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Ramblings of a pixel-pushing, barely-sane Sabbatical officer and Meeja Whore 
Diary entries by alexh in June 2006
By Alex Harries
on Fri, 30th Jun 2006 at 12:49
I like to keep an eye on what other Students' Unions are doing online - I'd be the first to admit that I don't know all the tricks, ideas and guidelines behind designing any sort of website, so I will happily admit that I take my cues from sites designed and run by more knowledgeable people. However, one thing I refuse to do is to simply copy designs, ideas, etc from another website - if someone is doing something cool, for example the BBC Blogs website, then we look at how and why they do things that way, and how we can adapt and improve it to suit our needs. It's because of these two rather conflicting principles that I am more than a little annoyed at a statement by Southampton SU's Media & Communications ossifer, Laura Fewell, who published a Union Council report in May saying UPSU.net has "ripped [SUSU.org] off something rotten", and then goes on to say "But on a plus, they have linked to Wessex Scene Online news feed because we rock and they don’t but want to rock like us." Ok Laura, whether or not you're reading this, here's a reply to your statements (and please remember that this is *my* reply - not that of UPSU.net, Portsmouth Students' Union, or anyone with any actual say in anything at all whatsoever, so if you want to send an angry mob to Pompey, send them to me, and not my bosses... ;o):
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By Alex Harries
on Thu, 29th Jun 2006 at 19:53
Video sites like YouTube and Google Video are great for finding ... well, largely rubbish and random videos, but this week I've had a couple sent through to me that have made me laugh so, for your just-about-work-safe viewing pleasure...
Some odd people out there...
By Alex Harries
on Wed, 28th Jun 2006 at 14:10
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!
By Alex Harries
on Tue, 27th Jun 2006 at 12:39
At last, I think the RSS system can be finally put to bed for at least the next couple of months - the last few days have been spent finishing off the extensions to the RSS system. UPSU.net now boasts one of the most comprehensive syndication systems anywhere (ironic timing of course - Summer is the Union's quietest period, so there's not likely to be much happening over the next two months...!).
The site can now offer several different flavours of RSS feeds for news, forums, comments, and events. The last bit of work - the forums extensions - were one of the hardest to do as I had to figure out a way of allowing for the nested forum system (where you can have a forum inside a forum inside a forum inside a forum inside.... ad nauseam) which I'm hoping to get round to doing well in advance of the start of the new academic year. Look out for the RSS symbol in the forums if you want to keep an eye on what's happening: RSS link in forums section view  RSS link in category view  RSS links at the top of a thread  ... and expanded to show all feeds:  RSS links at the bottom of discussion threads  Anyhoo, instead of having to burden yourself with visiting UPSU.net to stay up to date with the latest <whatever>, you can use a news reader - e.g. Google Reader - to stay up to date. Take a look at our "about RSS" page to see a list of the most useful feeds on the site. A typical worry of mine; after all this work, I do hope I'm not the only person using this system...! /al
By Alex Harries
on Mon, 26th Jun 2006 at 00:29
... if you're going to have an in-depth conversation about the football, world cup, Sven's decision to play one striker up-front, the weather in Germany, what time it is in Germany, how the beer tastes in Germany and how your mate's wife is enjoying the shopping - and please bear in mind this isn't because I'm horrible, grumpy or generally a b'stard - could you possibly refrain from holding the conversation - at a volume which shows no regard for anyone trying to sleep - 2 feet away from my bloody bedroom window?! Some of us have jobs to go to in the morning fer heaven's sake!
Footnote: dear neighbour-who-can't-drive: please refrain from justifying your lack of parking radar by listening for the "thump" of your bumper striking mine as a gauge to tell whether you're properly in your parking space. I must confess, I don't particularly like the sound of my car's bodywork being damaged, and I refer you to my comment to Mr. Chatty, above, about my reasons for liking some peace and quiet between the hours of, say, midnight and 6 a.m... (Yup, I'm grumpy when woken in the middle of the night...) More diary entries...about me"Grumpy, geeky old grey-head"
blogroll & links (what's this?)More from me...UPSU stuff...Definitely read this...
Radio & other meejaFlickr picswww.flickr.com
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