A few weeks ago I got the chance to be the first to make use of our innovation time.
After watching a demo on hacks.mozilla.org I wanted to experiment with HTML5 and Firefox's new support for drag and drop of files from your desktop to our web-based file sharing system, the Learning Materials Filestore.
The documentation they provide is nowhere near enough to actually implement this, so I was about to give up when I found out that only two days earlier the people who write TinyMCE had released Plupload, a library for doing exactly what I wanted!
Continue Reading
Posted in: Development, Tools
January21
By: Phil Wilson
So what an exciting first few weeks back we’ve had!
We started off nice and easy, picking up all the support requests that had been filed over the Christmas break and, after a suggestion from Kelvin last year, put together a demo of an augmented reality map of the University campus using Layar (which I will post more about later).
We also started preparing for our next set of work, delivering the most-requested features and fixes to our news publishing service, which is based on WordPress.
The shortlist of work we’d do was created in December during face-to-face meetings with members of the Press Office after which it was published on our wiki using the survey macro to give everyone a chance to vote and comment on which items were most important. At the same time, we got on with estimating all of the listed items so that once voting was complete we’d be able to balance the importance with how long they were going to take!
And then the snow came.
Fortunately the University had prepared for this already and an emergency telephone number had been set up with the current status of the campus and there were prepared news articles ready to be published. Of course, yet again the use of Twitter was instrumental in delivering the message that campus was closed as quickly as possible (and at least one person enjoyed their 7.30am tweet delivery!)
Sadly for us in Web Services, there are excellent remote working facilities provided by Computing Services, with a good VPN and remote desktop connection to work PCs and a wake-on-lan facility if your PC is off. There is also an instant messenger server which enables both one-to-one chats and chatrooms for groups of people which enables us to co-ordinate effectively even when we’re at home in our PJs.
The combination of remote desktop provision and web-based tools for documentation and issue-tracking meant we were able to complete the work for the news system on time. Now that the snow's melted we're just waiting for a moment to deploy our changes and show the Press Office what we've done!
Posted in: Communication, Development, Team, Tools
November26
By: Alison Kerwin
After months of developing, beta testing, feedback and more developing we have launched our research website!
Research is the first of the core sites to be launched as part of the external website project and will be closely followed by study (due for launch in December).
Despite having a research presence before, the site did little to promote the world class research undertaken here at Bath. Unless you drilled down to departments and individual centres and groups our research was difficult to find from our central website. We've also invested a huge amount in a publications repository in recent years but this was invisible to our users.
The new site focusses on exposing this information and promoting it. Led by Web Services we have worked with a number of key stakeholders across the University including our Pro-Vice-Chancellor Research, Jane Millar.
It is the first in a long line of developments and it will evolve over the coming months (and years!) but I am incredibly proud of the team here and what we've achieved.
One down... many, many more to go!
Posted in: Development, New website
September23
By: Alison Kerwin
Update: Due to a number of complexities the wiki upgrade has been postponed to Tuesday 29 September between 8am and 9am. Web Services apologise for any convenience this may cause.
Original message below:
The University wiki is due to be upgraded on Friday 25 September 2009. The upgrade will take us to Confluence 3.0 the latest version of the software which has substantially improved performance and a range of new features.
For more information watch the Confluence 3.0 overview video or read the release notes.
Please note the wiki will be unavailable between 8am and 9am on Friday to allow for this upgrade.
Posted in: Development
As of this time last year, the University Academic Year Charts have been generated in HTML, PDF and iCalendar formats from Excel spreadsheets. Previously there were only PDFs for download but we thought that providing versions to view live on the web and a version people could add to their own calendar software would be useful.
To take the burden out of maintaining all these different formats by hand we used some short Ruby scripts to do this (using libraries such as roo, pdf-writer, and icalendar).
Within Web Services we use the calendar plugin of our wiki to schedule who handles our frontline support on a daily basis (and then get it deliverd to us over instant messenger, as we've blogged about before) but it didn't show the University holidays, meaning that the support was somtimes unfairly balanced.
A screenshot of our support schedule plus University holidays
Yesterday we remembered that one of the year charts we generate just contains dates relevant to staff, without all the teaching days and student holidays marked in, and like all the others, we generate an iCalendar file for it, which the calendar plugin can read. So, a few clicks later and now our support schedule contains the University holiday dates as well as our custom-added events.
This means our calendar has an iCalendar input (the holidays) for human usage when we're updating the schedule as well as an iCalendar output (our support schedule) for robot usage when delivering our schedule directly to us! We've had to do comparatively little to enable this, neither of them have to be maintained by hand, and this is only a tiny fraction of the things that are possible, and all enabled because we use software which generates and consumes standard, open formats (and thanks to Tom Natt for making sure we did it!).
Posted in: Communication, Development, Team
March24
By: Alison Kerwin
See how the news system was developed courtesy of a Tom Natt walkthrough.
(and if you know how to convert this SWF into an FLV file please let us know! The usual ffmpeg magic has failed us!)
Posted in: Development
