I'm just grabbing two minutes' free time between meetings, so I thought I'd put a quick update on here about UPSU.net, which has seen a lot of new things going on over the last month or so, not least the new JobShop (which I'm going to do a full write-up about shortly).

The UPSU.net homepage has had a bit of a reshuffle; UPSU and BBC news headlines have been condensed into column 3, and column 4 has been freed up to make way for the forthcoming "latest photo galleries", reprioritised "forthcoming events listing"  and new "Social:Life" boxes, and - most importantly - a shiny new "JobShop" box has been added below blogs and forums in column 2, with the latest jobs and a mini tag cloud listing.

This should pave the way for the forthcoming news section reshuffle, which is proving to be a bit of a headache to work out at the moment, because it's very hard to find a balance between presenting a unified news section with navigation based on the content - for example news, features, reviews, etc - and a news section which presents articles based on which printed publication (or other media area - for example Pure FM) they're from.

Time to see what the experts would do, methinks... ;o)

Ttfn - Al 

I'm working on the NUS registration system for 2008; this week I'm adding security logging across UPSU.net to support the NUS card issue system. It's so boring I can't honestly think of anything to write about it that won't send you to sleep, so here's something completely different...

I'm not *that* stupid that I'm going to wade head-first into a raging debate about religious rights, but BBC News are covering a High Court challenge by a 16 year-old Christian today.

Her assertion is that her school's refusal to allow her to wear a ring symbolising her sexual purity - the "Silver Ring Thing" movement - is a breach of her human rights.

The story is here, but - since I'm a bit of a sheep when it comes to matters like this - I quickly found myself reading the "Have Your Say" discussion about this story.

Currently, the "most recommended" HYS entry reads, "As a practising Jedi, I am concerned that my daughter will not be able to wear her robes and carry a lightsabre when she starts school. My neighbour, a zealot Rastafarian has learnt that his son will not be able to smoke hashish at school. Political correctness gone mad."

<grin>

Just spotted this on the BBC Hampshire homepage:

Out in reader-land, you might not appreciate just how long a wait it's been for me to see some serious journalistic reporting on my favourite subject - namely, salad ingredients.

I think a short visit to Alresford is needed. Four days should do it - the place sounds like a regular metropolis of action-packed fun.

All I need now is a televised debate to determine the better of spinash and rocket lettuce, and my year will be complete... Ahem...

/al - playing with the new HD telly - it's huuuuuuge :o) 

(This is another really, *really* boring blog entry. Why not Google for "noodle mining" instead of reading it?) 

I've just made my first bit of Ajax - I feel so proud! Ok, it's sad and geeky, but I'm happy 'cos I just (a) learnt something new, and (b) it worked.

When I tried to get onto the UPSU homepage earlier this evening, it wouldn't load. It was working fine for everyone else, so I figured it had something to do with a piece of code I was loading for myself, meaning the only suspect was the weather box, which only loads for me (as I'm still testing its reliability).

To fix this, we need to have a way of preventing content which relies on other servers or websites, or which is either bulky, not critically important to UPSU.net (or both) from slowing down page loads. Lots of websites use JavaScript to load content into a DIV after the rest of the page has loaded, for example the BBC news homepage (which loads the "Your local news, weather and sport here" box after the rest of the page has loaded). This means that the non-essential content can be as badly behaved as it likes without breaking the rest of the page, even if it never loads. Google Ads also works on this basis to prevent their adverts from slowing down the loading times of the pages displaying the adverts.

Not really having a clue where to start though, I went off on a Google wander and found DynamicDrive.com's excellent cut-out-and-keep guide which does exactly what I was looking for. So, one quick modification (to let me load the EuroWeather module outside of Mambo - it's not a core component and certainly poses no security risks) and we're up and running.

I'll also be using this technique to load in BBC News headlines onto the homepage in the near future, and I'm already trying to think of other ways we can make use of this. An ideal application would be to use it to load additional homepage content, for example my original but not-very-evil plan of converting the hero advert (the big 450x200 box) into a tabbed area which can show either the hero advert, or two or three other boxes of content - "my forum discussions", "my blah blah...", or "my settings" - etc. While it opens the way for us to put a lot of new toys on the homepage we haven't been able to because of size and space restrictions, I'm going to have to be careful not to fall into the trap of piling crap on top of crap just "because it's nice" ;o)

Over on the SUSU forums, I spotted this discussion claiming that SUSU is the best students' union website in the country. Not sure I agree with that, but it's certainly a good site (as I've mentioned before).

I want to see UPSU.net kicking everyone's backsides as a student website - we need to focus hard on improving the content, features, usability, usefulness and looks (in that order), and since we have a potential base of 16,000 students, that's a lot of different needs and levels of computer ability.

I reckon we also need to start taking a much greater interest in what people would like to see. To that end, tell me!

• What do you think?
• What does UPSU.net need?
• What would you like to see on the site?
• What would keep you coming back to the site?

Answers in the boxes below. Thanks! /al

With the end of the academic year fast approaching and my coursework deadlines looming, I thought it would be nice to totally avoid the subject of academic work by working on another item on my UPSU.net to-do list (yup, I'm that sad that I have a "geeky stuff to-do list"...).

Quick introduction: RSS is a way of sharing news and other information. We use other websites' RSS feeds to display the BBC news headlines around the news pages, Pure:FM's "Now and next" box, Yahoo! weather information and loads more. Its main use, though, is letting us share our headlines and other news with the rest of the world.

Normally, you'd use an RSS feed reader - for example Google reader (pic below) - which collects news stories from the RSS feeds you've subscribed to and displays them in one list; this means you can catch up on the day's news, blog posts, forum discussions, whatever... Without having to trawl around a load of websites. Read more about RSS here.


Google reader in action

So, I've been working on our RSS system. Originally, we've only had two RSS feeds - News Headlines and Latest Forum Posts, and that was your lot. I wanted to make all of our news available as RSS feeds in a variety of ways; just want to catch up on club and society news? No problem. Want to get a daily list of upcoming events at the Union? Easy.

I've also added feeds to all the news pages, under the menu on the left:

... again, you just need to copy the link into your RSS feed reader or simply click on it for a nose around.

The RSS feed is also formatted so it's possible to read it without an RSS reader - normally an RSS feed is a fairly incomprehensible jumble of code and text. Although that's not what the feeds are designed for, this does mean it gives us a good chance to explain what RSS is and make things a lot easier to understand for first-time users when people click on the link for the first time.

There are plenty more feeds to be added yet - for example blog and forum feeds - but they'll have to wait until I've been out tonight (it *is* PWs after all... ;) ), and I'll take the chance to try and explain the RSS system a bit more once everything's done. For now though, thanks for reading! :o)

Oh, p.s. thingy - I've also chucked a Flickr photostream box thing on the right there -->. It shows random photos from my Flickr account and, if you need to host photos online, Flickr's not such a bad way to do it.

If you're writing a blog here and want to add a picture box like this to your blog (or on any blog that lets you add HTML), you just need to sign in to UPSU.net, click the "update your profile information" link on the top-right of the page, then wander over to the "diary settings" tab and paste the code you get from here into the "Your side-links HTML code" box.

Flickr offers free accounts, which don't have as much storage space, or you can pay abour $2 a month and store oddles of pics. Click here for more on signing up, or About 106 more words in this entry