20070120 

This month has mainly been spent tweaking and improving the reliability of some of my code.

Templates refresh

As part of the societies homepage redesign, below, I created a new header graphic which I like so much I turned into headers for other areas of the site too. Notice the new "news" colour - redesigning the news system is one of my next projects.

• See the headers here
  

AJAX 

New toys almost ready to be unleashed are AJAX-based BBC News RSS and Weather RSS boxes for the homepage; it's nothing particularly impressive, but it lets us display news and weather on the homepage. A nice touch, imvho.

Society pages 

I've also been working on the new Societies homepage, but it's not simply a case of changing one layout - existing redirects and hard-coded links have to be tracked down, broken, and re-directed in some cases. There's also a significant number of sub-pages whose styles can't be quickly converted over to the new layout.

I've also got to consider how we can make the layout consistent throughout the society pages, to maintain consistency. To that end, I've created a whole new menu "block", just for the societies. The existing menu block - which holds the static pages for each society (and is referred to as the "A-Z finder") - will need to be moved onto a hidden menu.

Navigation and search is also being improved, with a static page to act as a societies A-Z finder (as we are no closer to creating a tool which integrates club and society creation, management and updates) and another to act as a finder "by category".

I've had to hack the menu module around a little - originally we could only create menu separators which "said" something, requiring some pretty awkward CSS hacks to hide them. Now we can create a separator with a value of "-" and the menu module simply displays a blank space - very handy.

This is the first time I've looked at the layout and navigation of the societies section since we really started making use of the SEF URL system, so I can now include a Google search box on the societies homepage which searches for terms within all URLs below "upsu.net/getinvolved/societies". When I look at recreating the Get Involved homepage and re-visiting our implementation of search, I'll create a search system which can search both clubs and societies by searching everything under "/getinvolved" - this is one of the main reasons I'm loath to change the existing club and society URLs to remove the "getinvolved/" part at the front.

I also need to look very carefully at how we use the zOOm gallery component, as it is a nightmare for usability at the moment, requiring additional training and proving itself fairly cryptic even for me! Uploading should be little or no harder than it is on Flickr, and we could benefit from assessing whether we can allow *all* registered students to upload to us (although we would need to look carefully at bandwidth and space limitation).

Things to do

I have a very lengthy list of things I'd like to do and finish, but I'll come back to those another time.

The one big one for now is to look at how we can go about adding a couple of very handy toys to UPSU - a "my bookmarks" toy (with the ability to accept del.icio.us-style external calls so people could, in theory, save links from elsewhere), and a "my to-dos" list - more for my own benefit than anyone else's, but still with the potential to be very handy.

I'd also like to investigate - briefly - personal calendaring.

All that said, plenty of websites already offer this functionality, so the alternative route would be to find a way to *effectively* integrate these services from another website into UPSU.net. And keep it reliable and secure.

Reference: the BBC's 15 rules of web stuffness . Read it - they're ace.

20070121

Little touch - added a selective hack into the forums component to sort the club & society forums listing alphabetically (but still keeps the announements forum at the top).

Tonight I'll be finalising the new societies template and looking at organic group creation - the first things I need to integrate this with are the forums and com_content. I'm going to need to create a groups management extension to the toolbox, including search, as well as reviewing access rights and security, and I'll also have to look at how we implement security retrospectively; content which was once open for all to view should no longer be accessible, which means search results, members' "my content" listings and so on need to include these access restrictions.

This could be a long night...

20070123

Two Three little touches:

• The "latest blogs" box on the homepage now only lists one entry per person maximum; no more having three entries from me cluttering up the place...
• BBC RSS News and weather is turned on on the homepage. The weather box needs better intergation though - too much blank space not being properly used...
• I've just installed an XML-RPC pinging tool from Cadenhead.org which lets us "ping" blog monitoring sites like Technorati to let them know a blog has been updated. Bring on the blog tagging system!

20070129

• New societies and elections homepages launched. At last! (More info)
  
• Google isn't properly indexing the site. We need to correct missing META keywords and title tags. B*ll*cks :o( (example - a search for Ahlul Bayt in upsu.net/getinvolved/societies returns nothing at the moment).
• Lots of Ents artwork to put up for the forthcoming Re-freshers week. Yeay!
• Steve tells me there are two new surveys to go online. I wonder what they are?

20070202 (aka "What I've dun in the last couple of days"...)

• Put the JobShop 2007 survey online and sent out the weekly bulletin
• Created and implemented an iCalendar exporter for the diary system - look out for the Facebook-esque "export" button on the diary pages:
  
  
  
  In close-up:
  
  
  
  Click on the button and you should be asked if you want to download a '.ics' file - you can import this file into your calendar program (e.g. iCal, MS Outlook) to add the events to your calendar which were on the page you downloaded the .ics file from.
  
  This system has the ability to export *all* events (limited to 12 months at a time) although only a month at a time is enabled through the website unless you tweak the URLs.
  
  It's all about the sharing... ;o)
  
  
• Added a load of adverts for the UPEL side of things - 120x?? right column adverts (on every page) and homepage heroes to run for the next month or so.
• Added the LGBT month article, homepage hero and homepage top banner.
• Added the Pompey Watersports tour article.
• Created a load of default news article images, so now there's no excuse not to add an appropriate picture to news stories, even if it's only a generic one!
• Fixed a couple of errors which were stopping the Upsuuuuugle homepage from validating as XHTML.
• Tweaked the RSS system's events section's handling of dates and authors.
• Added a "post this RSS feed to my NetVibes homepage" button to the blogs' "Feeds" box (on the right of peoples' blogs) and to the "About RSS" page for each RSS feed.
• ... and have fallen in love with NetVibes - what a pretty, awesome and well-made Web 2.0 site. Damned cool!

