philwilson.org

University of bath

There are 46 posts in this collection

And it's goodbye from him

15 December, 2016 - 635 words

After more than a decade, tomorrow is my last day working in the Digital team. The team's had different names, and I've had different roles, but my mission has always been the same: improve the University's online presence through applied use of technology. While trying to live up to this, I've been privileged to work not just with the developers, but also our editors, product support an...

The pursuit of Appyness

14 December, 2016 - 705 words

We love apps. Apps can provide interactivity and features that web pages simply can't. They can tap in to your phone's hardware to use the camera, connect to your address book to help you remember birthdays or send push notifications when important events occur.

Digital team sprint notes 15-28 November

01 December, 2016 - 281 words

What we did Updated the links in the footer of the new pages to point directly to the correct locations (Copyright, Freedom of Information etc.) Reduced the size of headings in the sidebar of filtered lists Improved the consistency of lists on Person Profiles Made sure that the subtype of a content item is consistently displayed across ...

Digital team sprint notes 1 - 14 November

16 November, 2016 - 283 words

What we did Added subtypes to Team Profiles Enabled drag-and-drop sorting for members of a Team Profile Changed the ordering of the 'Enquiries' and 'Address' fields on Department pages to make their location more predictable Allowed publishers to preview a content item without sending it to the Review state first Increased the ...

Digital team sprint notes 18 - 31 October

04 November, 2016 - 302 words

What we shipped The first Faculty to transition into the Content Publisher is now live. You can browse the new Faculty of Engineering & Design section here. Improved layout consistency by updating the vertical rhythm and typographic scale Improved the legibili...

Digital team sprint notes 4 - 17 October

20 October, 2016 - 263 words

We're looking to hire two Ruby on Rails developers, so read a bit more about the team and come join us! What we shipped Team profiles now get republished when an associated Person Profile is publishe...

One Hour Upgrade part 5

11 October, 2016 - 305 words

Prioritising the One Hour Upgrade improvements. The idea behind

Digital team sprint notes 6 September - 3 October

10 October, 2016 - 266 words

What we delivered in the last two sprints Admins can create and publish Collections Collections are now listed at http://www.bath.ac.uk/collections/ The layout of our static lists matches the layout of our dynamic filtered lists Publishers can restrict access...

Digital team sprint notes 23 August - 5 September

07 September, 2016 - 212 words

What we delivered this sprint We have shipped the new Security section of the site which includes 30 new content items to help visitors with parking, lost property and other incidents on campus. Content items can now be filtered by label so you can see lists like

Digital team sprint notes 27 July - 22 August

26 August, 2016 - 320 words

If you are on campus, you can read about the latest Content Publisher changes as and when they happen at http://go.bath.ac.uk/beta-release-notes. The monthly Digital Roadmap also contains information about recently delivered features and a longer-term view on what we're delive...

Digital team sprint notes 28 May - 27 June

28 June, 2016 - 328 words

If you are on campus, you can read about the latest Content Publisher changes as and when they happen on http://go.bath.ac.uk/beta-release-notes What we've delivered Organisations can pin content from associated groups to their landing page Publishers can now choose from a list of cont...

Digital team sprint notes 19 April - 16 May

20 May, 2016 - 471 words

Last week we said goodbye to our Digital Supporter, Chris Shimmin-Vincent, who has joined our colleagues in Computing Services as their new Service Manager for IT Literacy. Good luck Chris! For the next two months we have a temporary Digital Supporter, Richard Massey, helping us out until we appoint a permanent replacement. We missed our last couple of Sprint Note slots due to ill...

Digital team sprint notes 5 - 18 April

20 April, 2016 - 426 words

This was an important sprint for us, as the first sections to be published with the new CMS went live. Our intention now is to continue delivering sections with the new CMS on a regular basis, and we will use our fortnightly sprint notes to highlight these.

Digital team sprint notes 22 March - 4 April

05 April, 2016 - 325 words

What we've delivered in the last two weeks Publishers can access the preview and published version of a content item from the top of the edit screen in the CMS There is a new stripe at the top of published CMS pages linking to an explanation of what is changing on bath.ac.uk We've made the spacing between different...

Digital team sprint notes 8 - 21 March

22 March, 2016 - 312 words

Every two weeks we publish an update on what we've delivered in the last two weeks, and what we intend to deliver in the coming fortnight. Here's the latest edition: What we did Updated the section at the top of each piece of content with links off to similar content and a description of what type of content this is Improved the display of the pag...

