I'm just grabbing two minutes' free time between meetings, so I thought I'd put a quick update on here about UPSU.net, which has seen a lot of new things going on over the last month or so, not least the new JobShop (which I'm going to do a full write-up about shortly).

The UPSU.net homepage has had a bit of a reshuffle; UPSU and BBC news headlines have been condensed into column 3, and column 4 has been freed up to make way for the forthcoming "latest photo galleries", reprioritised "forthcoming events listing"  and new "Social:Life" boxes, and - most importantly - a shiny new "JobShop" box has been added below blogs and forums in column 2, with the latest jobs and a mini tag cloud listing.

This should pave the way for the forthcoming news section reshuffle, which is proving to be a bit of a headache to work out at the moment, because it's very hard to find a balance between presenting a unified news section with navigation based on the content - for example news, features, reviews, etc - and a news section which presents articles based on which printed publication (or other media area - for example Pure FM) they're from.

Time to see what the experts would do, methinks... ;o)

Ttfn - Al 

I know I should be doing coursework, but while doing some research on the BBC's Access 2.0 accessibility blog for my final year embarrassment project, I realised that the alternative high-contrast stylesheets I put together to provide a text-only version of the UPSU.net homepage could be very easily rolled out to all the other pages on UPSU.net with a couple of simple code changes.

So, now, if you're a Firefox (or similar browser) user, you can change the stylesheets on-the-fly by going to the "View" menu, and choosing a different page style - 2 or 3. Layout 2 - light text on black - is designed to be easier for partially-sighted and dyslexic visitors to use, while style 3 - dark on white - should make also make viewing easier for visitors with certain requirements.

Naturally, this isn't a complete solution to our commitments to providing greater accessibility on UPSU.net, but it's a short step from here to enabling every page to respect the settings of the homepage's high-contrast choices, and also to allow visitors to choose a different level of accessibility as they browse around the site.

One day, maybe, I'd love to see UPSU.net making use of the accessibility features the BBC are trialling on their homepage layout customisation tool.

As always, I'm keen to hear feedback from everyone who visits the site, although I'd much prefer to read the reasoned and well thought-out criticisms over the ranty, angry comments (but anything's better than the tumbleweed of a quiet blog... ;o), so please let me know your thoughts on accessibility, or UPSU.net in general.

/al - I need to get out just a teeeeeny bit more.... 

I wonder if the proportion of elections coverage on the homepage is just - possibly, maybe - a little too high...? ;o)

While the elections are *the* most important part of the Union's calendar, it's not fair to assume that everyone is interested in having it quite literally forced on them.

Time to go searching for some alternative content to bring things back into balance. Any suggestions? 

(This is another really, *really* boring blog entry. Why not Google for "noodle mining" instead of reading it?) 

I've just made my first bit of Ajax - I feel so proud! Ok, it's sad and geeky, but I'm happy 'cos I just (a) learnt something new, and (b) it worked.

When I tried to get onto the UPSU homepage earlier this evening, it wouldn't load. It was working fine for everyone else, so I figured it had something to do with a piece of code I was loading for myself, meaning the only suspect was the weather box, which only loads for me (as I'm still testing its reliability).

To fix this, we need to have a way of preventing content which relies on other servers or websites, or which is either bulky, not critically important to UPSU.net (or both) from slowing down page loads. Lots of websites use JavaScript to load content into a DIV after the rest of the page has loaded, for example the BBC news homepage (which loads the "Your local news, weather and sport here" box after the rest of the page has loaded). This means that the non-essential content can be as badly behaved as it likes without breaking the rest of the page, even if it never loads. Google Ads also works on this basis to prevent their adverts from slowing down the loading times of the pages displaying the adverts.

Not really having a clue where to start though, I went off on a Google wander and found DynamicDrive.com's excellent cut-out-and-keep guide which does exactly what I was looking for. So, one quick modification (to let me load the EuroWeather module outside of Mambo - it's not a core component and certainly poses no security risks) and we're up and running.

I'll also be using this technique to load in BBC News headlines onto the homepage in the near future, and I'm already trying to think of other ways we can make use of this. An ideal application would be to use it to load additional homepage content, for example my original but not-very-evil plan of converting the hero advert (the big 450x200 box) into a tabbed area which can show either the hero advert, or two or three other boxes of content - "my forum discussions", "my blah blah...", or "my settings" - etc. While it opens the way for us to put a lot of new toys on the homepage we haven't been able to because of size and space restrictions, I'm going to have to be careful not to fall into the trap of piling crap on top of crap just "because it's nice" ;o)

Over on the SUSU forums, I spotted this discussion claiming that SUSU is the best students' union website in the country. Not sure I agree with that, but it's certainly a good site (as I've mentioned before).

I want to see UPSU.net kicking everyone's backsides as a student website - we need to focus hard on improving the content, features, usability, usefulness and looks (in that order), and since we have a potential base of 16,000 students, that's a lot of different needs and levels of computer ability.

I reckon we also need to start taking a much greater interest in what people would like to see. To that end, tell me!

• What do you think?
• What does UPSU.net need?
• What would you like to see on the site?
• What would keep you coming back to the site?

Answers in the boxes below. Thanks! /al

When I go to the UPSU homepage, I see things a little differently to most people because I have a couple of bits of content loaded in a "hidden" box - great while I'm working on new toys for the site.

One of these toys is the Portsmouth Weather feed, which uses a slightly modified version of the Mambweather module for Mambo (first spotted on Fred Bradley's GapStudentsOnline.com).

I've designed it to fit into a tiny bit of screen real estate, as you can see from the pic on the right, but I still don't know where I'm going to squeeze it into our already packed homepage. For now I might just tuck it under the "directory" links until I create a BBC News headlines box under the current UPSU news boxes.

Any better ideas? The winner gets precisely nothing but a warm fuzzy feeling :o)

(And, in answer to those of you at the back of the class: no, I won't be sticking it there. Eww...)