Apologies for the 50-in-1 update, but I've got loads of equally important (or, if you're a normal human being, equally boring) things to ramble on about...

Gamel - Pugwash mag editor and graphic designer extraordinaire - has finished the image which will adorn the back of the Pugwash hoodies this year:

I particularly love the dig at my Mac "obsession" - the monkey is typing away on a Banana laptop. In my defence, and as far as I'm concerned, I spend a lot of time on my laptop because I'm doing work - everyone else, however, has christened my laptop "Alex's girlfriend" (much to my better half's amusement) because of the amount of time I spend on it... Cheers... Gits the lot of you! ;o)

It's been a bit cold lately, and I grabbed a shot of the sunset over Biggin Hill while I was home visiting the 'rents. Apologies for the quality of the shot - I blame the camera - but the sky was like cut glass and I could see clearly right across London (about 40 miles) from the back window of the house...

Talking of photos, on my way back to Portsmouth, my carriage stopped next to this frankly ridiculous waste of a sign yesterday:

On the subject of bitching, I don't think I'll ever understand why some people feel the need to rip other people's work apart in a public forum just because they don't understand its purpose; it's like me accusing Aston Martin of selling overpriced rubbish just because their cars cost more than a Ford Fiesta... Meh... Sorry for the oblique rant, but it's frustrating when you pretty much live and breathe your media presence and sometimes the only feedback you receive is complaints!! Still, it could be worse... ;o)

In webgeekery, I've been tweaking our "news wizard" - a (very) basic wizard-style web tool we use to create news articles:

Where we used to be quite limited in terms of what we could do with the images in news articles - you got a 200x150 pixel image in your news article, with or without a caption, and that was it - you had to know a bit of HTML if you wanted to tweak it - now our online news editors have the ability to create news articles which have a widescreen image right across the article:

The main application for this will, I hope, be when we start putting more of Pugwash magazine's features online, as it will allow us to make a bigger feature of the article image, since the magazine is very much a visually-led medium. Unfortunately, with only two more issues of the mag left this year, I can't help feeling time's running out very quickly already!

A quick stop press: Digitially Imported 'net radio - I've been listening to...

Thanks to the NUS's Media Mailing list thingbob (one of their best-kept secrets), I've just found out about Palatinate, the online version of Durham University SU's fortnightly student newspaper.

Their website comes across much like I imagine UPSU.net does - a rapidly-evolving work of love by one or two hard-working HTML-geeks, and the results show (I admit I'm guessing about the webteam here, but the site feels a lot like someone's put a lot of work into it, and is perhaps still tweaking things as they go along...).

More importantly, the content is rich and diverse, ranging from features on the Union's clubs and societies (complete with pictures of Beautiful People™, of course ;o) through to the not-too-Geek-orientated weekly online news roundup (Facebook doing instant messaging? Srsly?!). In fact, revisiting the website to get the link to the Facebook article, I notice that they have a whole "online" section - not an entirely crazy idea, I suspect.

The content is also easily accessible (although the online front page appears to have a heavy bias towards comment which might just be down to layout tweaking than a lack of news-based content, it seems) and - yey! - they're using JonDesign's Smoothgallery (which I've gushed about previously) to rotate the top three news stories.

Very nice, and definitely worth subscribing to their RSS feed.

/al

This evening was the first of the four candidates' question times, with video being recorded (I think?) for the first time. Tallie Kane (reviews editor), Jacob (news editor), Luke (web editor) and Hannah (Pure FM sec) came along and helped out, broadcasting the evening's events to literally billions* of listeners, and videoing the night's proceedings - hopefully the videos should be up on our YouTube stream soon (i.e. once I or another kind soul processes them).

The evening is always scary for the candidates, so a big pat on the back to the girls and guys for doing so well tonight. A few are going to need to be trained to talk louder into the microphone, but that's nothing a little adjustment of the mixing desk can't fix. Alternatively, the "sound engineer's limiting stick" can be used to similar effect... 

Tomorrow night we're doing something very similar over at Rees halls for their residents. I'm told space there is limited, so it's more an opportunity for residents to come down, wonder what the hell we're doing and ask the candidates some questions rather than a bring-all-your-supporters-along-and-make-lots-of-noise night. Not that I mind either way - all I have to do is sit behind a sound desk and try not to get into (any more) trouble!

Thursday and Friday night will see the elections candidates at the Union, so that should be a really good night and will see Pure FM "OBing" (broadcasting live) and the Pugwash News bods recording and interviewing. Ooh, that reminds me, we have loads of interviews from tonight we need to sort out, as well as the candidates' segments.

If only I had half a clue about video editing... Oh dear...!

In other news (ahem), the latest issue - issue 11 - of the newspaper arrived today. It's looking good, although the editorial/pre-press process still needs a little tweaking.

Newspaper "oopses" 

This also appears to be as good a place as any for me to publish some "oopses" from the newspaper... 

I'm guilty as charged of cocking up Jacob's article with the inaccurate 'Frewen Library wins "Best New Building"' headline - apparently the Frewen part is the old building - the new building is simply The University Library. Sorry Jacob!

We also have some images on the PWs front page of the paper credited to "some guy with a camera", and an article has been attributed to the vaguely-titled "Union Council Chair". My apologies to the two hard-working bods involved. The cause of the mistakes will be looked into, and a suitable scapegoat found and made an example of. Possibly...

* potentially, of course ;o)

Unashamedly geeky blog post-thing: Yahoo!'s pipes toy has been around for a while, and lets you do some very interesting things with data, one of them being combining RSS feeds. I discovered it today while avoiding doing real work...

I had a play about with it today and created this feed in a couple of minutes for our news bods to keep on screen in the office, which updates every 30 seconds with the latest UPSU, University, Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK and World headlines.

Cunning stuff... 

As we gear up for a video-tastic Elections 2008, I've been polishing our YouTube homepage, which currently has a few videos on including the BBC coverage of the recent anti-fees lobby in Bitterne, and some breakdancing...

The design might get a little more tweaking as we get some feedback - hey, I'm no graphic designer by a long shot - but it's supposed to be all about the videos anyway ;o)

Check us out online at youtube.com/upsuportsmouth!

/al