Warning: it's another rambling, terminally-dull, work-orientated (kinda) blog entry. Read this,* or this,* or this,* or this,* or this* if you're looking for something a whole load better ;o)

I was wondering earlier how Facebook - a social networking website which must have some huge bandwidth bills - could justify its existence. After all, it's not like it can pay the bills on props alone...

I've just spotted this advert appearing in my "news feed" (a listing of changes in the status of the people in my social network) which probably explains how Facebook are raking in their money...

It's an inline advert which looks like it's part of the site's content, recommending something that's nothing to do with my social network - a company is paying Facebook (probably a helluva lot of money) to drop this advert into peoples' feeds right across the site.

As far as advertising goes, it's highly effective - apart from people accidentally clicking on it thinking it's genuine news, it also looks more "endorsed" by Facebook, which (from what little I can remember of my sketchy knowledge of psychology) implies to viewers that a warm, cuddly brand they feel they can probably trust - Facebook in this case - is endorsing a product.

As far as advertising effectiveness goes, it's right up there with the drinks companies who pay a ridiculously good-looking person to hang around in a bar all night getting people to chat to them/chat them up/whatever, and then get the unsuspecting dupe to buy them one of their employers' drinks. At the other end of the scale, by comparison, you have unsolicited ("spam") e-mails, whose proliferance make me want to throw things out of the window ;o)

Anyway, that's enough from me - bedtime. I've tweaked the profile pages on UPSU.net - now members can add more information about themselves, e.g. their Facebook profile address, more interests, and so on, and I've had a stab at cutting down on spam by changing peoples' public e-mail addresses into less-obvious ones (e.g. noodle [at] banana.com).

Anyway, night dahlinks... /al

* Neither UPSU, UPSU.net, nor myself, could give a toss if you're offended by the content of any of these links, since they're nothing to do with us, but I guess it's only fair I warn you I'm nothing to do with any of those links. So there you go...  

Pugwash RSS

In its first day of being online, Pugwash's homepage has had over 400 hits. Which is nice.

Thing is, we know that not everyone is going to be inclined to check back for updates every day, complete with bated breath, so I've collated a handy set of RSS feeds for Pugwash readers. The main one we're promoting is the announcements feed, which pops up a new article each month letting you know there's a new issue of Pugwash mag online. We also have a further seven feeds with different flavours of Pugwash goodness, so if you're just interested in the features, or only want to read gig reviews, you can sign up using our RSS feed - and an RSS aggregator - and not have to worry about checking back to look for new information. See the full list of feeds on our about RSS page.

More bugs, all my fault

While reviewing Google's site report for UPSU.net, I noticed a very large number of "page not found" errors for the blogs section, which turned out to be an oversight in the SEF engine related to my earlier post about the forums being broken. That's fixed now, but I have to apologise lots and lots for not spotting it before - sorry!

Related articles

The latest little touch which might make it easier to browse around the UPSU site's news pages is our "Related articles" box at the bottom of all news articles, for example at the bottom of this page. This widget looks for news articles in the same news stream, and related news streams, and lists them, along with a short list of latest news and blog entries from the article's author.

Adverts. The best of a bad bunch? ;o)

I'm also trialling Google Adsense around the site. You shouldn't spot it on the site, but you might notice it if you take a look through the site's HTML. That said, if you're looking around our code, you must be really really bored indeed. Why not take a look at Pugwash mag instead ;o)

(Don't read this - it's just another rambling stream of consciousness from me again...!)

We've just taken on board a new advertiser. Laterooms.com let you find hotels at short notice in pretty much any place in Europe (and beyond I think).

While I admit I'm not a huge fan of advertising - you create a website to serve a purpose, in our case to provide information for students and (hopefully) to get students chatting to each other, and putting adverts about things which the Union doesn't actually do kinda goes against that idea in my mind.

That said, like all of the UPSU.net advertisers, I'm glad that what's on offer is likely to be of some actual use to our students, so I'm happy to see them on here.

More importantly from my point of view, it gives me a chance to try some new things when it comes to working with pages on UPSU.net. If you're not familiar with the idea of a content management system, it's basically a way of creating pages which live on a database - rather than actual pages - and are only turned into a web page when they're requested by your web browser.

The benefits of this include being able to control your pages a lot more efficiently - I can change one setting and, voila, all pages on the site reflect that setting without having to update each and every page. There are loads of other benefits as well - one of the main ones being that almost anyone can, with a little bit of time, create web pages that are made from valid HTML and which are consistently created and laid out - but there are also some down-sides.

The biggest of these downsides is that you lose some flexibility in creating web pages compared to just creating an HTML file. This is most noticeable when people ask, "can we have a page that's X pixels wide, and put some PHP (a programme that runs on the server and can do many wonderful - and dangerous - things) code on it, and we want it to do X, Y and Z too?"

Often it's a case of saying, "No, we can't do it exactly like that, but I can do this, this and this which will work just as well" (or they're simply told to bog off if they're asking for the moon on a stick... Not that's not a regular occurrence... Honest!).

To put the Laterooms advert on UPSU.net, they wanted a web page on our site which lists their adverts. This is a good thing for advertisers for two main reasons: people reading their advert will tend to associate their brand with the Union, a name which they are more likely to trust, and because of the implied endorsement, people will be more inclined to trust the advertiser.

The second reason is purely that search engines like Google will see the advertiser's page on our site, and index the page - with all its links back to the advertiser's own website - and this should, in theory at least, increase the number of visitors to the advertiser's website.

