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.