know that there are many good sites external to UPSU.net which offer interesting content for students. We felt that we wanted to pick out some of the most relevant and
interesting content for students in the Portsmouth (and wider
Hampshire) areas.Of those sites, those which have taken the time to provide this news as a publicly-available RSS feed were ones we could syndicate from, including Wessex Scene. I must admit, I like reading WSO – I think the style is interesting and funny, and the articles are varied and well-written – and it was for this reason that we are making use of the RSS feed from Wessex Scene in our news pages (scroll down and it's a block of four small links on the bottom-left of the main news column).
Maybe next year, when we bring Pugwash online, you or your successor might consider reciprocating our interest by linking to us via our Pugwash RSS feed – who knows? Maybe you and our Media & Communications Officer Fraggy should get together over a drink some time…?
I am genuinely interested to hear any and all feedback – from anyone – on this matter. We work hard to develop UPSU.net and I must confess, despite the best efforts of the human resources bods, we are all only human, so if the site is broken, wrong or looks strangely like somebody else's work, we want to know about it, so go on and tell us!
/al
Posted by Alex on Fri 30th June 2006
A few random videos…
Video sites like YouTube and Google Video are great for finding … well, largely rubbish and random videos, but this week I've had a couple sent through to me that have made me laugh so, for your just-about-work-safe viewing pleasure…
- Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane (video 1) introduces Harvard's class of '06 to Peter Griffin (video 2), Stewie Griffin (video 3) and Quagmire (video 4)
- A fully-kitted out motorcyclist does “My Humps” (careful: it's not the censored version of the song…)
Some odd people out there…
Posted by Alex on Thu 29th June 2006
Another toy: instant newsletter subscriber
We have another new toy on the site. It's something that's been in the “planning” (i.e. the “thought about it, never got round to doing anything with it”) stage for a while now – a one-click way of subscribing to, and unsubscribing from, a newsletter feed.
On UPSU.net we run a few different newsletter lists; the JobShop and Social:Life ones are two of the most commonly-used lists, and the compulsory list (which is used to send urgent broadcast messages to everyone) sees about one message every two months.
With our mass mailing lists that can be opted-in to, e.g. the JobShop, you used to have to go to your profile, edit it, and tick a box, then save it and wait for someone to e-mail you.
Now, we have a toy we can sit on whatever page we like (for the JobShop, it's under the menu on the right on every page apart from the job listings pages – check for yourself if you like ;o).
This toy tells you if you're subscribed to whichever list that particular block of code is looking after, and a button you can click on the subscribe or unsubscribe. Clicking the button takes you straight back to the same page, so you don't end up lost in a sea of back-button clicking just to sign up.
I'm also planning a re-jig of the Social:Life homepage to coincide with the new academic year, so we'll hopefully be adding one of these buttons for the Social:Life mailing list to that page as well… Soonish… Maybe…
I'm doing a spot of work-avoidance at the moment – I'm supposed to be working out how the NUS card sign-up system is going to work (and, at some point in the next month or so, actually making it happen: cry…) – so, to avoid having to start it today, I'm sketching out some ideas for a “My RSS” box on UPSU.net's new homepage (err, coming soon…).
The idea with My RSS is to give all members of the site a way of adding RSS headlines (from any website) to their UPSU.net homepage (i.e. the page they see when they sign into the site, on any computer). Users provide the URL of the RSS feed, choose how many headlines to show, and say whether they want to see the first few words of the description as well (… and if they want to see HTML or plain text? Or is that too complicated?), and voila, someone else's news on our website…!
It really is good stuff, and if/when it's running, will probably cause me to switch from using UPSUuuuugle as my homepage. The only potential problem is that, like a lot of things, it uses a tiny bit of Javascript to show/hide options menus; I know a (small) number of the University's PCs don't even support javascript, so this will mean another feature which some of the site's more technologically-limited visitors will have to live without.
