Alex Harries's diary

A little geeky update - UPSU.net now has the rather posh-looking Smoothgallery by JonDesign running the homepage and Social:Life homepage promo images:

It's even got a very flashy preview gadget when you click on "Show all": 

The promos are limited to the newest four to keep page load times reasonable, although I'm trying to educate the editors of the tool that two or three are better... ;o)

The open source part is a simple Javascript library based on the open source Mootools framework, which the University's website has been using for some time now to great effect:

(One thing I'm hoping the University will capitalise on in the near future is their provision of RSS; there's clearly a lot of information on the site, but sometimes its nice when you can get the information delivered to you, and at the moment only the news (and possibly the events) feeds are obviously available).

Most importantly with Smoothgallery, the whole thing decomposes into accessible HTML very gracefully - no Flash here at all.

To get it working on UPSU.net, I had to write a small manager application to let us cue up the images:

... and once I'd thrown that together it was only a very short step from there to put yet another RSS feed on UPSU.net - the latest homepage promos RSS feed:

The gallery itself is a brilliant bit of code, and even a numpty like me was able to very quickly create a version for the Social:Life homepage image feed, too, which you can see on the Social:Life homepage if you really want to!

Anyway, I've only got to do another one of these Really Boring Introductions - for the JobShop - and then I can focus on more interesting things. Like sleep...

/al