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 

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!

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 £20 note as usual please...).

Along with Pure:FM dealing with the after-Pervert deck duties, this Grad Ball is looking better and better as we approach the day.

The only downside is that, unless I can get myself sacked between now and then, I'll have to work all day in the run up to the ball before I can go on the decks - exciting stuff, but being of a naturally lazy persuasion, I'm less than keen on doing anything even vaguely resembling effort. Still, you've got to take the lows with the highs... Or words to that effect.

As for UPSU.net, I'm trialling a basic mailer script as an extension to our news system which lets us add a basic form to any news article or web page asking for things like e-mail address, age, name, comment/suggesion, etc - fill it out, hit "send" and it (should) fire off an e-mail to us with the information you tell us. This is interesting for two reasons - it means we can quickly and easily ask for your feedback on a range of subjects - great for those of you who reckon we could do things better, or just differently - and it also means we can also tie some survey functionality into the site without sending you off to a massively complex survey tool when we only need to ask you a couple of questions.

I've also listed the various projects and work I've lined up for myself over the summer; finishing the blogs, the RSS system, updates to the galleries, "Ask UPSU a question", making page URLs more logical, tidying up the design of the forums, rebuilding the JobShop system, rewriting the search engine, and extending the NUS Registration system to handle the new NUS Extra and NUS Democracy cards, should see my workload pretty constant until... About 9pm on September 24th.

If anybody'd be so good as to send me a card for my birthday on September 5th, that would be lovely... :o)

Enough rambling for one day. I would have gone back and added a load of links but, to be honest, I'm sure you wouldn't be bothered about clicking them any more than I am about creating them in the first place - feel free to disagree, but it would just prove you're really bored, aren't you?

Another amazingly dull post coming up... ;o)

I've been tweaking the code that decides what the URL is for the pages on the site. The changes aren't finished yet, but it should mean shorter, easier-to-remember URLs to find your way around the site, and Google & chums should be able to do a better job of indexing the site, which isn't too bad an idea either.

It also means we can override certain pages individually, so the Sociallife homepage, for example, is actually at upsu.net/sociallife and not some long, complicated address instead. All the old URLs still work, so you won't have to update your bookmarks, either.

The main reason for this is so we can get URLs for pages like the forums - which have URLs like http://www.upsu.net /component /option,com_simpleboard /func,view /Itemid,336 /catid,27 /id,549 /#549 - down to something like http://www.upsu.net/forums/v/549#549.

I've also been tweaking the search engine - the output is a lot easier to read, and you can bookmark your searches if you're that kinda person. Once I've done a bit more homework, I'll be re-jigging the way the search engine selects your search results, so (hopefully) the search results should be a lot more accurate.

Oh, and plans are now in motion for a new JobShop system which should be ready for the new academic year. The existing system is ok, but doesn't do everything we want it to. I'd like to see a system which is properly integrated into the site; Job Searches would be much easier - you'll be able to search for a job or job type, apply direct for some jobs through the site, and get further information and help with just a few mouse clicks.

We'll also be making it easier to get information and advice on searching for a job, and the jobs bulletin should be more accurate, contain more of the right information, and will (hopefully) also be customised to your preferences - more interested in admin work than customer service? Just tell us in your profile and we'll customise your bulletin e-mail before we send it out to you.

This, of course, is all assuming I don't decide to go and herd goats in the Andes over the summer instead...

Told you it was going to be another boring post... ;o)