Alex Harries's diary

A quick festive Happy Christmas (or, if Christmas isn't something you celebrate, happy holidays) message from me. I'm sitting at the parents' house in Kent drinking tea and wandering around the vast expanse that is Flickrdotcom.

Of course, that means I'm bored. Very bored. I'm supposed to be off to a party in Essex later this evening, but having a shaved head and - rightly or wrongly - believing that my stubbly features could pass for "fashionable", I don't have any getting ready to do beyond the usual shower, brushing of teeth and selection of clean underkeks.

So, I've been playing about with UPSU.net, but now I'm running out of "little things" to do - I've already sent out a mass mail saying nothing more than Happy Xmas (but it's quite pretty anyway), I've re-jigged the URLs to peoples' profiles (e.g. "upsu.net/people/alexh") and squashed some bugs that have shown up from the fix, managed to separate the profile template from the forums template (when you viewed your profile, your page was using the same stylesheet as the forums, which was something I needed to change so I can start thinking about polishing up the user profiles pages soon), and posted some tumbleweed-attracting twaddle on the forums, also about me being bored. I think there's a common theme here...

I've got a couple of little tweaks ... ok, major changes, to make to the news system, including some magic with image handling and simplifying/tidying up the layouts, but for now I'm off to plan what toys I'm going to buy for the Nano I'm hoping Santa's dropped into the Apple store to collect for me (I'll be writing a furious letter if he hasn't...).

Hope you all have a ridiculously fattening Crimbo, and a great Noo Year. I'll probably write some more twaddle on here at some point, but if you're still around to read it, I'd really advise getting some more interesting things to do with your hols... ;o)

/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!

Whilst awaiting a steady but angry stream of complaint e-mails/phone calls/angry mobs after the débacle that was my sending of 3 e-mails all saying the same thing (the Social:Life update which Hotmail took a disliking to, and promptly broke for everybody who reads their mail at Hotmail.com), I've spent part of this evening developing a click-stream tracker for the site.

Well, I say "I" - I should really say "we", as I had a lot of help from our hosting co's head honcho, a chap who seems to spend more time at a PC working for other people than I do, and yet has time to actually hold conversations with anyone who asks nicely enough (albeit usually through MSN Messenger).

Anyhoo, I can hear the faint murmur of bored readers closing in about now, so I'll first try and explain what click-stream tracking is, and why it's a Good Thing and not a Bad Thing.

First of all, let me say this - it's totally, entirely, 100% anonymous. There, I said it.

Click-stream tracking is basically a way for us to work out whether parts of the site - especially the busiest areas like the homepage - are getting clicked as often as they could/should be. Imagine we spend hours crafting a beautiful picture to tell you about the latest new event/new feature on the site/tasty pancakes on Tuesday (Pancake Day! Woohoo!)/etc - if not-many-people click on it, either because it's not eye catching, it's not interesting to them, etc, then we've basically wasted our time and yours by putting it on a page where something more interesting/relevant/etc might get more attention.

Or we might be interested to know whether users are more likely to click on a picture of a beer bottle or a text link advertising that beer bottle - both go to the same page in the end, but how you get there - and as a result how we can better grab your attention - is important, especially on pages as crowded as the homepage.

So we create a system which makes a note of what link was clicked, and at what time, and every day/week/month we sort this information out and scratch our heads over what we think could work better.

In fact, if you clicked either of the links I put in this entry, above, your link will have been tracked. Don't feel like we've tricked you - those links are only there for me to find out (a) if people click the first link they can see to escape the hell that is my diary(!), and (b) to see if the offer of pancakes gets peoples' attention (I hope it does! Mmm, pancaaaakes...).

So, over the coming weeks I'll be working on converting some of the more important parts of the site to a click-tracking system, and we'll be thinking about ways of making the less-clicked links receive more interest. You might even spot something on here you never thought about investigating before, for example the Trampolining Club homepage! ;o)

Mass e-mails are always a bit of a contentious subject, and last night's e-mail (you can see it online here) to around 7,000 people has brought with it a few sharp responses from people whose responses made it quite clear that they didn't expect to receive them, and thought that we were simply "spamming" them without permission.

