A couple of days ago I got asked on my personal blog if it was possible to get the Univeristy terms dates into Google Calendar. The answer is a wholehearted “yes!” and this is how:
Step 1
Go to http://www.bath.ac.uk/semester/ and look underneath the Key on the right hand side and choose which calendar you want from:
* Full chart
* Full chart with university week numbers
* Staff chart (without the teaching days and student vacation dates marked)
* Staff chart with university week numbers
Right-click the one you want and copy the link to your clipboard (you probably want either the “Full chart” or “Staff chart” screenshots of each are below).
Google Calendar using the Full chart
Google Calendar using the Staff chart
Step 2
Go to Google Calendar and click “Add” in the bottom left corner and then click “Add by URL”
Paste in the link you copied from the semester page and click “Add”. That’s it! You can now click “Back to Calendar” and you’ll see all the items from the calendar you imported.
At the moment the calendar you add will expire at the end of the academic year so you’ll need to go through this again next year.
Posted in: tools
So, with the news that YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye and the recent release of Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 8 I thought I’d take a moment to look at the browsers that visitors to the University of Bath’s website are using. We use Google Analytics to track a significant portion of visits to pages on our site but with tens of thousands of pages and hundreds and hundreds of templates, we don’t track everything*. I’m rather hopeful that the following figures, derived from site visits between the 1st and 30th of June, are representative nevertheless!
External visitors:
| Browser |
% of visitors using it |
| Internet Explorer |
64.61% (IE6 = 21%, IE7 = 65%, IE8 = 14%) |
| Firefox |
23.83% (almost all 3.x series on Windows) |
| Safari |
7.35% (almost all on Mac) |
| Chrome |
2.98% |
| Opera |
0.73% |
Internal visitors:
| Browser |
% of visitors using it |
| Internet Explorer |
72.31% (IE6 = 13%, IE7 = 78%, IE8 = 9%) |
| Firefox |
19.55% (almost all 3.x series on Windows) |
| Safari |
5.07% (almost all on Mac) |
| Chrome |
2.13% |
| Opera |
0.50% |
These numbers seem to suggest that we need to review our current browser support matrix to accommodate the high IE6 usage among both the internal and external audiences (~9% and ~13% respectively, although I do hope that we can identify some of the internal perpetrators!). This is slightly disappointing given the fact that IE6 is now eight years old and has bugs that make even the most determined of exterminators squeal but these numbers should only get lower and lower over time, reducing our maintenance burden, and increasing the number of things we can do on the site.
Footnote: We do run Analog over our Apache server logs which does monitor every single page, but the browser report there doesn’t get grouped quite as nicely and the stats are harder to summarise which is why we tend to prefer Google Analytics. All of the sites which have moved to our CMS do of course have the Google Analytics tracking code!
Update: Mike Nolan from Edge Hill University has published the corresponding browser usage statistics for their webpages, showing a similar pattern.
Posted in: communication
