Alex Harries's diary

A quick festive Happy Christmas (or, if Christmas isn't something you celebrate, happy holidays) message from me. I'm sitting at the parents' house in Kent drinking tea and wandering around the vast expanse that is Flickrdotcom.

Of course, that means I'm bored. Very bored. I'm supposed to be off to a party in Essex later this evening, but having a shaved head and - rightly or wrongly - believing that my stubbly features could pass for "fashionable", I don't have any getting ready to do beyond the usual shower, brushing of teeth and selection of clean underkeks.

So, I've been playing about with UPSU.net, but now I'm running out of "little things" to do - I've already sent out a mass mail saying nothing more than Happy Xmas (but it's quite pretty anyway), I've re-jigged the URLs to peoples' profiles (e.g. "upsu.net/people/alexh") and squashed some bugs that have shown up from the fix, managed to separate the profile template from the forums template (when you viewed your profile, your page was using the same stylesheet as the forums, which was something I needed to change so I can start thinking about polishing up the user profiles pages soon), and posted some tumbleweed-attracting twaddle on the forums, also about me being bored. I think there's a common theme here...

I've got a couple of little tweaks ... ok, major changes, to make to the news system, including some magic with image handling and simplifying/tidying up the layouts, but for now I'm off to plan what toys I'm going to buy for the Nano I'm hoping Santa's dropped into the Apple store to collect for me (I'll be writing a furious letter if he hasn't...).

Hope you all have a ridiculously fattening Crimbo, and a great Noo Year. I'll probably write some more twaddle on here at some point, but if you're still around to read it, I'd really advise getting some more interesting things to do with your hols... ;o)

/al 

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

Another amazingly dull post coming up... ;o)

I've been tweaking the code that decides what the URL is for the pages on the site. The changes aren't finished yet, but it should mean shorter, easier-to-remember URLs to find your way around the site, and Google & chums should be able to do a better job of indexing the site, which isn't too bad an idea either.

It also means we can override certain pages individually, so the Sociallife homepage, for example, is actually at upsu.net/sociallife and not some long, complicated address instead. All the old URLs still work, so you won't have to update your bookmarks, either.

The main reason for this is so we can get URLs for pages like the forums - which have URLs like http://www.upsu.net /component /option,com_simpleboard /func,view /Itemid,336 /catid,27 /id,549 /#549 - down to something like http://www.upsu.net/forums/v/549#549.

I've also been tweaking the search engine - the output is a lot easier to read, and you can bookmark your searches if you're that kinda person. Once I've done a bit more homework, I'll be re-jigging the way the search engine selects your search results, so (hopefully) the search results should be a lot more accurate.

Oh, and plans are now in motion for a new JobShop system which should be ready for the new academic year. The existing system is ok, but doesn't do everything we want it to. I'd like to see a system which is properly integrated into the site; Job Searches would be much easier - you'll be able to search for a job or job type, apply direct for some jobs through the site, and get further information and help with just a few mouse clicks.

We'll also be making it easier to get information and advice on searching for a job, and the jobs bulletin should be more accurate, contain more of the right information, and will (hopefully) also be customised to your preferences - more interested in admin work than customer service? Just tell us in your profile and we'll customise your bulletin e-mail before we send it out to you.

This, of course, is all assuming I don't decide to go and herd goats in the Andes over the summer instead...

Told you it was going to be another boring post... ;o)

(I must learn to write more interesting less terminally dull post titles...)

Today I've been mainly pushing php around the forums: one thing about open source projects is that, when you dig around in the code a bit, you find lots of hidden "extras" that, for one reason or another (lack of time to document, security concerns, lazy developers ... ok the last one is plainly wrong since noone would bother writing open source code if they were *that* lazy) never made it into the released product, or at least weren't fully exploited.

One of these handy little gems (bear with me - this post is about to get a whole load more boring) is the way moderators can "hide" a post which they think might break the forum rules, without actually deleting it; say, for example, someone posts something which might help other members cheat in an exam; it's probably against the site rules, but the moderator who spots it wants to e-mail an admin and check. They hide the message, fire off an e-mail, and twiddle their thumbs for an hour or so. In the meantime, anyone who wanders past the post can see a post has been hidden, but not who posted it or what's in it, and aren't any the wiser.

Of course, the person who posted the message might be getting a bit cross about all this, but I'm hoping a combination of sensible moderators and sensible members will mean there's a bit of understanding if this has to happen. Maybe; maybe not...

