Alex Harries's diary

While I wait for my bedtime cup of hot chocolate to cool down (and yes, that really is the time), I just wanted to jot down a couple of little changes that almost no-one will notice, even fewer people will use, and that I'm fairly proud of regardless.

• Yesterday, I added social bookmarking links to the news and blog pages (as they're generated by the same chunks of code) to encourage a bit more user interactivity. No, it doesn't mean I'm expecting a gazillion people to descend on UPSU.net and declare it an amazing website, but it's definitely a start ;o)
  
  
• I also got round to turning on a redirection system which lets us create a news article as normal, but instead of showing a news page when people click on the article's link, they're sent automagically over to another page on UPSU.net. This is quite handy if we want to put up a short news story where the topic is already explained in more detail elsewhere on the site, which lets us cut down on maintaining information on the site. It also means we can start linking blog entries and forum posts into the news feeds, which means that people whose only contact through the site is via the RSS feeds can also be kept more up-to-date on changes on the site's non-news areas. Not that you lot out there in readerland will ever actually see the system in action until you click on something you think is news and get sent over to Fraggy's Sheep Worrying pages. Or something...
  
  
• Tonight, I've been tweaking the social bookmarking toys links (sorry) and adding in a bit more control over comments - now we can turn the commenting system off on a news article (and soon you'll be able to do the same in your blogs if you want to) to let us gracefully close any discussions that get a bit too heated, or just when we're reporting on factual news and don't want to give the impression that we're asking for comment. Comments also automagically turn themselves off a month after a news story was last updated, so yesterday's news doesn't start attracting comments that won't be seen by the majority of the readership. The third (and best) benefit of this is that it reduces the number of news articles which our new best mates the spam bots are posting on, which makes my day a little bit smoother ;o)

Goddamn I need to get me a life... Or take up knitting or something... ;o)

Buenos noches darlings! /al

I know I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm getting bored of having a spam-bot trying to advertise websites offering videos and images of a certain, ahem, "type" of kinky activity. What's even worse is it seems to be happening more on one of my blog entries than anywhere else on the site - is it something I'm writing about? Something in my side bar's "about me" text? Whatever it is, I seem to be attracting this kinky, apparently Russian computer to my blog.

Still, it's nice to know someone's reading... ;o)

Anyway, as of tonight, I've finally got round to enforcing the no BB code and HTML rule in website comments - comments with some types of web address in them, or some types of BB code, will come back with an error message and explain what you're doing wrong (it's unlikely you'll accidentally put these codes into your comment, so most people should never see this error).

Some HTML and BB code won't trigger the spam filter - just the key words that seem to be turning up in all the spam bot posts, but I'll tweak this as and when things change - that way, we're not being too draconian with our rules, so pretty much all normal comments will still work, but my new best mate the Russian Spam-Bot (TM?) won't be able to tell us all what a wonderful website it's got to tell us about.

Anyway, if you're trying to post a comment on UPSU and come up against problems, please let me know here and I'll take a look into it. Promise :)

Right, I'm off to watch Hell's Kitchen USA (yup, it's a quiet night in... How sad...) and try and figure out how the hell I'm going to put my 120Gb hard disk in my MacBook Pro without deleting all my docs... It's going to be a late night.

Have a good weekend and wrap up warm, kids ;o) /al

We have another new toy on the site. It's something that's been in the "planning" (i.e. the "thought about it, never got round to doing anything with it") stage for a while now - a one-click way of subscribing to, and unsubscribing from, a newsletter feed.

On UPSU.net we run a few different newsletter lists; the JobShop and Social:Life ones are two of the most commonly-used lists, and the compulsory list (which is used to send urgent broadcast messages to everyone) sees about one message every two months.

With our mass mailing lists that can be opted-in to, e.g. the JobShop, you used to have to go to your profile, edit it, and tick a box, then save it and wait for someone to e-mail you.

Now, we have a toy we can sit on whatever page we like (for the JobShop, it's under the menu on the right on every page apart from the job listings pages - check for yourself if you like ;o).

This toy tells you if you're subscribed to whichever list that particular block of code is looking after, and a button you can click on the subscribe or unsubscribe. Clicking the button takes you straight back to the same page, so you don't end up lost in a sea of back-button clicking just to sign up.

