A new toy for our contributors: a (very poor) attempt at sticky notes for web and news pages. Still, apparently, it's the thought that counts... ;o)

Too much going on at the moment to get my head around, and even more I can't begin to work on because I just don't have time...

What's happening...

• Asking every student with a passing interest in media to get involved with writing and designing for the Union this year,
  
• Looking at ways of re-organising the media teams to make it easier for the Union's strong and diverse media content to make it into the student population's consciouness - better sharing of news, better communications between the various media groups, and encouraging more - and faster - communications between students and student groups, and the Union,
• Building up - with more than a little bit of help - a large amount of training materials and opportunities for students to get a lot more from being involved with UPSU Media. Ben Norman's been working hard on some journalistic training which made for strangely compelling reading over the weekend,
• Directory 2007 - Mike Cooter and Steve Baker have been working their arses off for this, and it's coming together nicely I think,
  
• Pompey Guide - Gamel Oki (Pugwash designer extraordinaire) has been cracking the whip to get me writing for the Pompey Guide 2007, so when you come across the really boring couple of pages, you can blame me,
• New newspaper - we now need to start thinking about a name, layouts, designs, content and presentation styles, and how much space we're going to have (or not) per issue. Don't worry - I'm confident we'll squeeze it all in nicely,
• Still setting up the iMacs for UPSU Media use - no sooner do I think it's all done and ready to be unleashed when someone thinks of another program to install,
• Loads of work on the UPSU Groups and NUS Registration systems,
• Building up a long list of UoP-related Facebook groups so we can get our news out to even more students than before,
• Sabbs DJing in Lux on the 28th September, around 9pm - yehay!
• New season of Heroes coming shortly - will it be any good?
• Poking fun at abusive freshers who don't have the nous to sign out of their accounts before posting abusive comments on the website ;o)

What's not happening...

• The blogs homepage being redesigned,
• The forums template being redesigned,
• Grad Ball videos being edited down (actually, that gives me an idea...),
  
• UPSU Groups being finished, with comments, forums, photo and document uploads and many other things, err, not being done,
  
• My to-do list getting much shorter.

Tomorrow we're off for some staff bondage while climbing trees on a hovercraft... Something like that...

/Al - Meeja Whore 

... if there's enough room on the UPSU.net homepage for "What is UPSU?" and "Take a tour of UPSU.net" links? There's certainly a good argument for both; how many students at the University of Portsmouth - or outside of it, for that matter - know that the Union is in fact two companies - UPSU and UPEL - and they do two very different jobs under the same roof, for largely the same target audience?

And also, while we're on the subject, how many people really know how huuuge a website UPSU.net is, and what it can offer students?

I think it might be time to reassess how well the Union promotes what it actually does: there's a helluva lot going on at the Union throughout the year, and pretty much every student - whether they're resident in Pompey or a distance learner - can benefit from at least something going on here.

In the meantime, I'm trying to figure out how we can a) streamline the galleries so they're as simple to use and update as, say, Flickrdotcom (or, for that matter, whether we should just invest in a Flickr account and put all our photos up there instead?) and b) really expand peoples' public profiles into something useful and interesting to wander around.

/al - reading standingonthebox.blogspot.com  

(Health warning: this post is very boring...)

The last couple of weeks, and this weekend especially, have been a geeky code-pushing time for me as I try to cram in some much-needed site development.

I've finally turned on the tagging system, which lets you find blog entries, web pages, news articles and members by keywords, and I've been working for the last couple of days to tidy up the code that creates peoples' public profiles so I'm ready to start writing the tabs code (which lets you see all the content a member has created on UPSU.net). I've also just finished working my way through the 5,000-ish-lines of code that make up the UPSU Groups system, ready to incorporate group management into the site.

I'm going to ramble on a bit about each of these three features, because they're quite important to how UPSU.net is going to grow as a community site over the next 12 months. I hope...!

Tagging

The tagging system has been in development for over a year now, and it's more-or-less finished, bar a couple of bugs that mean some results don't show up when they should.

"Tagging" is a way of adding keywords to your content - blog entries, web pages, news articles, your profile, and photos, to let other people search for your content - and everyone's content - about a particular "thing". For example, this blog entry is tagged with "development", and you can find other blog entries by me about development by clicking the tag link at the top of this blog entry.

This also means you can search for other members of UPSU.net by their interests, and once the new profile pages have been finished, this should make a lot more sense.

The best thing about the tagging system, though, are tag clouds, which graphically represent the top 100, 200, or however many tags which are the most popular in a given area. You can see what I mean by taking a look at the tags homepage.

One other benefit of this is how the tagging system works with blogs: your blog's web address is something like "upsu.net/blogs/johnsmith". If you tag a few blog entries with "football", you can find a list of all these blog entries at "upsu.net/blogs/johnsmith/football", and a miniature tag cloud - the top 15-or-so tags used in the blog you're viewing - is shown on the right of every blog page belonging to that author.

I've also tried to make it as easy as possible to tag blog entries - you simply have to type a new tag on each line in the "Tag this diary entry" box (when you write or edit your blog), and your tags can be more than one word, e.g. "top 40 chart tunes".

Anyone who's a member of UPSU.net can start a blog - just sign-in and go to upsu.net/profile/content/blogs to find out more.

• More information on the tags homepage.
  
  

Member profiles

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