Development in Jeans and a T-Shirt
A look into the exciting work of Nick.
Author: Nick Jackson
//We are aware of some possible issues when setting up printing from Windows Vista or Windows 7 which are causing trouble for a small number of users. We’re taking a look at this right now, and hope to have an update for you before the day is out.
Printing from Windows XP, OS X and Linux is unaffected.
//It’s been a while since I’ve given you an update, so here goes: Next week I’ll be looking at developing a whole new service for communications. For now, however, it’s more on what I’ve been doing for our top secret project (which anybody has been able to find out about, we invited people to focus groups about but nobody showed up, and which you’ll hear more about from just about everybody very shortly) – LUNA.
LUNA stands for Lincoln University Network Access, which we know is technically incorrect because Lincoln University is either in Nebraska or New Zealand but it sounds cool. It’s the nickname for a huge set of updates to the workings of the network access controller which is responsible for connecting people in University accommodation to the internet. You know, the thing which asks you for your username and password and sometimes dumps you into the mysterious quarantine.
//Building on some earlier work (but in a more official capacity this time) I think I should share some of the artwork I want to scatter around the University to help advertise Get Satisfaction. So, here goes.
As always, feedback is welcome.
//As promised not long ago (earlier today, in fact) more work has been done on the Common Web Design to make it a bit shiner and a bit more ready for prime time. In all honesty, Alex did a lot of the work to actually make the design fit together, and now the challenge is how to make it friendlier for things like large text browsers. I suspect there will be much mucking around replacing pixel values with em values.
Anyway, regardless of what needs to be done I thought I should share with you some of what has been done – specifically mockups of a shinier Print From My PC support website, and the beginnings of my.lincoln. I’d like to point out that these designs aren’t put together in Photoshop, they are genuine renders by the browser, in this case Safari. They also work in Internet Explorer as far back as IE6, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and even Lynx (people using screen readers will love us).
Shiny, huh? A nice side-effect of this design – and one which was planned to be doable from the beginning – is that they are easily tweakable to be touchscreen friendly with big, chunky menu buttons and fixed height presentation. I’ll leave it to your imagination as to what we could do with touchscreens and a nice web interface to University services, because we don’t have any plans (or even solid ideas) at this end.
//Update regarding the state of emails: I’ve not heard official words from IT on the state of play of the email server, however my account (which was out yesterday) is now back in action. I’m guessing this is a good thing.
Today, along with 1/3 of the other staff and students at Lincoln, I’ve been devoid of emails. This is down to a problem with one of the three email stores at the University, and includes staff accounts beginning with letters A, B, M-O and V-Z along with a third of student accounts (pretty much at random). People are working on fixing it. You can keep up to date with it on Get Satisfaction.
Oddly enough this has let me spend a couple of hours working on stuff without being distracted by people asking silly questions. Instead I’ve been looking at the user interface tweaks necessary to encompass some changes to the student halls network access controller, and thinking more about the dream of a common design and components for web services.
Put simply myself (along with my partner in crime, Alex) have been throwing ideas backwards and forwards for a couple of weeks now on the subject of a single coherent way into all of Lincoln’s web services, inventively dubbed my.lincoln. The idea is of a single website which collects and collates everything you might need to know from the myriad of services as well as letting you fine-tune how they work for you.
As a part of this (once I’d beaten another kink out of how Vista behaves with PFMPC ((Print From My PC))) I began mucking around with some CSS, aiming to throw together a layout based on something Alex mocked up. The old ‘gateway’ style in use in several places is actually quite messy behind the scenes, is extraordinarily narrow, and doesn’t provide much flexibility. You can put buttons at the top, and then a load of text.
There is also a ‘new gateway’ style which I knocked out for PFMPC which fundamentally looks the same (or at least very similar) but which is completely standards compliant with the exception of some little bits of CSS. However, this still has the problems of being narrow, a bit dull, and lacking in anything which makes you go “wow, this is a great, well designed web service”.
Which is why Alex and myself decided a change was needed. Something wider, faster, cleaner, smarter, more flexible, more appealing, ready for Web 2.0, ready for single-sign-on, accessible, standards-compliant and ready for use in every browser we could think of (including Lynx, and even including IE6). We’ve nicknamed it the “Common Web Design” in the vague hopes that the name will explain what it should be used for and people can latch on to the idea.
Along with this will come a set of guidelines on how to write content for the CWD so that everything clicks together nicely. The whole thing is specifically designed to be portable between services (perhaps using the c.lincoln.ac.uk storage location for CSS, images and JavaScript). More importantly I feel that the CWD is a deliberate disconnect from the old look and feel. Things using the design won’t be a re-hash of the old systems with the same quirks, they will be ground-up redesigns with goals of ease-of-use and interoperability explicitly in mind.
This is very much a work in progress and probably won’t ever be seen in the wild, but we can hope. Ideally I’d like to get the design finished and roll it out for PFMPC and LUNA to help spread the message that ‘things are changing’, but since I’ve mostly done this in my own time and off my own back I may surprise people.
//During the saga of getting Print from My PC working, I had to build some pages to help people set the whole thing up. Predictably, this included clobbering some HTML and CSS around (and for the record, I still hate ASP with a burning passion).
