During a bit of a bored moment I decided that I needed some way of organising the myriad collection of websites the University has under its belt into something we can navigate around.
My starting point was the University’s current A-Z on the corporate website, which contains several oddities and duplicates but nonetheless does list a lot of bits of the University. However, I wanted to create something a bit more useful than a straight list of links – anybody can cobble together a <ul> of items and manually sort it, but it takes a bit more trickery to do what I had planned.
Long story short, I’ve built up a brand-new A-Z service (currently in Labs). This is still not quite finished as I need to get the administrative side working (for which I need our SSO service available, hopefully next week) and as such the data isn’t quite fully loaded. However, a few awesome things I feel I should point out:
- It supports multiple lists of A-Z (try the menu items on the site), and each link can be in as many lists as it wants. When a link changes it is updated once and the change ripples out automatically.
- It’s blazingly fast, and supports heavy-duty caching to make it even more so in production.
- It supports machine-readable output on any list, for example this JSON version of the home list. CSV is coming soon.
- Lists can be either automatically sorted into A-Z (as on the home page) or arbitrarily by the list creator (as shown in this example for Gateway), with unique display styles for each flavour.
- A-Z sorted lists are split automatically into blocks of letters when viewed as HTML (ie in a browser, not the machine-readable version). If a block would be too small, it automatically runs blocks together. The threshold for a block being ‘too small’ is determined automatically based on the number of items in the list, to prevent there being too many blocks in the menu.
This new A-Z service already has interest from the Library, who may find it an easier way to manage their myriad of links to services. It’s also already found use in another side-project, the new-look Gateway. This is the same Gateway you all know and love, just made über fast and sporting improved cross-platform compatibility by the power of the CWD. The list of links is imported from the A-Z service so it can be easily managed without resorting to asking Online Services nicely or hacking your way through the Portal. Planned future developments around this may include a customisable ‘springboard’ of links for each person… but more on that later.
Over the last couple of weeks, the Online Services Team (the nice bunch of people in ICT who look after – in broad terms – websites that do things) has acquired a shiny new server to muck around with and develop on. For the most part this involves Alex and myself slamming bits of the University together in weird and wonderful ways that nobody has thought of yet and seeing what sticks, what falls apart and what makes people complain. We’re calling the server (and the whole process) Labs.