It's 11:45pm, and I'm the only one left in the office. Right now in Fabric nightclub, Goldie is tearing up Room Two, and over in Lux there be people a-boppin'. I'm off home to catch up on 3 days of recorded TV on the Meeja Centah, and then it's a 48 hour revision marathon to try and learn two units' worth of wireless networking and project management.

Oh, happy days... ;o) Peace out /al

Update: just knocked a little notes toy together. Very basic, but kinda handy... I'll do more on presentation/interface after my exams this week :o) 

20070204 0434

• Just added an elections box on the homepage and a new elections events stream, and it only took one hour out of my life... :o)
  
  Now I can export the elections events (using yesterday's iCalendar export toy) as an iCalendar file to save me spending ten minutes putting the events onto iCal... Hmm, hang on, I think I might have messed up the maths here...
  
  Oh, and that reminds me - the events diary layout looks a bit gash. I think it's time for a re-orientation... ;o)

20070216

Not much to report. New VIP section page layout and content refresh, and I have a very important decision to make, which - if I decide to go for it - will mean very little development on the site over the next month (ok, no change there then!) and probably a lot of blogging from me instead.

In case I find myself no longer allowed to enjoy a dictator-like free reign over UPSU's content in the coming days, I'd like to take this opportunity to say "tarrah" and thanks to my millions of loyal supporters, especially those of you who sent flowers and chocolates... Something like that anyway - you've all been beautiful B-)

Peace out /al 

20070601

Lots has happened in the 3 1/2 months since I last updated this page. Nothing massively interesting though, so bullet points are all you're getting... ;o)

• Group access restrictions on static web pages is here. Huzzah!
• The groups management section is largely completed and ready to be opened up to all members of UPSU. Everyone can create groups, and certain special groups - e.g. webteam, staff - will be assigned special privileges, e.g. being able to export e-mail lists, etc. A lot of this will be hard-coded into forthcoming projects, but that shouldn't be a major problem with regards to future-proofing.
• The group management and query functions class is now global. This means any Mambo component, module, mambot, etc, can query objects to get the current user's access rights. Presently, only static web pages can be queried from outside the Groups management interface, but this will soon be extended to cover news, forums, and some other general objects. Any code can, of course, check a member's membership of any group, so development of code which checks a member's access to a group is fine to go ahead now, meaning some of the toolbox tools can be updated to check group membership, e.g. the "view member's account details" tool. This also means the NUS Card issue interface, which is currently an external project, can be brought onto UPSU.net in time for next year's issuing process.
• The Get Involved pages have been extensively updated, with new templates being created. A universal-design template has been applied to the Get Involved pages, Democracy, Elections, and a few more. This template should also soon be applied to the news sections.
• I've been starting to think about how we're going to re-vamp the news sections, with a greater focus on autonomy of maintenance, and more interactive features, including at-a-glance information on popular and recently-popular (meta) tags, comments, and "most viewed".
• Blog tagging is now enabled, and plugs nicely into the...
• ... Tag Search system, which is - bar a couple of searching bugs - very, very good at identifying the range and levels of content on UPSU.net's web pages and news articles.
• Members' profiles are undergoing a revamp, with a strong emphasis on members' content silos, and integration with existing social networking, such as Facebook.
• Created a handy little SSI toy, which lets you insert blocks of HTML into your web pages at run-time. An example: I have a block of HTML which includes links to websites about house music, my favourite DJs' websites, and some photos of me embarrassing myself on the decks. I want to inset the same block of HTML on all my Pure:FM DJ profile and show tracklisting webpages. Instead of having to insert it into each page, then update each one individually, I can create the HTML, upload it to the server, and type a line of text which is automagically replaced with the HTML file's contents whenever the page is loaded. Very handy...
• The contributor interface and workflow for the galleries is being updated, and I'm thinking of putting together a universal template to wrap it all up in. I've also begun creating globally-available code to resize and crop server-local images to predefined sizes and aspect ratios. This means creation of galleries - and associated RSS feeds - should be a lot easier. I also want to investigate whether - and how - we offer *all* members the ability to upload photos.
• UPSU.net won an award for its use of social bookmarking buttons, and various other Web 2.0 toys, for example RSS. Tasty...
• Oh, and I got elected. Guess who's running the asylum next year then... ;o)

More updates shortly, no doubt, and a lot more information on my blog, if you're that bored that you want to read it ;o)

20070605

• Fixed a bug which wasn't returning the right Itemid from mainframe for multiple cat Itemids where the matching cat id was first in the array.

20070701

So who's idea was it to ban smoking in enclosed public spaces? Grrr... (Joking - of course it's a good idea).

This month I have mainly been creating and implementing the site-wide tracking system, working with Mike C on the Grad Ball mini site (almost there, now) and putting some more time into the profile/account pages.

I'm also supposed to have been working on converting the NUS Card Issue tools to run within Mambo; that's on hold for a couple of weeks while I do my handover, but it'll be ready well in advance of the start of the academic year, so no worries on that front.

I officially start as a Sabb tomorrow, so do wish me luck. Or not; whatever makes you happy ;o)

/al 

20070706

• Working hard on the Grad Ball mini site - this year the web presence for our flagship event is going to be bigger than we've ever done before, and probably bigger than any other students' union in the rest of the country! We're also making use of external websites, such as YouTube for videos and Flickr for photos, as well as a Facebook group, which should make this an interesting year to see how we can make use of existing websites to extend what we offer our students online, often at much lower cost than developing our own peripheral sites.
• Re-created the contacts page and added complaints pages. The site map will be next, and then a re-vamp of all the directory pages to set a common style will be scheduled hopefully during the winter holidays.
• Not had enough sleep... ;o)

20070709

• Finished the Grad Ball mini-site at last - rahh!