When it comes to looking for good ideas for UPSU Media, I don't think there's any shame in taking cues from other FE and HE media outlets.

Warwick Uni has a very large base of staff and student blogs on their webpages, with articles ranging from music to democracy and everything in-between. The content is also largely well-written (which makes a change to some of the gumph I spout on these pages ;o).

Two articles which really interested me were this one ("why websites don't matter any more") and this one by Holly Cruise, called "No, I don't understand the democracy here, either", which is a very insightful piece about Students' Union elections; well worth a look.

Warwick's SU site also publishes "The Word", their equivalent of Pugwash, as a PDF available online; another nice touch. It's not nearly as interactive as I want to go with Pugwash, but it's a good start.

More importantly, I think, the magazine also covers forthcoming event listings for the Union, and also dedicates a reasonable amount of space to news and reviews.

It's a good read; check it out if you have a chance, and also take a browse around their SU website as well if you have a chance; again, there's some interesting ideas on there I'd love to implement here.

Got an idea of your own for UPSU Media, from a news article, feature, or a suggestion on how we could improve things? Send them in to us.

(This is a *really* boring blog entry, but I have to write it - sorry!)

With the impending arrival of the campaigning season, it's only fair to assume that any unfair advantage a candidate has should be taken away from them wherever possible. Unfortunately for me, given I have fairly wide-ranging access to UPSU.net, this means certain steps need to be taken to ensure I (or a "helpful friend") can't take advantage of this power by turning UPSU into a "Vote Alex" campaign.

The problem is, simply turning off my account would prevent me from writing in my blog, posting on the forums and maintaining my profile, all of which are privileges available to everyone with a UPSU account.

It would also be impractical to "transfer" ownership of my account to another - standard - account, because we don't have that kind of tool on UPSU.net, and it would make a complete mess of the auditing system I've put in place over the last couple of weeks.

So, in the spirit of fair campaigning (i.e. to make sure I can't misbehave when I come home trolleyed from a night of drinking...), I've been wandering around UPSU's code today turning off some of the controls. Here's what I can't do on UPSU.net any more:

• Edit any web pages in the elections mini-site,
• Edit any news articles in the elections mini-site,
• Log into the administration back-end at all - so I can't:
• view or edit peoples' accounts,
• change advertising settings,
• move pages around,
• add, edit or remove the SSI modules - for example, the toys which generate the "latest news articles" code on the elections homepage,
• ... and a load of other things, too,

Tomorrow my FTP access to the site will also be disabled, too, so I won't be able to edit code on UPSU. On the plus side, this means I won't be tempted to spend hours writing and tweaking new projects, which will be great for my sleep pattern (I almost *always* think of a great new tool around midnight which "will only take 10 minutes" and keeps me up for the rest of the night...).

Now I don't have anything to do, maybe I'll actually (a) get on with making My First Video Blog, and (b) start planning my campaign ... maybe!

Big love /al 

UPSU.net has a new toy, which (I hope) will make it a lot easier to add a video to your blog, and easier for us pixel geeks to add videos to news and web pages.

Find out more here, and to see a really bad impression of Richard Hammond advertising a boot sale (... or something ...).

/al 

1. Find a video you like on YouTube,
2. Start a new blog entry, and think up an appropriate title (witty and/or attention-grabbing is better),
3. Copy the handy HTML code provided by YouTube and paste it into the HTML editor in your blog,
4. Click the "update" button to return to your blog's WYSIWYG view,
5. Click the "save entry" button,
6. Admire your... Oh bugger, where's my video gone?
7. Click the "edit" link to open your blog entry again,
8. Click the "HTML" button to see what's happened to your HTML,
9. Wonder why your HTML code seems to have turned itself into a random jumble of code that makes no sense to anyone,
10. Repeat steps 3 to 6 at least 5 times,
11. Google for an answer to the problem,
12. Try 15 different permutations of your Google search. Still nothing,
13. Google for a plugin to work around the problem,
14. Find a plugin but not too sure if it'll work, so off we go to take a database back-up before anything else is done...

So, far from being able to upload a video about a floating dog, I'm now looking for a way of putting YouTube videos into blogs without breaking everything.  Oh, happy days...

/al - trying once again not to break anything... 

(Off topic, and apologies for the title - it was the best I could think of...)

I've already said my piece about Celeb Big Brother's latest publicity ploy - the stirring up of a race row - but I think it's probably best left to a magistrate to put things into perspective, here.