Alex Harries's diary

If there's one thing that's truly awesome about Facebook's new(-ish) fan pages, its our ability to combine them with the huge amounts of visual content we make available through RSS syndication from UPSU.net.

(Total disclosure: many ideas used on our UPSU FB page stolen wholesale from the UoP Facebook page. Ah well, they say there are no original ideas anymore...) 

A little geeky update - UPSU.net now has the rather posh-looking Smoothgallery by JonDesign running the homepage and Social:Life homepage promo images:

It's even got a very flashy preview gadget when you click on "Show all": 

The promos are limited to the newest four to keep page load times reasonable, although I'm trying to educate the editors of the tool that two or three are better... ;o)

The open source part is a simple Javascript library based on the open source Mootools framework, which the University's website has been using for some time now to great effect:

(One thing I'm hoping the University will capitalise on in the near future is their provision of RSS; there's clearly a lot of information on the site, but sometimes its nice when you can get the information delivered to you, and at the moment only the news (and possibly the events) feeds are obviously available).

Most importantly with Smoothgallery, the whole thing decomposes into accessible HTML very gracefully - no Flash here at all.

To get it working on UPSU.net, I had to write a small manager application to let us cue up the images:

... and once I'd thrown that together it was only a very short step from there to put yet another RSS feed on UPSU.net - the latest homepage promos RSS feed:

The gallery itself is a brilliant bit of code, and even a numpty like me was able to very quickly create a version for the Social:Life homepage image feed, too, which you can see on the Social:Life homepage if you really want to!

Anyway, I've only got to do another one of these Really Boring Introductions - for the JobShop - and then I can focus on more interesting things. Like sleep...

/al 

This week I read with interest a letter printed in Nottingham Students' Union's "Impact" magazine by their Students' Union Community Officer, Lou Green. Mr Green wrote how the first issue of the magazine that year had run with the headline "Shottingham", referring to a shooting which had taken place in the city, and how he felt the headline gave a "false negative stereotype" of the city. What I think Mr Green's article boiled down to was that he felt that, given all the positive aspects of student life in Nottingham to shout about, surely the choice of a story about a shooting in the city was a purposefully negative one, given the wealth of positive articles the paper might have run instead.

This issue will no doubt have been debated internally, both before and after publication, and while I'm certain that Impact's editorial took reasonable care to ensure their content was fair and balanced, I can't and won't try to add my tuppence-worth to an issue I know virtually nothing about. That said, a sad fact of any media-led culture seems to be that "bad news sells". Instead, I want to relate Mr Green's letter to an issue which arose on the day of distribution of issue 4 of Pugwash News - Wednesday 14th November - which carried the headline "Student murdered in Hilsea".

On the morning we were due to start handing out the newspaper, I received a completely unexpected request from the University's marketing department requesting that the newspaper not be handed out in the Union until the end of a University open day which was taking place there. Given that the Union building is owned by the University, and after some considerable debate, I agreed to temporarily hold the newspaper.

To the best of my knowledge, the University's reason for asking that the paper not go out in the Union was that they didn't wish to project a negative image of the city to prospective students. While I can appreciate this motivation, and am as keen as the next person to see Portsmouth University's student numbers continue to grow over the next few years, I can't help questioning whether their request was appropriate.

Somewhat ironically, anyone wandering next door into Balfour's on that or any other day could have picked up a copy of the Portsmouth News, complete with stories of good and bad happenings around the city. Although I haven't asked their manager, I doubt a similar request to hide any newspapers which may have suggested anything bad ever happens in Portsmouth was received...

In deciding whether or not to pull the paper, I had a fairly heated discussion with our Chief Exec. In it, I was reminded that I wear "two hats" as Media & Publications Officer; one as an editor figure for the Union's student publications, and the other as a trustee of the charity. Frustratingly for me in this situation, those two hats brought with them diametrically-opposed viewpoints; with one, I felt compelled to fight for the rights of the publication to be distributed freely amongst the student population.

Meanwhile, the other "hat" - as a trustee of the Union's charity and therefore tasked with ensuring the Union continues to provide for its future students - required me to think long-term and ask myself whether it was right to risk scaring off large numbers of potential students for the benefit of one newspaper article. On the balance of this argument, I think the right course of action was the one taken; to hold the paper, and then to whinge to anyone and everyone who'd listen about it afterwards... ;o)

Still, it's important to remain philosophical at times like these: while the principle of embargoing a newspaper which is perfectly within its rights to print what it did makes the blood boil, and results in arguments which include phrases like "freedom of speech", "hypocrisy" and "megalomaniacs"...

The student portal is broken. Again. Not that I like complaining about it, or anything, but this is frankly a joke, especially at this time of year.

Grrr....!

Have a good bank holiday weekend!! :o)

Just came out of the elections candidates' briefing to find this:

D'oh! £50 fine this time too after I was clamped last time (and the less said about me 'stealing' that clamp the better... Six angry University security guards - oops...).

In my defence, I was in a hurry to get to the candidates' briefing, and I wasn't parked illegally; I just didn't have a permit. Still, it's nice to know I'm making my contribution to the University's bank account - it's good to give back to the University once in a while... ;o)

Coming next week: Alex gets on his bike...