Category: Web 2.0

Dev8D is here again…

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

Hello all,

The ever popular JISC sponsored Dev8D event is just 1 month away now. Dev8D is the largest event of its kind in the UK and it is your only opportunity this year to get 3 days of free training in essential skills and emerging technologies. This year the event is packed with great opportunities for learning new tech skills, discovering new technologies and collaborating on technical challenges with experts in the sector. At past events attendees have learnt new programming languages, experimented with new software platforms and established lasting communities. As always tickets for the event are free but availability is limited so book soon to avoid disappointment.

This year more than ever the goal of Dev8D is to tool up attendees with skills in essential and emerging technologies for the coming year in away that is practical and fun. There will be sessions for:

  • HTML 5
  • Programming in Python
  • Git version control and source code management
  • Understanding and using Linked Data
  • Using Redis
  • JavaScript and JQuery
  • Writing effective Moodle plug-ins
  • Making your web applications accessibility friendly
  • Coffee Script
  • too many more to name…

Attendees will also get to interact with cool technologies like 3D printers and multi-touch tables and form their own sessions in our larger than ever unconference sessions. Bring your technical problems along and work them through with experts in the sector.

This years event runs from the February the 14th-16th and will be in University of London student union. Remember tickets are free but they are limited so sign up before you miss the opportunity.

You can see more details and register for the event on the Dev8D website at: http://dev8d.org/

Hope to see you there!

All About You

Nick Jackson / / Open Data, User Experience, Web 2.0

As you’ll know if you follow the adventures of Alex and myself we’ve been playing around with our new-look staff directory (give the beta a whirl). We’ve rebuilt it from the ground up to be stupidly fast, using bleeding-edge search technology all wrapped in Web 2.0 goodness to deliver your search results as quickly as possible. After all, why would you want to hang around waiting for half a second when we can have the number you’re looking for in a quarter of that time?

Directory search is awesome, but we thought we could do more with this information. We could take a person’s staff directory entry and make it a little bit more epic, as well as a bit more useful on the internet as a whole. So we did, and we’re happy to introduce the (beta) of staff profile pages – for examples see mine, Alex’s, Joss’s and Paul’s.

Continue reading “All About You”

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.

There’s not an app for that.

Nick Jackson / / Projects, User Experience, Web 2.0

Recently there’s been a lot of noise made about mobile applications for universities and colleges. Apparently what students want to see is a dedicated app for their institution, providing them with bits and pieces of information on just about everything. There are plenty of examples, a quick search of the iTunes App Store reveals several universities which are keen for you to download their slice of application goodness. Entire products have sprung up to address this market, and some places have even gone all out and written their own.

All this is good. After all, who wouldn’t want to be able to check things like their timetable, their library fees and the state of the university’s IT services from their phone? What could be cooler than tapping a button and being told where your nearest free PC or copy of a book is? We like the concept so we’re having a look at mobile stuff, especially given that according to our analytics an appreciable fraction of our users are now trying to access services from their mobile.

However, we’re not entirely convinced about the route of apps. Sure they let you hook straight into things like geolocation and local storage, but with HTML5 so can a website. Apps also need to be made for the whole range of devices out there. iOS and Android are the big players, but you’re then cutting out Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, WebOS and Symbian devices. Apps also have an approval process to go through, or if not then they have a slightly complex installation route. There’s also a requirement either to pay someone a lot of money to make an app, or to spend a lot of money on in-house development.

All this means that we’re steering away from apps as much as possible, but we still want to make sure we provide kick-ass mobile services. “How?” I hear you cry. The answer is amazingly simple – we’re going back to mobile-optimised websites.

Continue reading “There’s not an app for that.”

Let There Be Data

Nick Jackson / / Open Data, Total ReCal, Web 2.0

At the moment, Lincoln is standing on the edge of a huge change in the way things are done, at least as far as data is concerned. It’s been slowly pushed there by a small band of people (myself amongst them) who believe that one of the keys to making the world a better place is simply opening up data. Today it’s become clear to me that the availability of this data isn’t something that’s just wanted by an academic elite who want it ‘because it should be there’, but it’s something that’s wanted by people who just want to make things better.

Within hours of the University posting up a warning about severe weather, a Tweet dropped into my @mentions box from someone asking if there was the raw data for the warnings available. There’s already a student who’s wanting the not-yet-complete Total ReCal public timetable data for his own 3rd year project. Someone else was wanting to get hold of the GCW PC availability data. The list is endless.

So, what I’m going to try to do in some of my not-really-free time is to start the ball rolling for a website in the style of various other places around the world. Things like data.gov, data.gov.uk and data.open.ac.uk. I think data.lincoln.ac.uk should be fairly easy to rustle up. We could even use WordPress, and the whole thing is ready to go in under a day.

Who’s with me?

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.

Continue reading “Designing for Everybody”

A Universal University Search

Nick Jackson / / Labs, Open Data, Web 2.0

During my time as a student I was faced with a great many challenges which involved some form of searching. Lots of it was academic, relying on the Library, Google Scholar and (gasp, horror, revoke his grades) Wikipedia. However, a lot of it was about more mundane stuff. Where exactly is AR1101? Who is John Smith, and what’s his phone number? What’s for lunch today?

The problem was that to find this information, you already had to know where to find it. Maps of the University are available on the Portal… if you know where to look. Phone numbers can be looked up… if you know the address for the service. The weekly menu is on the Portal… if you know where to look.

We’re left with a simply astonishing number of things which people may want to know about, but which is locked away as an image of a screenshot embedded in a Word document stored 14 levels down in Portal behind a page which nobody has access to, unless you happen to have asked for it. Rooms, events, books, journals, the Repository, blogs, people, news posts, lecture notes, the weekly menu and more are all available somewhere within the depths of a system. So, in traditional Nick fashion, I spent a few minutes in the shower this morning working out how to fix it whilst being refreshed by some particularly minty shower gel.

Continue reading “A Universal University Search”

Location Aware Lincoln

Nick Jackson / / Labs, Open Data, Web 2.0

One of the cooler things we’re working on at the moment is location awareness for our web applications. This lets us do useful things, like adjust page content based on where you are. The new Room Bookings system, for example, will detect your campus and automatically set your default location accordingly. Even things like the new Library service (“Jerome”) will be able to intelligently change things like library contact details and opening times based on where you are.

Give it a go. Visit http://location.ll.tn-uk.net/ from anywhere on campus (either wired or wirelessly) and it should tell you where you are. Sorry that it doesn’t look too pretty, but it’s basically a testing front-end to an API service we’re cooking up.

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.

Continue reading “Posters, CWD and more!”