Of course (without wanting to sound like I'm jumping on a passing bandwagon), it's a fairly Web 2.0 thing (although members will only see their own RSS choices), and – more importantly – it's another way of UPSU.net encouraging people to set UPSU.net as their homepage, which would be rather flattering!
Posted by Alex on Wed 28th June 2006
How many more jokes about aRSSes can I make…?
At last, I think the RSS system can be finally put to bed for at least the next couple of months – the last few days have been spent finishing off the extensions to the RSS system. UPSU.net now boasts one of the most comprehensive syndication systems anywhere (ironic timing of course – Summer is the Union's quietest period, so there's not likely to be much happening over the next two months…!).
The site can now offer several different flavours of RSS feeds for news, forums, comments, and events. The last bit of work – the forums extensions – were one of the hardest to do as I had to figure out a way of allowing for the nested forum system (where you can have a forum inside a forum inside a forum inside a forum inside…. ad nauseam) which I'm hoping to get round to doing well in advance of the start of the new academic year.
Look out for the RSS symbol in the forums if you want to keep an eye on what's happening:
RSS link in forums section view
RSS link in category view
RSS links at the top of a thread
… and expanded to show all feeds:
RSS links at the bottom of discussion threads
Anyhoo, instead of having to burden yourself with visiting UPSU.net to stay up to date with the latest
A typical worry of mine; after all this work, I do hope I'm not the only person using this system…! /al
Posted by Alex on Tue 27th June 2006
It’s not that I don’t care, but…
… if you're going to have an in-depth conversation about the football, world cup, Sven's decision to play one striker up-front, the weather in Germany, what time it is in Germany, how the beer tastes in Germany and how your mate's wife is enjoying the shopping – and please bear in mind this isn't because I'm horrible, grumpy or generally a b'stard – could you possibly refrain from holding the conversation – at a volume which shows no regard for anyone trying to sleep – 2 feet away from my bloody bedroom window?! Some of us have jobs to go to in the morning fer heaven's sake!
Footnote: dear neighbour-who-can't-drive: please refrain from justifying your lack of parking radar by listening for the “thump” of your bumper striking mine as a gauge to tell whether you're properly in your parking space. I must confess, I don't particularly like the sound of my car's bodywork being damaged, and I refer you to my comment to Mr. Chatty, above, about my reasons for liking some peace and quiet between the hours of, say, midnight and 6 a.m…
(Yup, I'm grumpy when woken in the middle of the night…)
Posted by Alex on Mon 26th June 2006
Ooops
Thanks to a brain failure on the part of some techies which left a couple of computers emitting smoke, UPSU.net went a little bit squiffy this morning…
The first I knew of it was a couple of minutes after the site went down and I received a nasty-looking error message about corrupted tables, database errors and passwords – first thoughts were “someone's managed to hack into the site – arghh!” and promptly had to deal with the panic of taking the whole site offline.
Thankfully, it wasn't anything as serious after all – the sudden shut-down of our database server meant one of the crucial lists of information – which tracks who's logged in – was corrupted and needed repair. This isn't the same as the list of members on UPSU.net, so losing the information would simply have meant anyone who was logged in to the site would have to log in again, at worst.
Things I've learnt from today:
- We need a “big red button” which can be pressed to take UPSU.net offline and display a “Sorry, we broke it…” message.
- And we need to make sure we know exactly how to press this “big red button”.
Oh, and…
- … It's not worth having kittens over spilt pixels (or something similar…).
I'm not sure if we're out of the woods yet, as I understand there are a number of red-faced chaps running around an office somewhere in London trying to fix things before the end of the day (it is, after all, POETS day…), but we appear to be back up and running, so I can get on with finishing off the RSS system now. Huzzah…
Posted by Alex on Fri 23rd June 2006
Bandwidth miserliness
It was pointed out a couple of days ago that we might be somewhat over-doing it with the amount of comments in our code, especially in our CSS files. I didn't realise just how much until I ran a little test using our new-fangled dynamic CSS thingy; comments make up around 16Kb in the 65Kb of css sent down for the homepage alone.
