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Ramblings of a pixel-pushing, barely-sane Sabbatical officer and Meeja Whore 
Latest diary entries by alexh tagged with "rag"
By Alex Harries
on Tue, 29th Jan 2008 at 23:50
I've just come back from Ravelin Park, where SADO Ben Norman and RAG bods Jenny Leggott and Sarah Blatchford have been bedding down for the night with only cardboard, damp sleeping bags and tarpaulins (err, and each other...) for warmth. No, they're not trying to recreate a summer picnic atmosphere - not at this time of year, anyway. The event is the University-organised "Sleepout", which has been planned to raise awareness for the homeless population of Portsmouth. There were around 25 bods milling around when I left, including three Purple Door staff (one of which is Alice Hickman, the University's Volunteer and Work Experience Officer and Ben Norman's oppo, who I may have met before...), two security guards, and a full tea urn. It looks like the choice spot for the night will be under a pair of large tarpaulins which have been erected between two trees in a loose-but-functional impersonation of a giant tent. The area surrounding the shelter was intertwined with the string holding the shelter up, leaving the whole area slightly resembling a giant spider's lair... Ewww, spiders... Hopefully everyone will have a fun - if chilly - night and get some sleep into the bargain. This kind of event is good (as long as it serves its purpose to raise awareness for the homeless, naturally) and it would be great to see the University collaborating with the Union more often to publicise such events. Pugwash News is always available to help, of course. Ms Blatchford has my camera at the moment, so once it's back I'll get some photos online. In the meantime, look out for pics and even (possibly) some footage on BBC South Today and in the Times Higher Education supplement - when the Uni want to promote something, they don't 'arf go for it... :o) Find out more on the University's website. Permanent link
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By Alex Harries
on Thu, 11th Oct 2007 at 20:30
The Freshers' Ball line-up - happening on Saturday 20th October - was announced today and I have to say that, with its diverse and slightly eclectic line-up, I'm actually pretty excited about the night. (Sorry for the little plug, but I'm only saying it 'cos I think it's true...!) The main Freshers' Ball headline act is a Scissor Sisterz tribute band which, having listened to the tunes on their website, should make for a brilliantly messy one in Lux, while CO2 is being themed in a Bhangra style, with Eastern sounds, visuals and even some Eastern flavour in the form of special cocktails. In five years of being here at the Union, I don't think I've ever know such a random and eclectic event take place, and that alone should make it one of the most fun nights of the year. Brucie Bonus: £15 is nothing to pay for a ticket to the best way to end your first few freshers weeks! (Check out the Freshers' Ball event listing for more info if you've got a minute free). It's been a while since I've written anything here, and that's mainly thanks to spending a ridiculous amount of time on the launch of our new student newspaper, Pugwash News/Purple Wednesdays, which was swiftly followed by the traumatic workload associated with the fun of Freshers' Fayre. Since then, for the last few days I've been running around putting all our archived Pugwash content onto the iMacs so the bods who get involved in meeja this year have plenty of material to refer to - we've got Pugwashes going back to 1997, and I even found a dusty old copy of the Portsmouth Student Guide from '79 down the back of a filing cabinet - random... I think the newspaper has been an amazing success: we printed 3,000 copies of the 12-page Pugwash News/Purple Wednesdays, and in the space of 48 hours at Freshers' Fayre and around campus, almost 2,700 copies were handed out to students. Despite having a huge range of content I want more, so every other sentence I've been uttering for the last few days has been about recruiting more people to help with the paper, and to get more ideas and content for it (interested? mediaofficer@upsu.net!). Freshers' Fayre, while I remember, was really good - more than 200 people signed up to Pugwash! Everyone enjoyed themselves, especially the people who got to see me being gaffer-taped to a tent pole. Many videos and photos were taken and, since self-embarrassment is something I'm so good at, I'll put them online as soon as we can edit them down. We've also taken on two new pixel munkis, and UPEL (the trading bods who run the bars) have also been spending some time on their Social:Life section: Tom Worman (aka the Union's photographer) and Nathan Sweeney (a bars supervisor in a former life), to take up some of the workload on the website now I've got less time free to push pixels around. Mind you, I never did that much hard work really, so it's not like they're going to find it particularly hard or anything... ;o) I should mention the Sabb team a bit, since I'm supposed to be promoting their work and all that: loads of students signed up at Freshers' Fayre to take part in clubs, societies and the Union's support and training groups, including STAND, RAG and About 321 more words in this entry
By Alex Harries
on Sat, 11th Mar 2006 at 00:52
Well, that's it; the Elections 2006 are over and done with. Six people have a job next year - no more tax dodging (at least for 12-ish months) while ten others have only the tattered remnants of their campaign trail to reflect on. Or at least an impending hangover given the results are announced in a perfect place to drown your sorrows for not-a-lot-of-money...