Personally, I hate unsolicited e-mails, and the Union goes to great lengths to make sure that we only send out what we say we're going to send out, and only to the people who agree to receive these e-mails.

We also do our best to make sure that the content of the e-mails is varied and interesting, but there's always room for improvement. If you would like to make a suggestion, you can e-mail us at webteam@upsu.net or add your comments below.

I'm also reviewing the criteria we use to select people for the lists; although we may end up sending out to fewer recipients, those who do receive the mailings should be the people who can actually benefit from the mailings.

You can change your subscription settings by going to your profile (you'll need to sign in first), then click "update my profile" and select the "preferences" and "JobShop" tabs to see your e-mail subscriptions. Don't forget to click the "Update" button at the bottom to save your new preferences.

Well, it's been a couple of very long days. I've been tied up with the forums, blogs and commenting system. The forums and blogs have been seeing more pixel-pushing and a lot of sub-standard code has been re-written to improve the reliability of both systems.

The main bulk of today's work was getting the commenting system ready to turn on. The basics were already in place - people could write a comment and click a button, and an administrator could then decide whether they wanted it displayed or not.

However, a fundamental part of the blogs system is that the owner of a blog... sorry, diary entry should also be able to manage their comments. This means that, when someone comments on a news story or diary entry, the author of the item gets an e-mail telling them, and they can then go and see the comment. Not only that, but they can approve the comment, edit it, or delete it.

Another important part of this system is the ability for anybody to make a complaint about a comment - it's an unfortunate fact of life that websites tend to attract the bad with the good, and because it's impossible to guarantee that no comments which breach site policy will slip through the safety nets we have in place, there's a mechanism in place which allows anybody to report a comment to a member of the site administration team. This system has been written to cover anything on the site, so you can now also complain about forum posts if you wish to.

The last stages of testing the commenting system will be taking place over the next few days, and I'm hoping to have it ready to launch by Monday, along with the diaries. This year's election candidates are going to be my first guinea pigs in the system, and I'm hoping this proves to be a valuable help to their campaigns. That said, it might turn out that no-one wants to make use of t'Interwebnet to promote themselves. Only time - and some gentle prodding - will tell.

Other happenings lately - or not, in a couple of cases - are the re-vamp and mahoosive update of the Social:Life section I've been asked to tackle. It's a shame it's taken a bit longer than I'd hoped to get the information out there, but this update will hopefully set the trading side of things up more-or-less until the end of the year, which is handy. No word on the Grad Ball yet, but I'll be sure to relay that here once I know some more.

The RAG website is still not up - entirely my fault (and I hang my head in shame). All the graphics are more-or-less done; I just have to slice and dice them, and squeeze them into a new template. A couple of things are bugging me at the moment about the colours; I want to stay true to the black/orange of the RAG publicity, but there's nothing quite like trying to read light text on a black background to put anyone off. Ideas on a postcard as to how I can tackle this - the writer of the best suggestion gets to buy me a pint (that's fair, isn't it...?).

The Course Reps mini-site is also on the to-do list and I fear I'm going to have to let it slip past the March 1st deadline. Luckily, I'm still waiting on the text - without that, it's a bit hard to know how to divide it all up, but the layout and colours I've yet to decide on, so myself, a pack of felt-tip pens (and maybe some playdough...) and a camera will be off on a mission to find some inspiration tomorrow. Just how inspiring the Uni halls of residence are though - at least when sober - is another matter entirely...

We're also starting to get on our feet with the mass-mailing system (although some of you may have missed out on last week's JobShop e-mails - this mistake will be rectified this week, and I apologise!) and should be sending out some reasonably uniform-looking, easy to read mails from the various departments on a more regul...