Alex Harries's diary

It's another late night, so it must be time for another rambling blog entry about "what I've dun lately". If you read this, I can guarantee you'll be bored... ;o)

This is going to be a bumper blog entry of all the really really boring stuff I've done this week altogether, so you only have to "ignore" one thing instead of loads ;o) 

Pugwash, gatecrashed 

Yesterday, I gatecrashed the Pugwash graphic design team's weekly "social", where they get together to organise who's going to illustrate and lay out what article. Having spent a very busy hour accosting members of the team and asking them what they would change about Pugwash if they could, I've got some great ideas for improving the way the writers' and designers' time is organised, and some suggestions to improve the tools available to the Union's creative teams, e.g. Pugwash, Purple Wednesdays, and more.

One of these is actually something I lost sleep over last night while trying to figure out the maths in my head; in short, I'd like to invest a chunk of money on the Union's multimedia suite - which at the moment is home to a collection of PCs - to see them using industry-standard kit which should be good for the next four years and to provide a set of really good training and production tools for graphic design, video and audio editing. In other words, with a little investment, the Union could boast a really solid production suite for Pugwash, Pure:FM, and Purple Wednesdays, and also be available for use as a classroom for teaching students to use the various software packages the Union makes use of.

Aside from that though, I was impressed - again - by just how enthusiastic every Pugwash team member is about what they do; it's nice to see they're so self-motivated, and talking to Mike Cooter - the comms manager - about the team's development, it's obvious there are some real success stories to be told there. In terms of what I'd love to achieve with the Union, these success stories are as close to role models as I think I'm ever going to get, and I'm keen to see more of the same stuff happening with UPSU media throughout the next year.

No matter what happens in the elections, I really hope next year's MAPO realises just what an asset Pugwash is, and invests a good deal of time and money in the magazine!

"Vlogging"... Or not... 

I still haven't made any more progress with my video blog entry thingy I mentioned at the bottom of this post; that's mainly due to stage fright, laziness, and a chronic case of being not-at-all-photogenic ;o) I promise I'll try to do something by next week, even if it's just so you can laugh at me... :oP

Anyway, I'm not sure it's such a great idea until someone thinks up a better name than "vlog"ing - it sounds a bit too kinky for me... 

Housekeeping 

Before I lose my admin access to the site on Sun 11th (the campaigning period has been cut from two weeks to one - March 12th to 16th; good thing or bad thing?),  I've been setting up the UPSU and UPEL homepage adverts (pic on the right somewhere); we've got Captain (March 16th - elections night, straight after the results) and - much more importantly (I think!) - the MoS's Cut Up Boy...

(This is a *really* boring blog entry, but I have to write it - sorry!)

With the impending arrival of the campaigning season, it's only fair to assume that any unfair advantage a candidate has should be taken away from them wherever possible. Unfortunately for me, given I have fairly wide-ranging access to UPSU.net, this means certain steps need to be taken to ensure I (or a "helpful friend") can't take advantage of this power by turning UPSU into a "Vote Alex" campaign.

The problem is, simply turning off my account would prevent me from writing in my blog, posting on the forums and maintaining my profile, all of which are privileges available to everyone with a UPSU account.

It would also be impractical to "transfer" ownership of my account to another - standard - account, because we don't have that kind of tool on UPSU.net, and it would make a complete mess of the auditing system I've put in place over the last couple of weeks.

So, in the spirit of fair campaigning (i.e. to make sure I can't misbehave when I come home trolleyed from a night of drinking...), I've been wandering around UPSU's code today turning off some of the controls. Here's what I can't do on UPSU.net any more:

• Edit any web pages in the elections mini-site,
• Edit any news articles in the elections mini-site,
• Log into the administration back-end at all - so I can't:
• view or edit peoples' accounts,
• change advertising settings,
• move pages around,
• add, edit or remove the SSI modules - for example, the toys which generate the "latest news articles" code on the elections homepage,
• ... and a load of other things, too,

Tomorrow my FTP access to the site will also be disabled, too, so I won't be able to edit code on UPSU. On the plus side, this means I won't be tempted to spend hours writing and tweaking new projects, which will be great for my sleep pattern (I almost *always* think of a great new tool around midnight which "will only take 10 minutes" and keeps me up for the rest of the night...).

Now I don't have anything to do, maybe I'll actually (a) get on with making My First Video Blog, and (b) start planning my campaign ... maybe!

Big love /al 

I've just had a quick chat with Carl, Pure:FM's resident web guru, and he's beginning work on a brilliant little pop-up Pure:FM player.

This will mean no more having to hunt around Purefmdotcom to find out how to listen to their shows; you'll just have to click a link on any UPSU page (in the "now and next" box - pic somewhere on the right there) and away you go.

Naturally there'll be some things that have to be tackled first; a lot of computers have either one type of media player progam - e.g. Windows Media Player - or the other - Real Player. Some don't have either, for example a number of the University PCs, so we need to make sure that the end result is able to work on the widest range of systems possible.

With a little bit of luck, and a not-inconsiderable amount of work on Carl's part, I'm confident we'll be able to get this up and running in time for the elections. Fingers x'd then!

Alex is the UPSU.net web monkey, and loves adding new toys to the site. He's also running in the UPSU Elections for Media & Publications officer, and trying to finish off his degree as well. He's also half Welsh, but please don't hold that against him...

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? 

UPSU.net has a new toy, which (I hope) will make it a lot easier to add a video to your blog, and easier for us pixel geeks to add videos to news and web pages.

Find out more here, and to see a really bad impression of Richard Hammond advertising a boot sale (... or something ...).

/al