November20
By: Phil Wilson
Our team is the first-line support for the University’s web needs. This means we get a lot of diverse requests landing in our bug tracker, RT, ever day. To help us share the load, we each deal with the support queue on rotating basis, as you can see in our schedule. We use the wiki rather than the University calendaring system just because it’s quicker and easier to set up, enter events and edit them.
However, using the wiki means that there aren’t any alarms or reminders.
So I took a few hours the other day and built a new module for our open-source Hungrybot which does the reminding.
The wiki calendar has an iCalendar export, so every two hours or so Hungrybot looks at that, works out who is on support today, checks the RSS feed of unassigned tickets and then lets the person on support know about them. In practice, it looks something like this (here you see I’ve prompted it to tell me about the new tickets):
Posted in: development, tools
On Thursday 27th November at 11:00 am in the BUCS Conference Room (2 South), we will be holding a demonstration of the News module in the CMS. Topics covered will include:
- How to add, edit and expire news items
- How to include news items on pages using macros
- How to use tags to categorise news items and display them in context around your site
- Using RSS feeds to promote your site’s news
There will also be time for questions and discussion.
Posted in: CMS, events
November11
By: Alison Kerwin
Last month some of the team attended the Future of Web Apps event in London. They came back enthused and full of information which they presented back to us giving us all an overview of developments elsewhere.
Rather than simply be fed the information and go back to the day job we’ve all been assigned homework (courtesy of Andy Male and Phil Wilson) and each week we’re sitting down to hear more about some of the key topics in detail. We’ve already had presentations on OAuth, Recommendation Engines, Activity Centred Design and the Cloud Computing. All of which have been interesting and informative (particularly the saxophone demo from Tom Trentham).
This week we continue with presentations on Open Social and Getting Things Done. These are happening on Thursday the 13th at 11am in the BUCS Conference Room (University campus).
These sessions will be followed by Desktop Apps, XMPP (20th Nov) and The Agile Process (27th Nov).
If any of our University colleagues wish to attend then please drop in.
Homework sessions have been a really useful way of transfering knowledge across the team. They are really giving us food for thought and providing everyone with an opportunity to get involved.
Posted in: events, team
