Alex Harries's diary

The student portal is broken. Again. Not that I like complaining about it, or anything, but this is frankly a joke, especially at this time of year.

Grrr....!

Have a good bank holiday weekend!! :o)

(c) Matt/Telegraph - more of the same here

I've written - no, ranted - before about how embarrassingly poor the Alliance and Leicester website is, when their badly-designed personal banking website managed to cost me a lot of money in penalty charges.

Checking my balance tonight (ok, I'm waiting for my student loan to come in so I can pay off some debts and, err, maybe spend some of it on a posh widescreen telly. Maybe...) I noticed an advert-style link at the bottom of the banking website. Apart from anything else, this position is one of the worst places to tuck important information as advert blindness tends to set in for anything placed in this part of a web page.

I'm a cynical git by nature - when I'm not off upsetting people, being embarrasingly drunk, or just being plain embarrassing - and decided to see what wonderous information the A&L were going to provide its customers that one can't already find out by reading any number of existing - and respected - websites (for example here, here, here, here ... etc).

The first thing to annoy me when I clicked the link was that it opened a new window. Not a major issue for most people, maybe, but I consider it bad manners to start popping up new windows on your visitors' computers unless you have a very good reason to do so.

The second annoyance - and this is the point where I decided I had to write a ranty blog entry about this - was the completely gratuitous 2-step entry process - first I was shown a picture of a safe, with some text fading in and finally a "[click here to] enter" link appearing in the middle of the safe's combination dial thingy:

... followed by an equally gratuitous animation of the safe opening:

... and after a few seconds, you're presented with this completely Flash-based website:

Very pretty, lovely... Just one question - why has someone gone to all the trouble to pay - probably a lot of money - to have a Flash website developed to do this, when a plain, boring - but just as pretty - HTML website would have done *exactly* the same job, been a lot cheaper to develop and bug-test, loaded faster, provided a much higher level of accessibility and user friendliness, and would (eventually) have found it's way into the Google indexes??

However, I ought to balance this argument out a little - the information in the site isn't completely crap, although it's extremely basic and does little to help people make use of the myriad free anti-virus and anti-spyware tools available on the net. Oh, and there's also a link to the security centre on the A&L online banking log-in page:

The student portal, bane of my life, and the one thing I love to whinge about consistently, is clearly expressing its feelings of neglect on this otherwise romantically-saturated day by throwing yet another paddy, so once again instead of a student portal, we have error messages and lots of strange-looking numbers.

Come on ISO, please sort it out. This is beyond any acceptable level of trouble for a multi-million pound system, and yes, I know you're changing over to Jupiter. I can even see how that might cause problems during the transition, but the error message showing there - "out of memory" - is much more likely to be down to poor code than new fighting with old.

How about if I say "pretty please"?

Yup, I can't be arsed to say any more than this:

• 1: The student portal has crashed again
• 2: This isn't the first, second, or third time I've come across this (this year alone - last year was just as big a nightmare...)
• 3: There's only one solution - drink. And lots of it...

Grrr......

/angrymunki 

This is starting to feel like Groundhog day for me...

Never let it be said that the University don't have any impressive strings to their bow: their student portal, an example of all that is good and great about Web 2.0-orientated design (sarcasm... sorry...), is clearly capable of working out exactly when its customers - us students - are at their most stressed and, using what can only be a form of advanced internet-based mind-reading technology, works out precisely the most important parts of its website that students will unfailingly need to use.

And then, possibly out of spite, or a very sick sense of humour, pretends it's broken.

Note the use of "pretends" - it isn't actually broken; oh no, it couldn't possibly be. That would imply the University have done something wrong, or at least that they failed to do something right, and we all know that's definitely not possible...

So, once again, as 20,000-ish students are desperately scrabbling around to revise for their exams, and need to occasionally check their student portals to make sure the goalposts haven't moved*, the University's ONE essential link to its students - the people who pay their wages, gas and electric bills, etc etc - has proven itself flaky, unreliable and about as much use as a Tetleys tea bag condom.

* Goalposts, movement of: when the University's exam portal categorically states that "This is the final and complete examinations timetable", and then you find out the exam you've turned up to actually took place last week, and for some unknown reason your portal didn't reflect that information, but since it only happened to you it "didn't actually happen and you're probably just making it up to get yourself an ECF".

... aaaand then it happens another 4 times, so you fail the year. Bollocks... 

Not that I'm not lazy - in some respects I'm useless (to paraphrase someone much more intelligent than myself, I want to learn; I just dislike being taught...) - but I'll swear on my last vestiges of charm and good looks that I'm telling no lies here.

Don't worry - I'm not angry. Just tired and more than a little stressed. Just as well I have the Top Gear website to check out instead, eh? :o)