Digital team sprint notes 23 Feb - 7 March

08 March, 2016 - 220 words

What we did: Added extra metadata to CMS pages and allowed this to be tracked and reported on by Google Analytics Configured crazyegg.com to get better page usage data for selected web pages Created the list of all Organisations (eg. Departments) Created the list of all Groups (eg. Graduate School, Committee) Did user testing o...

Digital team sprint notes, 8 - 23 December

06 January, 2016 - 219 words

A slightly longer sprint in the lead-up to Christmas and here's what happened: What we did Provided preview functionality in the new CMS. Implemented content type strata on organisation and group landing pages. Changed 'Able' to 'Available to supervise research degree projects' on Person Profiles. Restricted access to your items ...

A Week With The Digital Team

23 July, 2014 - 158 words

Hi, I'm Rob, an A-level work experience student who was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to join the digital team last week. The past week has been a great experience, after being introduced to the self proclaimed king of the nerds and the rest of the team it was straight to work with Tom on the development of a replacement application for the old

Digital team sprint notes, July 14 - 18 2014

21 July, 2014 - 508 words

It was a conference-tastic sprint week as Ross, Rich and Charlotte headed north for the Institutional Web Managers Workshop in Newcastle, and Iris, Miles and Dan went west to UXBristol. We'll all be reaping the benefits of these trips over the next few months as we're regaled with the lessons learned at Sh...

Concatenate, minify, embed, serve.

03 July, 2014 - 301 words

Building a modern website which also performs well is hard. The amount of JavaScript and CSS we add to our pages is going up, but we still need to keep them loading quickly. Tools like Grunt and Gulp help us manage thes...

Digital team week notes: Feb 24 - Feb 28, 2014

28 February, 2014 - 562 words

Welcome to the end of February! It's been a short month but that doesn't mean there's been any lack of activity chez Digital. We're now just waiting to press the button on the new Agresso website, and Paul has written about some of the user testing we did for that site. Whilst our fingers were hovering ...

Digital team week notes: Nov 18th - Nov 22nd 2013

22 November, 2013 - 336 words

Another exciting week in Digital Towers has flown by, but this one saw some good forward-looking work. Kicking the week off, Ross wrote about our new delivery principles and took both these and our long-term plan of work to our colleagues in Computing Servic...

Digital team week notes: October 7th - October 11th 2013

11 October, 2013 - 488 words

This is our sixth weekly update. Six is the smallest positive integer which is neither a square number nor a prime number and on this occasion we have precisely six things we've been doing to tell you about: the most obvious thing is that we've updated the font stack we use across the site; previously we had more than 120 rules defined in more than a dozen stylesheets, each specify...

Digital team week notes: September 9th - 13th 2013

13 September, 2013 - 372 words

With our new glorious leader sunning himself in Spain for a few days, I draw the winning lot to reflect on our output of the past week, it's been a really good one where progress has been made on a wide variety of products: Our September Open Day is tomorrow, which we're really looking forward to (10,000 visitors really makes the place buzz!) and we'll be monitoring social media al...

Responsive design is not the answer

28 June, 2013 - 508 words

Christopher Gutteridge (@cgutteridge) tweeted at 10:01 AM on Thu, Jun 27, 2013: Over 100 people in the responsive design session at #iwmw13. Question "who's cynical about responsive design?" - no hands go up. Unive...

Is IE6 really used in China?

13 November, 2012 - 352 words

According to Microsoft's own stats, Internet Explorer 6 still accounts for more than 20% of web browser usage within China. Around a quarter of our 4,500 international students are Chinese (source PDF) and so we've always been really hesistant about switching o...

Front-end developer? Join us!

23 August, 2012 - 68 words

We're looking to hire an awesome new front-end developer. Hip to HTML5? Savvy with CSS? Read more about the job! Applications for this job have now closed.

Responsive websites are easy

13 July, 2012 - 275 words

There is a list being kept of HE websites which are using responsive design techniques to change how their pages appear based on the size of the screen loading them. I think that this is a waste of time. Making websites reflow, and changing the design a bit (top nav becomes a dropdown etc.) based on screen size is easy. ...

Using QR codes effectively

22 February, 2012 - 455 words

QR codes are increasingly in use around campus and, regardless of opinions of whether they are actually useful or not, there are still some best practices to follow to get the best results: legibility suitabilit...

