Well, it’s been an exciting day today. Riseholme library and the Hull campus closed early, persistent if not particularly heavy snow over Lincoln, people going home stupidly early to avoid the chaos, and a continuation of the ongoing saga of getting LUNA working.
Our new date for deployment is… (drum roll)… Thursday 7th January. As long as nothing else goes wrong, the pages work and our server guy makes it through the snow.
Now, a quick mention of my next project: A website providing an electronic copy of all of the posters you normally see littered around campus, giving you a one-stop location to get all those details you were walking too quickly to remember. More on that later, I’m off to fight the snow now!
The poster site is a great idea and the advantage is that they won’t get ripped down a day or two after they first appear! How do you plan to do it? Allow people to upload their originals as jpg and tag them?
That’s in part why we’re building a mockup, to show Comms the possibilities. We’ve got some cool scripts to convert just about any image format (or PDF/PSD) to whatever is ended up being used, and then each ‘campaign’ is given extra details such as time/location/email/website/phone etc.
Each poster ‘campaign’ then gets a keyword they can use, so instead of the wall of text containing details which normally gets slapped on a poster (which people invariably are too busy to note down or remember) the poster only had to display the keyword (eg http://posters.lincoln.ac.uk/snowflake /printing /council /christmasball and so on). Over time people will get the idea that all they need to remember is the keyword to get to the poster’s info page directly, or they can visit the posters website to see everything (ideal if they spotted one, thought ‘that looks good’ but didn’t get any details).
That and the whole thing will be producing RSS and RESTful data, so it can be used elsewhere with ease.