Alex Harries's diary

A couple of the acts playing at the Grad Ball have MySpace pages with players which play their music. I've found out we can insert those players on our Grad Ball minisite pages, but I can't find any way of preventing them from automatically playing tunes when the page loads.

Unfortunately, this means I can't (read "won't") put them onto our pages, because I absolutely hate - with a passion - going to a web page a having it decide to play me a song without asking. It's almost the modern equivalent busking (and not the good ones you get on the tube - I'm not a "buskist" - just to clarify...).

I'm running out of time - and patience - with the Grad Ball site now, so this will unfortunately have to remain a feature request for another day. It's a shame, really - I want us to have more multimedia on UPSU.net. I'm just not so keen on forcing it down peoples' throats.

/al

If you're wondering where the official Grad Ball announcement is... Well, it's kinda my fault that it's late.

The reason it's late is because we don't simply want to give you a list of names and then you have to go off and find out about the acts, so we've been working hard on one of our biggest mini-sites on UPSU.net to date; almost 30 pages of information about the Grad Ball, including videos and photos of all the acts we can find information on, as well as information on tickets, the reserve list, a huge FAQ, more photos, and before we could do any of that we had to build a website to put it all in!

Here's some rumours answered in the meantime...

• No, So Solid Kru aren't playing (no trainers allowed, you see...),
• No, The Feeling aren't playing.

... and some facts:

• (more than) 50: musicians performing at the ball,
• 11: acts those 50 people make up,
• 8: hours of music, drinks, food and other entertainment,
• (at least) 5: bars,
• 4: venues, including the outside,
• 2: places to get fresh food on the night,
• 1: free drink on arrival,
• (also) 1: Graduation Ball each year, so we're working hard to make it the best ever.

I'm going to get some sleep in a bit, then I'll be carrying on working on the ball site while the rest of you are no doubt catching up on sleep tomorrow morning. I'm accepting donations - Greggs' iced ring doughnuts would be preferred... ;o)

I do hope that, after all this work, people are happy with the line-up and take the time to look around the site and get to know the kind of music each act plays. I'll be just a bit gutted if, after all the work to put a lot of information online, everyone seems to hate it! 

Have a great weekend! /al