Anyhoo, congrats to the winners; I won't list them all - mainly 'cos I'm lazy, but also because I can't be bothered - and commiserats to the non-winners (is it still PC to use the term "losers"?). I had the unique experience of trying to update the elections website while playing the music for the election candidates, trying to listen to the announcers (Rena & Chileya) and generally trying not to break anything I can't afford to... I must have looked like the world's biggest plonker running back and forward in the DJ booth during the elections announcements. Still, on the plus side, the elections homepage had just under 2,000 hits in 30 minutes during the announcements. Ker-ist! One thing that struck me as I was putting the candidate manifestos online last week was just how differently things might become under different management; a large part of my work is involved with the Media & Communications officer, who was - and still is - Fraggy aka Adrian Fraguela. I'm lucky enough to have enough free reign over the site to be able to work on my own projects as well as doing his bidding (which, to be fair, is usually a case of "keep up the good work/let's try this/how about..." - in other words, a not-too-bad manager to have (and for me, that counts as a compliment - trust me ;o) ). Reading the other chap's manifesto - Craig Fordham - I couldn't help wondering what he would have changed about the website. Would I have been out of a job? ("You obviously have no idea how to run a student website" - guilty as charged I reckon...) Would he have been the "boss from hell"? ("You can't write a blogging system for UPSU.net! Who'd bother reading it??!" - uhhm, me?) Would I have been relegated to fifty different layers of red tape? ("Go on, fight your way out of that, you pixel-abusing HTML-pervert" Err, too much speculation maybe...). That's not to say that the next year is going to be anything other than bloody hard work. I'd love to be able to get all the work I've done on UPSU.net to count towards my degree qualification, although I doubt it will - so much has been done "on the fly" without a huge amount of documentation being made (yes, I know, very risky business - what happens if I get run over tomorrow? Uhhm, I get squashed, most probably...). Still, it's a nice dream. Wonder if anybody out there is actually reading UPSU.net...? It's a scary thought... <tumbleweed> ;o) The RAG 2006 minisite is now online. It took a lot longer to put together than I'd hoped it would; sorry again to Tig and chums. I hope it's worth it though!! :o) Still got plenty more to be doing on it, so watch this space... The Social:Life section of the site has seen some fairly hard work lately, although there's *loads* more to do, and it should all have been done last week, so I'm a bit scared at the prospect of cracking on with that. I'm sure it won't be too scary once I wake up tomorrow Anyhoo, I must go - one of the DJ booths is a bit unwell, so I guess I ought to go prop it back up... Eep!
By Alex Harries
on Fri, 24th Feb 2006 at 04:21
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... About 260 more words in this entry
By Alex Harries
on Fri, 17th Feb 2006 at 13:18
Last week I went back to my parents' house for a few days to try and concentrate on the website. I ended up dismantling my car's steering trying to fix some weird handling and got practically no work done, so this week has been a hectic mix of lectures and pixel-pushing.
The forums have had a bit of a tidy-up, and I've finally managed to get the "latest discussions" code working just how I want it to; now you can see what topics have been posted on lately, and the list doesn't include any repeats; plus you can see how long ago the last reply was posted, and which forum the topic lives in. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the new layout tweaks; you can add your comments here. The site's mystery slow-down seems to have been cured by a reboot of the hosting co's firewall. I don't know (and probably wouldn't understand) why it was slower, but apologies to everyone who suffered the annoyance of a slow website and hopefully everything should be back to top speed, which is more than can be said for the annoyingly slow student portal. With the elections fast approaching, and RAG already with us, I've got to get on with a lot of work; the RAG website especially is going to see a lot of attention from us over the next few days, as it's getting a revamp and will be converted into it's own mini-site. First things first though - I've got to upload all the Purple Wednesdays pics from the RAG re-launch. Lots of nakedness - woohoo! For the elections website, I've got to organise a homepage for all the candidates, including making sure there's an easy way for people to ask the candidates a questions - I think we'll be using a combination of the blogs (diaries) system for candidates to tell the world about themselves, and the forums for people to ask questions on. As always, we can't make this site (one of) the best Union websites in the country without your feedback, so if you have a comment to make, click here and be as (constructively) critical as you'd like to be - trust me when I say it's welcome! More diary entries...about me"Grumpy, geeky old grey-head"
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