An extension of this system is that we can also pre-moderate a member's messages; it's unlikely it'll ever need to happen, but we can flick a pixel-switch to make sure all posts by a user are moderated if, for example, they develop the habit of drunkenly posting nasty comments about the quality of their housemate's cooking when drunk.

Both bits of the system are designed, ultimately, to make the forums a) safer and b) less harshly moderated (since it's less likely a post will be deleted on the spot "just in case" it upsets someone). That said, anyone and everyone can  complain about any message (or comment, or - starting Tuesday, photo in the galleries) which they feel particularly strongly about. It's all about feedback - it's not possible to make a decent website which people want to come back to if no-one but the pixel-pushers feel like they have a say in how things are done.

Randomly, Angry Boss sent me a link to an Idiot's Guide to CSS positioning. I'm studying it as we speak. Maybe I'll learn something... I doubt much will go in though...

p.s. If anyone's at a loose end on Tuesday, come and see Flightplan in the Union. If I see you there, I promise I won't try and talk to you. And I'll make a concerted effort not to trip over your feet while trying to find somewhere to sit, too.

p.s. 2 - for my own reference, Things I Must Do Or I'll Be Sacked this week are:

• send Mothers' Day cards out to mum, extended family, women from down the road, some old lady I've never met but who sends me a card so I must know her, and ...
• Finish tidying up the forums code - "Thanks for posting your message" screen looks like Etch-A-Sketch gone baaad....
• Find a way to stop spamming the admins when a new post comes in
• Finish off the diaries side-bar, message layout and homepage - no-one wants to have to wade through my incessant waffling to get to their mate's diary. Oh, and find a way of allowing people to select a couple of different templates. And create a couple of different templates. Aaand....
  
  About 50 more words in this entry

Well, it's been a couple of very long days. I've been tied up with the forums, blogs and commenting system. The forums and blogs have been seeing more pixel-pushing and a lot of sub-standard code has been re-written to improve the reliability of both systems.

The main bulk of today's work was getting the commenting system ready to turn on. The basics were already in place - people could write a comment and click a button, and an administrator could then decide whether they wanted it displayed or not.

However, a fundamental part of the blogs system is that the owner of a blog... sorry, diary entry should also be able to manage their comments. This means that, when someone comments on a news story or diary entry, the author of the item gets an e-mail telling them, and they can then go and see the comment. Not only that, but they can approve the comment, edit it, or delete it.

Another important part of this system is the ability for anybody to make a complaint about a comment - it's an unfortunate fact of life that websites tend to attract the bad with the good, and because it's impossible to guarantee that no comments which breach site policy will slip through the safety nets we have in place, there's a mechanism in place which allows anybody to report a comment to a member of the site administration team. This system has been written to cover anything on the site, so you can now also complain about forum posts if you wish to.

The last stages of testing the commenting system will be taking place over the next few days, and I'm hoping to have it ready to launch by Monday, along with the diaries. This year's election candidates are going to be my first guinea pigs in the system, and I'm hoping this proves to be a valuable help to their campaigns. That said, it might turn out that no-one wants to make use of t'Interwebnet to promote themselves. Only time - and some gentle prodding - will tell.

Other happenings lately - or not, in a couple of cases - are the re-vamp and mahoosive update of the Social:Life section I've been asked to tackle. It's a shame it's taken a bit longer than I'd hoped to get the information out there, but this update will hopefully set the trading side of things up more-or-less until the end of the year, which is handy. No word on the Grad Ball yet, but I'll be sure to relay that here once I know some more.

The RAG website is still not up - entirely my fault (and I hang my head in shame). All the graphics are more-or-less done; I just have to slice and dice them, and squeeze them into a new template. A couple of things are bugging me at the moment about the colours; I want to stay true to the black/orange of the RAG publicity, but there's nothing quite like trying to read light text on a black background to put anyone off. Ideas on a postcard as to how I can tackle this - the writer of the best suggestion gets to buy me a pint (that's fair, isn't it...?).

The Course Reps mini-site is also on the to-do list and I fear I'm going to have to let it slip past the March 1st deadline. Luckily, I'm still waiting on the text - without that, it's a bit hard to know how to divide it all up, but the layout and colours I've yet to decide on, so myself, a pack of felt-tip pens (and maybe some playdough...) and a camera will be off on a mission to find some inspiration tomorrow. Just how inspiring the Uni halls of residence are though - at least when sober - is another matter entirely...

We're also starting to get on our feet with the mass-mailing system (although some of you may have missed out on last week's JobShop e-mails - this mistake will be rectified this week, and I apologise!) and should be sending out some reasonably uniform-looking, easy to read mails from the various departments on a more regul...