My Lincoln meets Getting Started

Nick Jackson / / Labs, My Lincoln
A very, very early mockup of My Lincoln

Alex and I were in a meeting today, where it was decided that some form of wizard for guiding people through setting up email accounts would be useful. This then expanded slightly into a wizard for a lot of things.

It turned out to be a perfect candidate for slamming together with My Lincoln into a one-stop shop for just about everything. This basically means a unified website which acts as a springboard for everywhere else, as well as prompting a user when something needs to be done. We’ve not spent any time properly architecting it yet, but it seems that it will come in three parts:

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Making Mini Links

Nick Jackson / / Labs

I thought you might be interested in taking a look at my new URL minifier: http://lncn.eu

This one is just for the University, operated entirely in-house, and because it’s a Labs project we can make it do what you want. Got something cool you want to see in a URL minifier? Want it to check links on occasion to make sure they’re working? Want to be able to change the destination of a link? Want to see custom namespaces for your links? Let me know.

Introducing Labs

Nick Jackson / / Labs

Over the last couple of weeks, the Online Services Team (the nice bunch of people in ICT who look after – in broad terms – websites that do things) has acquired a shiny new server to muck around with and develop on. For the most part this involves Alex and myself slamming bits of the University together in weird and wonderful ways that nobody has thought of yet and seeing what sticks, what falls apart and what makes people complain. We’re calling the server (and the whole process) Labs.

“But wait!” I hear you cry. “Don’t we already have the Learning Labs?”. The answer is “yes” – we’re not reinventing the wheel here. What we’re doing is looking at new and better ways of building what we should be doing anyway, things like integrated search for the Library, improved room bookings, unified preference systems, improved customer support and sensible listings of the University’s websites (I think the most esoteric thing we’re working on is Touch, which uses RFID to enhance the Digital Signage project. Learning Labs, on the other hand, looks at pushing boundaries in new and interesting ways (as well as hopefully providing a platform for people to develop things which use the data we’re exposing).

Want to see something cool come from ICT? Let me know and we’ll see if it lines up with anything we want to try.

Keeping an eye on things

Nick Jackson / / Labs, Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else
A very early version of one of the Status Dashboards. The numbers aren't live (or accurate), but everything else is actual real-time information.

If you’re kicking around the north-west ICT Services office you may have spotted the giant touchscreen which has appeared. This is nothing to do with me, however with it sat being idle I decided to act on some inspiration from the people at Panic and build something ICT doesn’t currently have – a live, up-to-the-minute status and monitoring system.

The Status system (To be hosted on Labs, whenever the server arrives. You will note that it’s currently offline.) is fully modular (each individual panel can behave in its own way, making its own checks and loading its own data on its own schedule, customisable (so different ‘dashboards’ can be created to serve particular needs) and flexible (it makes the best use of screen estate that it can, without relying on a fixed display resolution). It also looks quite good.

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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Searching The University

Nick Jackson / / Open Data, Web 2.0

Part of my remit as one of the Online Service Team’s tame students is to take time now and then to step back, look at things, and work out how they could be made all-around better. An example of this has been the slow but steady march towards a common, uniform, standards-compliant styling for every web service.

All my rambling aside, I spotted a brilliant post from the BBC Internet Blog on searching the BBC. In short, their new Search+ trawls the entire BBC looking for what you’re after, and then decides what’s most relevant within context. Data representation and organisation is a big area of interest for me (the Cybernetics part of my degree has a huge focus on knowledge representation), and searching is an area in which the University, to put it bluntly, sucks.

Bits and pieces work on their own, for example the Library Catalogue searches the library fairly well, and the Phone Search tends to find who you’re looking for. Blogs has a search, although it does skim over a few things. There’s also Portal, which has a search function which alternates between sometimes giving you something relevant and sometimes picking random, outdated and irrelevant content from 5 years ago.

What’s needed is something a bit like the Awesome Bar in Firefox, simultaneously looking at a myriad of sources to find something relevant and presenting it to the user. In short, a single box in which you could type “Portal” and find the Portal, or “Nick Jackson” and find my directory entry, or “Somerville” and find his book on software engineering, or “help” and be taken to our support pages. Something which simultaneously scrubs across any data source we care to let it at, returning data as fast as possible.

Thoughts? Opinions? Do you want a single ‘search the University’ box with options to narrow your search, or would you prefer to have to start by specifying what you’re after?

Answering The Flood

Nick Jackson / / LUNA, Service 2.0

Further to the revelation that there are students out there capable of voicing an opinion, we now have to deal with the resulting fallout. At this point I need to quote Joss, the nice man from CERD, who likened my approach to IT support to this:

Whilst I’m tempted to staple this notice to the front of the helpdesk and watch confused students ask “will you really set us on fire?”, it’s actually better to deal with stupid questions by documenting your response, on the basis that the universe never ceases to provide a constant stream of the terminally confused, people who don’t bother to read the dialog box which pops up with important information and clear instructions, and people who believe that the helpdesk are there to actually operate the computer on their behalf.

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My God, There’s Life!

Nick Jackson / / LUNA

If you’ve been keeping track of the joy that is LUNA, you will know that this week is the first time we’ve let the new scanning process loose on a select few guinea pigs in the Courts (and inadvertently Riseholme, sorry guys!). We also busted out a revolutionary tool, never before seen at the University. No, really. I checked.

The anonymous, free-form feedback box. A single box with no prescribed questions, no survey-style questioning, and no requirement to tell us who you are (although the option is there for you to leave an email address or phone number in case you’re happy for us to get back in touch). The result is somewhat more than we expected – usually feedback mechanisms get maybe three or four responses a week, we’re currently getting in the region of 20 to 25 a day.

Most of the feedback is little to no use – we have a wide assortment of “rubbish”, “useless” and “crap” comments. A few responses seem to be from people with broken apostrophe and shift keys (“its rubbish” or “i dont see y ur doin this”). A couple have broken exclamation marks (“!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”). However, despite this noise we’ve been able to glean a few things which we wouldn’t have been able to from simply relying on the helpdesk or by asking carefully selected questions.

Keep ’em coming, although remember that every time you say “crap” without letting us know why God kills a kitten.