Category: CWD

So, what’s going on?

Nick Jackson / / CWD, Jerome, Linking You, Nucleus, Open Data, Service 2.0, Total ReCal, User Experience, Web 2.0

Good question. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, so here’s a really quick overview of what I’m currently working on, pretending to work on, worked on but haven’t done anything with, or planning to work on.

  1. Linking You, our current JISC project on institutional identifiers. Finishing up next week, and currently causing Alex and myself epic amounts of beating our heads against the desks.
  2. Jerome, our other JISC project on making libraries slightly more awesome.
  3. Zendesk Phase 2, including bits and pieces of integration work to make it smoothly flow through everything else we’re doing.
  4. Nucleus (and assorted fluff), our epic store of everything, being brushed up, pinned down and fully documented.
  5. Authentication being made even cooler, and more reliable, along with support for more stuff like SAML.
  6. GAME, our application management environment, being made more awesome.
  7. Room Bookings will be coming over the summer, allowing people to find and book rooms faster than ever before.
  8. Lots of QR Code goodness all over the place, including on room labels (this hooks up to room bookings for added goodness).
  9. Possibly a bit of hardware hacking in the Library with RFID stuff.
  10. CWD updates to version 3. Faster, lighter, more accessible and generally good.
  11. Total ReCal rollout to replace our legacy Timetable system (we hope).
  12. Replacing the legacy phone book with the new one (we hope).
  13. Data, data, data.
  14. A bit of mucking around with telephony, just for kicks.
  15. Taking another look at our Student Communications project to try and address a few annoyances.

Designing for Everybody

Nick Jackson / / CWD, Web 2.0

If you’ve kept up to date with our blogs then you’ll know that Alex and myself have, over the past few months, been slowly working towards a unified design for all of the University’s online services. This is the Common Web Design (or CWD for short), and provides the underlying page structure, semantic layout, design, typography, colours, UI and UX widgets and more for the entirety of our online services provision.

A few people have asked, and quite rightly, what was wrong with the old designs. It’s a sensible question, after all there’s no point wasting effort fixing something which isn’t broken. However, the answer is not that the old designs were broken or wrong, but that a new design could offer a lot more.

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The Roadmap

Nick Jackson / / CWD, Get Satisfaction, Labs, lncn.eu, LUNA, Open Data, Posters, Print From My PC

Just to keep you up to date, here’s what’s planned to be happening on a few projects we’ve got kicking around over the summer. This is in addition to some other big ones we’re working on like Project Jerome (a brand new way of interfacing with the Library systems) and online postgraduate applications.

Authentication

  • Completion of our OAuth 2.0 interface for login.
  • Application Directory to handle issuing of API keys, secrets and tokens.
  • Taking a closer look at seamless SSO.
  • Adding the ability to use University usernames and passwords at Get Satisfaction.

Linking You

  • Administration interface.
  • Even faster.
  • Improved statistics.
  • Link checker (monitors for broken links and notifies accordingly).
  • Support for custom minified keywords.
  • Support for alterable destinations using 307 redirects instead of 301.
  • Improved metadata & thumbnail gathering.
  • Warnings for potentially unsafe or unsuitable destinations (to stop link masking).
  • Support for web hooks.
  • Membership of 301Works.

A-Z

  • Admin interface.
  • Link checker (monitors for broken links and alters lists accordingly).
  • Highlighting of links requiring login.
  • Support for even more export formats (CSV, XBEL and XML) on top of JSON.

LUNA (Network Access for Student Village & Riseholme Park)

  • Updating the design to the CWD.
  • Faster.
  • Removing dependence on JavaScript.

Posters

  • Going live on the production network, ready for its shakedown in the public eye over the summer.

Common Web Design

  • Even more blisteringly fast.
  • Lots of behind-the-scenes goodness to get it looking even better on older browsers and Internet Explorer.
  • Unicorns.
  • Various tweaks and fixes.
  • Custom styling for even more elements of the page so you don’t have to.
  • Moving to a new domain name and production server so we can roll it out to even more sites.

Printing

  • Better compatibility with more operating systems (hopefully).
  • Colour printing support.
  • Integration of Pay For Print, so everything is in one place.

Posters, CWD and more!

Nick Jackson / / CWD, Labs, Open Data, Posters, Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else, Web 2.0

Last week I headed off to a conference in London called Dev8D, where I met a few hundred other developers from the HE sector (and others) and spent my time brainstorming ideas, messing about with RFID tags, mashing data together, attending workshops on the future of data representation, writing an iPhone app, learning to use the Force, drinking far too much complementary tea and coffee and fighting the mess that is the Underground on a weekend. In short, it was awesome fun. Out of it I’ve gleaned loads of useful bits and pieces which I can now use to push the bits of the University that I can get my hands on into the future with impunity, because somebody else has already done the research and I now know who.

Next up, Posters. We’re still waiting for our new development server on which the Online Services Team can develop, stage, test and show off our latest inventions. Once that’s up and running you’ll be able to have a go at breaking it and we’ll be open for feedback. Posters will also be the first production University site (albeit beta) to use our new CWD 2.0, and will also be providing data as RSS in the initial release, with JSON and XML further down the line. The ability for groups such as student societies to add posters, along with a streamlined online approval process, will be in place ready for once Posters leaves beta.

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Today In Brief

Nick Jackson / / CWD, LUNA, Print From My PC, Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

Today, I attended some training. I also have a headache, need to do some washing, and need to pack for a weekend in London (off to see the Lion King!), but that’s another issue.

Other things that happened today are good:

  • I updated the jQuery framework which lies behind LUNA and PFMPC to the latest version, giving several speed increases which will be completely unnoticeable for most people but which make my benchmark tools very happy.
  • I updated some of the CWD CSS to fix a niggling bug in IE6 and improve appearance on browsers supporting the CSS3 specification. This brings CWD to version 1.3.7.
  • I updated the HTML in PFMPC from CWD 1.2 to 1.3, bringing more cross-browser goodness, better semantically valid navigation, improved printing and a liquid layout to make best use of bigger screens.
  • I hacked some regex into the game console registration pages in LUNA, which now forces people to enter a valid MAC address when they’re registering. Unfortunately they have to enter uppercase letters (a true MAC address can be either) to keep our network access software happy, but tomorrow may include fixing this so some clever JavaScript converts it to uppercase for them.
  • I’ve got a server to play around with where I can put a nice LUNA feedback page.
  • Kirsty has managed to do some more work on the ICT team blog, so I’m seeing if this post will cross over successfully.