I'm also planning a re-jig of the Social:Life homepage to coincide with the new academic year, so we'll hopefully be adding one of these buttons for the Social:Life mailing list to that page as well... Soonish... Maybe...

I'm doing a spot of work-avoidance at the moment - I'm supposed to be working out how the NUS card sign-up system is going to work (and, at some point in the next month or so, actually making it happen: cry...) - so, to avoid having to start it today, I'm sketching out some ideas for a "My RSS" box on UPSU.net's new homepage (err, coming soon...).

The idea with My RSS is to give all members of the site a way of adding RSS headlines (from any website) to their UPSU.net homepage (i.e. the page they see when they sign into the site, on any computer). Users provide the URL of the RSS feed, choose how many headlines to show, and say whether they want to see the first few words of the description as well (... and if they want to see HTML or plain text? Or is that too complicated?), and voila, someone else's news on our website...!

It really is good stuff, and if/when it's running, will probably cause me to switch from using UPSUuuuugle as my homepage. The only potential problem is that, like a lot of things, it uses a tiny bit of Javascript to show/hide options menus; I know a (small) number of the University's PCs don't even support javascript, so this will mean another feature which some of the site's more technologically-limited visitors will have to live without.

Of course (without wanting to sound like I'm jumping on a passing bandwagon), it's a fairly Web 2.0 thing (although members will only see their own RSS choices), and - more importantly - it's another way of UPSU.net encouraging people to set UPSU.net as their homepage, which would be rather flattering!

As one of the people who put this site together, I have to admit I'm not particularly fond of the idea of having it's design perforated by adverts of all shapes and sizes because someone, somewhere thinks that loading up a website for students with adverts is a great way to sell something-or-other; as a budding web-geek (ok, I might be a little too long in the tooth - at least when it comes to the www - to be described as "budding") I'm conscious of the fact that most people don't visit a website to see the wonderful adverts; in fact, most adverts are (by their very nature), intrusive, eye-catching and distracting from the page's actual content.

However, I'm also aware of the fact that the site's hosting - and my wages! - aren't paid from money growing from trees in Ravelin Park, and so there is a fine balance between me fighting against having adverts here, there and everywhere, and my bosses deciding to take on a less rebellious web designer (and preferably one with a little more talent and skill, since I know there's no shortage of both attributes among the Portsmouth population!).

So how do we go about trying to get UPSU.net to help pay for itself?

By glancing at the right of any of the pages on the site (with the exception - at the moment - of the Blogs section), you'll probably notice that most of the adverts are in fact links back into UPSU.net. This is a conscious decision on the part of the top brass and myself to help raise awareness of the important things going on at the Union. That said, there are many important things going on, so adverts are just one way we try to raise awareness of happenings on the site.

As for paid advertising, this is where my latest back-burner comes in; Google Adsense. You've probably seen Adsense adverts before - they're often text-only, can be hilariously mis-targeted (I regularly see adverts encouraging visitors to a certain website to buy from competitors' websites, as well as a couple of "buy it, sell it, love it - UCAS forms on eBay" oddities), but more importantly are less intrusive than the flashy, full-colour ads you often see bouncing around some websites.

So why Google Adsense?

Well, Google Adsense is something we can set up in a matter of hours. We can say who can and cannot advertise on UPSU (so we can filter adverts out to ones which you'll actually be interested in), we can say how big - or, if I am allowed any say in the matter, how small - the adverts are, and - most importantly I think - we can get you, the students, involved in how and where we place the adverts.

Ultimately, this means we're not going to be letting adverts dominate the site, unless they're for something seriously useful.

Another major bonus - two in fact - is that we can keep a close eye on how the adverts are performing, and any money we make from Adsense can be ploughed back into the UPSU charity as a whole. Ultimately, this means we aren't selling out to keep the money coming in (as if we ever would!) and, hopefully, you shouldn't have to fight your way through a load of adverts to get to the parts of the site you're interested in. In fact, most of the time, you probably won't even look at the adverts unless you glance to the right - or the bottom - of the page.

Spam? What spam!

The other thing I positively detest is junk mail. Receiving it, and as much, if not more so, sending it out to other people. So we've been very careful this year to make sure that the only mail we've sent out to your registered e-mail address has been to tell you about the things at the Union that we think/hope that you, as students in a democratic body such as the Union, would be interested in (plus ...