The nature of the page meant that we had to add custom CSS styling to the page, and to be able to monitor links to and from the page to see which ones are working well and which ones don't receive as much traffic. We also needed to be able to adjust the META tags - used by search engines - to include keywords relevant to the advertiser's content.

With the original UPSU.net content management system - which we introduced last September - this would have been hard work to do and would probably not have been possible. Today, it was just a few clicks to build a very solid-looking, attractive page which did everything the advertiser wanted (at least, I hope it does!).

At the very least, it wouldn't have been as easy to do as it is now; since last September, we've worked hard to increase how much control people have over the pages they crea...

A while back, one of the more technically-minded members of the UPSU team mentioned that there were people using MSN Messenger as a way of sending out advertisements. Naturally I assumed the worst and - choking on my instant coffee - decried it as a cheap way of spamming users of instant messenger programs, and another intrusion on peoples' privacy.

As usual, I slightly jumped the gun.

The way this works is this; say the Union wanted to send out "what's on" information through MSN Messenger. We would set up an MSN "bot", which is simply a computer program with an MSN Messenger account that "talks" to people on it's MSN contacts list.

To join up to the service, I would simply add the bot's e-mail address to my MSN contacts list - e.g. sociallife@upsu.net. The bot would automagically accept my e-mail address into it's contacts list and send out a message through MSNM (assuming I'm online) saying something like,

"This is the UPSU.net Social:Life messenger bot. I send out what's on information every 24 hours.

To join up to this service and receive this information, please type 'join'. To cancel, please type 'cancel', or simply close this conversation window and delete me from your contacts list.

Remember you can cancel this service at any time simply by typing 'cancel'."


Seems simple enough doesn't it?

The bot would then keep an eye out for you and when it sees you're online and you haven't been sent the latest updates for at least 24 hours, it sends out a mini-summary of what's on, e.g.

"Tonight at the Union - Mr. Scruff in Lux 9pm to 2am (dance music) - more info click here
Tomorrow at the Union - ....
Drinks offers - Bud 2-4-£3 - Carling £1.40 - ...
Food - the new summer menu is online. See it here..."

Two of the most important things about this service:
1. Your e-mail address won't be sold, harvested or whatever other horrible things they do to e-mail addresses these days. No spam - not ever; not from us or anyone else.
2. Anyone can sign up to the service, and your e-mail address won't be used for any other promotional purposes in or outside the Union - it's purely there because the IM services (e.g. MSNM, AIM, etc) need it to work.

The only e-mail you would ever get from this system (that I can think of) would be a confirmation that you'd signed up to the service, what it offers, and how to cancel (just in case a "mate" of yours signs you up when you're not looking).

So, would an instant messenger news bot be a good or a bad suggestion? You can add your comments below.

As one of the people who put this site together, I have to admit I'm not particularly fond of the idea of having it's design perforated by adverts of all shapes and sizes because someone, somewhere thinks that loading up a website for students with adverts is a great way to sell something-or-other; as a budding web-geek (ok, I might be a little too long in the tooth - at least when it comes to the www - to be described as "budding") I'm conscious of the fact that most people don't visit a website to see the wonderful adverts; in fact, most adverts are (by their very nature), intrusive, eye-catching and distracting from the page's actual content.

However, I'm also aware of the fact that the site's hosting - and my wages! - aren't paid from money growing from trees in Ravelin Park, and so there is a fine balance between me fighting against having adverts here, there and everywhere, and my bosses deciding to take on a less rebellious web designer (and preferably one with a little more talent and skill, since I know there's no shortage of both attributes among the Portsmouth population!).

So how do we go about trying to get UPSU.net to help pay for itself?

By glancing at the right of any of the pages on the site (with the exception - at the moment - of the Blogs section), you'll probably notice that most of the adverts are in fact links back into UPSU.net. This is a conscious decision on the part of the top brass and myself to help raise awareness of the important things going on at the Union. That said, there are many important things going on, so adverts are just one way we try to raise awareness of happenings on the site.

As for paid advertising, this is where my latest back-burner comes in; Google Adsense. You've probably seen Adsense adverts before - they're often text-only, can be hilariously mis-targeted (I regularly see adverts encouraging visitors to a certain website to buy from competitors' websites, as well as a couple of "buy it, sell it, love it - UCAS forms on eBay" oddities), but more importantly are less intrusive than the flashy, full-colour ads you often see bouncing around some websites.

So why Google Adsense?

Well, Google Adsense is something we can set up in a matter of hours. We can say who can and cannot advertise on UPSU (so we can filter adverts out to ones which you'll actually be interested in), we can say how big - or, if I am allowed any say in the matter, how small - the adverts are, and - most importantly I think - we can get you, the students, involved in how and where we place the adverts.

Ultimately, this means we're not going to be letting adverts dominate the site, unless they're for something seriously useful.

Another major bonus - two in fact - is that we can keep a close eye on how the adverts are performing, and any money we make from Adsense can be ploughed back into the UPSU charity as a whole. Ultimately, this means we aren't selling out to keep the money coming in (as if we ever would!) and, hopefully, you shouldn't have to fight your way through a load of adverts to get to the parts of the site you're interested in. In fact, most of the time, you probably won't even look at the adverts unless you glance to the right - or the bottom - of the page.

Spam? What spam!

The other thing I positively detest is junk mail. Receiving it, and as much, if not more so, sending it out to other people. So we've been very careful this year to make sure that the only mail we've sent out to your registered e-mail address has been to tell you about the things at the Union that we think/hope that you, as students in a democratic body such as the Union, would be interested in (plus ...