Online Services already has an online ‘look’ which is visible on the Gateway, which seems to be used wherever possible. The trouble is, the entire layout and design is based on some very old HTML and CSS (and an inexplicable reliance on JavaScript, which I’ll ignore for now). Each individual subset of the online services provided by the University has a subtly different stylesheet and a different way of doing things, so for Print for My PC I decided to mostly scrap the existing code and start from scratch.
The result is visually almost identical, although in a few places it sports crisper lines and cleaner finishes. However, behind the scenes the CSS is smaller, faster, slicker, more standards compliant, provides better support for assistive technologies, makes greater use of flexible positioning and so on. There’s a ‘standard’ stylesheet to provide the unified look, and then an individual ‘tweaks’ stylesheet for some PFMPC specific colour adjustments. Finally, PFMPC makes use of some common JavaScript scripts to handle the nice lightbox effect for popup images.
Why am I blogging about this? Well, firstly this is a blog which in part aims to let you look behind the scenes at what’s happening. Secondly and most importantly, however, the code is specifically designed to be incredibly portable between various services. I envision there being yet another subdomain (sorry!) such as common.lincoln.ac.uk, which exists purely to store objects shared by all services. The stylesheets, the images, the scripts. The result once properly implemented would be ultimately beneficial – it would improve caching, reducing hits to services. It would enforce consistent appearance. Applying a code or styling fix would need to be done once and would be replicated to all services using it. Finally and most importantly, it would get people into the mindset of “data should only exist once” which is a key part of the Web 2.0 way.
Still, mindless code changes for such a minor improvement would be senseless. Which is why I’m going to suggest the following: create common.lincoln.ac.uk, add the resources to it, and when new services are created or services are updated make them use the common resources. It’ll be slow, but it’ll be worth it.
//Get Satisfaction is getting its first public airing on a mass distribution tomorrow morning when the student email goes out. In preparation, I’ve knocked up this crash course on how to post topics, reply, get signed up and tweak your preferences and personalisation.
This particular version is aimed at students (although should provide a good grounding for staff wanting to get involved), a more in-depth staff-friendly one will be along in a day or so with more detail on things like moderation.
//Now that the University has some Get Satisfaction support goodness going on, there are all kinds of cool widgets we can use to integrate the support community with other websites. The Blogs help page sports a “Feedback” tab on the left hand side of the window, powered by Get Satisfaction. My other blog has a page explaining about what I do as a Student Rep, and includes a feedback widget right in the middle of the page. In fact it’s so easy to do that here’s an example of our most recent active topics, embedded into the middle of a blog post.
Clever, huh? If you’ve got a site which is relevant to the University and you’re wanting to get hold of a widget to expand your direct support methods then just let me know!
//Sadly, my efforts to make wtf.lincoln.ac.uk the official address for our Get Satisfaction account weren’t successful, despite receiving widespread support. We are, however, now sporting a brand new and shiny URL at http://wwh.lincoln.ac.uk. The WWH stands for What, Why and How which neatly encompasses a lot of the things which Get Satisfaction will be dealing with. Other suggestions included huh.lincoln.ac.uk (as in “Huh? What?”) and a variety of “eh” and “umm” derivatives.
However, we also have some good news in that we now completely support Get Satisfaction! We can properly moderate conversation to keep it relevant, make sure the Student Reps get recognised, keep people up to date easier and more! Expect to see more news about this through some more channels soon, but if you want to tell anybody to use Get Satisfaction (or What, Why, How) then please feel free.
//Okay, it’s been a while, so here’s a roundup of what’s going on in the land of Nick.
Get Satisfaction
My never-ending quest to get the University using Get Satisfaction seems to be nearing an end with the news that we will very soon (Monday!) be getting on the basic level of subscription services. This brings all kinds of cool new stuff to the service, including more moderation tools (so we can keep the conversation relevant and better manage how we respond to things), the ability to flag student reps as awesome (so more people listen to them), extra branding opportunities (so you know it’s about Lincoln), more widgets (for letting people use Get Satisfaction from within other sites) and most importantly the support of the University!
Now all we need is a cool name. So far thoughts include feedback.lincoln.ac.uk, thoughts.lincoln.ac.uk, qipp.lincoln.ac.uk, comments.lincoln.ac.uk and my personal favourite (although highly unlikely) wtf.lincoln.ac.uk – anybody got any more ideas or preferences? Let me know.
Print From My PC
Our ‘wireless printing’ service is still on track for a week 6 soft launch, although we’re experiencing some interesting glitches with printing from Ubuntu and other Linux flavours since they don’t trust our certificate provider. Kirsty took a brief wander around the library to work out where we could put posters advertising the service and you should hopefully see them appearing soon (so that you can break things and complain at us).
Lincoln University Network Access
This is a new one – LUNA is the name for an updated network access controller which will be rolling out to Student Village after the Christmas break. It includes improved security, better guidance on what to do when things go wrong, and (best of all) redesigned pages so you still feel like you’re within the University. Guess who’s been tasked with dismantling the existing pages, figuring out how they work and redesigning them all? Yup, it’s me!
All in all it’s a load of exciting things going on here in ICT. Hopefully once Get Satisfaction is working I can get cracking on another Service 2.0 thing (I want to see if there’s something I can do with the helpdesk…), there are some big enhancements to timetabling floating around in the cloud, and there’s a huge (and I mean huge) set of changes to student communications in the pipeline.