Our mobile Open Day page

13 November, 2011 - 542 words

For our September 2011 Open Day we put together a single-page destination specifically for the event. The percentage of visitors to our site whom Google Analytics classifies as using "Mobile" devices currently runs at 3.4% (up from 1.4% this time last year) but since we always see a spike in mobile traffic on an Open Day and during the days lea...

Expanding the Web Services family

09 November, 2011 - 211 words

It's been just over three months since our glorious leader, Alison Kerwin, left on maternity leave - since then I'm delighted to be able to say that not only has she added two healthy bouncing babies to the fray but we've also had four new members of the team start!

The first six months of 2011

12 July, 2011 - 566 words

As you can tell from the fact we're hiring new people there are exciting times ahead for Web Services! Since we're also half-way through 2011 I thought it would be a good chance to look back on what we've achieved so far this year.

Going HTML5

30 June, 2011 - 312 words

Edge Hill University recently launched a new website. It's HTML5. We're overdue an update to the list of

Cookies and EU

08 April, 2011 - 305 words

There is an EU law coming into force on 25 May about websites needing to ask users before storing information in cookies - the relevant bit about cookies is paragraph 66 (just search the doc for 'cookie' - it only appears once!). Since everyone and their dog seems to have an opinion about the effect of this...

Customer satisfaction and happiness

14 February, 2011 - 572 words

So, everyone's favourite web company, 37signals , have started to publish their customer happiness rates at smiley.37signals.com. People can rate them as "great", "OK" or "not so good". At the time of writing, they have an 87% "great" rating, 5% "OK" and 8% "not so good".

Web Developer wanted!

19 October, 2010 - 223 words

You're a PHP or Java web developer looking for a challenge, a 6 month contract, and to earn up to 17,823 pounds. As it happens, we've got the perfect opening and you can apply right now! We're looking for someone with a passion for developing friendly, usable applications to help us revamp the the process our students go through when they apply t...

Implementing innovation

17 March, 2010 - 498 words

A few weeks ago I got the chance to be the first to make use of our innovation time. After watching a demo on hacks.mozilla.org I wanted to experiment with HTML5 and Firefox's new support for drag and drop of files from your d...

Welcome back!

21 January, 2010 - 503 words

So what an exciting first few weeks back we’ve had! We started off nice and easy, picking up all the support requests that had been filed over the Christmas break and, after a suggestion from Kelvin last year, put together a demo of an augmented reality map of the University campus using Layar (which I will post more about later). We also started pr...

Blogging

18 January, 2010 - 127 words

Last year Web Services managed 37 blog posts, down from our 2008 total of 63. This is obviously a reflection of the fact that we're working so hard on our new website that we don't have time to blog! For 2010 it would be great for us to get to at least one per week, and a minimum of 52 posts spread across twelve months doesn't sound unreasonable; it's not as if there's not a lot happenin...

Getting the University of Bath term dates into Google Calendar

22 July, 2009 - 291 words

A couple of days ago I got asked on my personal blog if it was possible to get the Univeristy terms dates into Google Calendar. The answer is a wholehearted "yes!" and this is how: Step 1 Go to http://www.bath.ac.uk/semester/ and look underneath the Key on the right hand side and choose which calendar you...

Browser stats

15 July, 2009 - 428 words

So, with the news that YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye and the recent release of Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 8 I thought I'd take a moment ...

The benefits of open formats

14 May, 2009 - 396 words

As of this time last year, the University Academic Year Charts have been generated in HTML, PDF and iCalendar formats from Excel spreadsheets. Previously there were only PDFs for download but we thought that providing versions to view live on the web and a version people could add to their own calendar software would be useful...

Supporting ourselves with XMPP

20 November, 2008 - 204 words

Our team is the first-line support for the University's web needs. This means we get a lot of diverse requests landing in our bug tracker, RT, ever day. To help us share the load, we each deal with the support queue on rotating basis, as you can see in our schedule. We use the wik...

A sample blog post

10 September, 2008 - 16 words

Some sample content (for demonstration purposes during the "Using the web to work together" Web Session)

Using the web to work together

05 September, 2008 - 101 words

Next Wednesday, intrepid Web Servicer Phil Wilson will be giving the third of our Web Sessions. Following the last talk about consuming information from the web ("The Other Side of the Web - RSS and Atom Feeds" which you can watch online...

Web Services talks!

21 August, 2008 - 92 words

During lunch yesterday we made the rather rash decision that we should make a quick, unscripted, video exploring how Get Creative Week has been going. The hideous result is below. http://www.vimeo.com/1566065 This was filmed on a Nokia N95 on what turned out to be a windy afternoon,...