For a broadband user, that's a whole… one-third of a second to download. Ahh well, at least we're heading in the right direction ;o)
Because of this, we're trialling not sending any comments down, but this means if in
the future we decide to use CSS hacks which make use of comment tags to
hide code from non-compliant browsers, we're going to run into a whole
world of CSS validation fun…
Another trick we're trying is sending the .css files in a compressed format – it's (supposed to be) completely transparent to the person browsing the website; our server asks your browser if it can handle compressed information, and either your browser can or can't – if it can't, the stylesheet is simply sent uncompressed, but if it can then the server packages the css file up on-the-fly and sends it down the wires to your browser, where it's decoded.
Despite the minimal benefit, it's still good that we're paying attention to these things, although I'm fairly certain there are many much more important things to be getting on with. Like answering the support emails I've been hoarding for far too long – oops!
/al – off to do some proper work now
Posted by Alex on Tue 20th June 2006
A busy week
More as a way of helping me remember wot I dun last week than trying to write anything interesting, this week I've mainly been…
- Working on the diaries side bar – the calendar system is up and working, along with “latest diary entries” and “latest comments” – now there's only a couple more things left to do before the diaries are ready to go.
- Working on the RSS system – it's not finished yet (I still have to finish the “comments on this article” and set of forums feeds first, but we're getting there, with the addition of a huge range of feeds – see upsu.net/rss/about for a mini-list).
- Working on the dynamic CSS system – since we began UPSU.net, it's never been 100% possible to tell how your web page is going to look because we typically use two CSS files – the local one, and a site-wide one. When you edit a web page, the WYSIWYG editor only pulls in the local template, so some of the site-wide settings – fonts, some colours, etc – don't show. As of today, each page has a single .css file which is generated by the site each time it's called, and includes the local and site-wide CSS code, as well as any user-inserted CSS (which they can simply type when they are editing their page to save the hassle of uploading a stylesheet). So far, everything seems to be working in hunky-dory fashion. Woot!
I've also been playing catch-up with a backlog of work the dimensions of a small mountain, so the next couple of days will be spent finally clearing that – joyous things like answering the “why doesn't the JobShop work?” e-mails (fixed now – my apologies – hosting co. moved server but I forgot to pencil it in the diary… Duh…) and “why don't you have anything about snowboarding/skating/whatever on the site?” (uhhm, 'cos … actually I dunno…!).
Over the summer, we have a lot of work to be ploughing on with, but the main jobs over the summer include getting the sportos to update their homepages a lot more, and encouraging the societies, and the various Union departments, to do likewise.
Fraggy's been working on getting to grips with some of the harder aspects of the site – creating templates for the Netball club, for example – and I'm planning the rope him into getting some of the site's more neglected areas polished up over the summer, too.
I've also just finished a few different re-usable homepage layout thingies, the first – “violet” – finding it's way onto the Course Reps homepage. It's one of my first *almost* pure-CSS layouts – the code's still a bit messy, but it's certainly better than opening a dozen tables just to push something one pixel to the side…(!). You can see the other variations on the theme here. Unfortunately, one of my evening jobs is going to be pruning the CSS files down to a sensible size – the CSS for the tester page is 60K, which is bloody silly. Ah well, s'pose we can't all have social lives, eh? ;o)
There are quite a few other tweaks I've been making, but I'll save those for a really rainy/boring day…
Right, I'm off to hoover the house – Jade's moving in tonight 'cos I've got a spare room. Apparently she's “loud and lovely” – so says her profile thingy – but she's been a mate for years so I'm sure it'll all be cool. Or noisy. One or t'other…
Posted by Alex on Mon 19th June 2006
Test entry 1
Let's see if the multiple-entries-on-one-day code is working shall we?
Posted by Alex on Mon 12th June 2006