Archive for the ‘tools’ Category

February14

Customer satisfaction and happiness

By: Phil Wilson

So, everyone’s favourite web company, 37signals , have started to publish their customer happiness rates at smiley.37signals.com. People can rate them as “great”, “OK” or “not so good”. At the time of writing, they have an 87% “great” rating, 5% “OK” and 8% “not so good”.

Visit the 37signals Happiness Report

Visit the 37signals Happiness Report

Part of the work Web Services do (alongside everything else), is to act as frontline web support for internal and external users. When a ticket was marked as “closed” between June 2010 and January 2011, the submitter was asked to rate both us and the solution we provided. In those eight months we dealt with 1,251 support tickets, but received feedback on only 118 of these (just over 9%).

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Posted in: communication, tools1 comments

April7

Our CMS – What do you think?

By: Andrew Male

Our first CMS site was published at least 2 years ago. Since then, academic sites plus a few others have been moved to the CMS, so it’s a good time to look at how the CMS is working for us. The University is investing in the web site so the CMS will be important in helping us to achieve our aims.

We got together for an hour to brainstorm under 5 main headings:

  1. What problems do non-technical users have?
  2. What’s good about the CMS?
  3. What do I want in a CMS?
  4. What’s bad about the CMS?
  5. What benefits have maintainers seen (in our opinion)?

Nine of us came up with 116 items, so we’ve got quite a lot to digest. Happily they were quite well distributed.  The key will be making sure that we identify and prioritise items that will have the biggest impact for everyone using the CMS.  Making these changes will be important for both Web Services Content Editors and Faculty Editors.

It’s clear that the WYSIWYG editor is a big issue for us and others creating content and almost everyone wants to edit in HTML. The interface isn’t very intuitive; it can take quite some time for new editors to get used to the way it works.  On the positive side, it’s easy for us to make changes to the central template so that everyone will get updates immediately. We can also create macros that allow people to easily include complex content (videos and staff profiles).

One of the benefits of using a CMS has been to reduce the number of copies and versions of Dreamweaver across the University.  As a result we’ve improved our support to site editors and can resolve problems much more quickly.

We would like to hear about your experience of using the University CMS. What changes do you think we should make?

Posted in: CMS, team, tools6 comments

March17

Implementing innovation

By: Phil Wilson

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!

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Posted in: development, tools0 comments

January21

Welcome back!

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.
Twitter message about the closed campus

Snow on campusFortunately 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, tools0 comments

July22

Getting the University of Bath term dates into Google Calendar

By: Phil Wilson

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

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: tools5 comments

February2

Using WordPress for news

By: Phil Wilson

We’ve recently started a new project to overhaul the system powering the University’s news pages.

The old system is powered by a desktop XML editing package called XMLmind, the new system will be powered by WordPress (mind that capital P!).

We’ve looked at other Universities and how they present news, looking particularly at how they use video and audio (if at all).

Surprisingly, there’s very little consensus on what goes to making up the content of a news article; some have no images, some are only press releases, some have contact details and notes for journalists, others nothing but the bare text of an article.

It also seemed that there was no consensus on what software to use to power these systems – most appeared to be using homegrown solutions or the news feature provided by their CMS. Since we need to turn something around quickly, we decided to go for the third-party solution, and after comparing our desired features to the features available in the most popular open-source CMS and news management systems we went with WordPress.

WordPress has an awesome feature set, a massive plugin ecosystem, and comes at an excellent purchase price (£0). There’s also masses of documentation on how to write your own plugins and themes, as well as the newly-launched WordPress.tv which contains a section containing nothing but screencasts of how to perform certain tasks.

We’re currently running some user testing with WordPress straight out-of-the-box which will no doubt lead to some recommendations for changes, but we’re looking forward to working with such a popular, well-documented and feature-heavy tool.

Posted in: communication, newweb, tools6 comments

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