Argleton might have been wiped off the main Google map but it’s still there in Street View as you can see in the above Street View of Argleton Aughton Village Hall.
Edge Hill’s St Helens Road and Ruff Lane entrances are present but you can’t (yet!) look around the campus or Ormskirk Town Centre:
Strangely on Ruff Lane the section immediately past the entrance is missing. I don’t think this is a conspiracy, it’s more likely the route the Google Street View car took.
Post links to any interesting things you’ve found on Google Street View.
For both sites we’ve developed some new ways of displaying information as well as improving the designs. Bot the homepage designs use jQuery to create visual effects on the page. 125 has multiple “slides” of information. Each slide transitions to the next after a short period of time or when you click the link on the right.
New Sport also uses some jQuery transitions, this time to change the background image and headline when you hover over links to each section.
There’s a few more new additions to the sport site. We were provided with a DVD containing lots of aerial photos of the campus to feature in a gallery. We’ve done the usual thumbnail gallery but we’ve also got a fancier way of showing off photos.
Microsoft Photosynth is a tool from their Live Labs project. It works by taking a set of photos, working out how they fit together and creating a 3D model in which you can navigate around them. Our set of photos is 71% “synthy” – a measure of how we matched they are – pretty good I’d say! The one negative thing is that viewing the resulting photosynth requires Silverlight on the browser.
Another new development that’s being released for the first time on this site is a video browser. The observant may have noticed last week video pages on the Edge Hill site changed slightly, doubling the size of the video and moving around some elements on the page. This was to allow us to highlight related videos right along side.
One final little thing we’ve incorporated into this site is embedding the PDF of exhibition boards – normally a sizable download – into the page using Scribd. Using third party hosted services has risks associated with it but here it clearly benefits the user to be able to quickly scan through pages without the need to download a large file and open in Acrobat.
There’s been quite a lot of talk in the mainstream news about Internet Explorer 6 – Microsoft’s browser released in 2001 along side Windows XP. IE6 has a long history of security vulnerabilities and has been linked to the Chinese attacks on Google.
More recently French and German governments have advised people to upgrade and there is a petition to make the UK government follow suit. For Edge Hill’s corporate website, 7.5% of visits are from people using IE6 – higher than Safari, Chrome and Opera.
As web developers, life would be so much easier if we could relegate IE6 to the lower divisions and would encourage uptake of new techniques like those in HTML5. This isn’t necessarily because they can’t be done along side IE6, but supporting it is one more thing we have to do.
is it your place to do anything about it? they may have good reason (e.g. access from school where IT Dept locked won to IE6)
This to me is the heart of the problem. There will almost certainly be people who can’t upgrade and we need to ensure we don’t annoy them too much. But there will also be people who simply don’t know and those that may have no direct control over what browser they’re using (maybe through inexperience or company restrictions) but can be helped to change.
Another suggestion with potential came from Matthew Walton:
Implement an incredibly compelling new feature which doesn’t work properly in IE6.
I don’t want to go back 10 years to the situation where “you must be using Internet Explorer 4 or Netscape Navigator 3 to enter this site” but there are ways to introduce new functionality while still offering something for older browsers.
But prizes (no monetary value) go to Alex Mace and Martyn Davies for the following suggestions that I wish I could get away with:
alexmace: @MikeNolan Pop a lightbox over the screen that says “OMG, SECURITY FAIL – please hand in your internet access license”
and
martynrdavies: @MikeNolan I’m recommending going to the house of every user and upgrading their browser whilst informing them of their failure.
More questions than answers? You expected anything else?!
When the BBC announced Digital Revolution, a new project to create a programme about the rise of the Web, I had high hopes that it would be something genuinely different to the way documentaries about computing are normally made.
The whole production process was put out in the open with a blog, a Twitter account and regular releases of the “rushes” from interviews. Guardian journalistAleks Krotoski was to present and father of the Web Tim Berners-Lee was on board to drag in the crowds.
I’ve not kept up with the making of the series as closely as I’d have liked – I’ve watched the odd video and heard about some things on Twitter – but last night I saw the first episode in the four part series, now renamed The Virtual Revolution. Part One “The Great Levelling?” (repeated Monday and available on iPlayer now) tried to introduce the series and talked about the early beginnings of the Web – its academic origins, San Fran free living culture and the commercialisation of it.
The list of names they’ve interviewed for the series is impressive: Gates, Fry, Gore, Jobs, The Woz – people so famous they don’t need first names. Connecting them is a narrative attempting to explain what’s gone on for the last 20 years but it’s this that for me doesn’t work. While I get the basic concept – the web is a leveller – it fails to link together the examples in a way that tells the true history. It jumps from a bloke who spends quite a lot of time on Wikipedia to an obscure American bulletin board system pre-dating the web all interspersed with arty shots of Aleks sat using a laptop, stood using her iPhone, walking using an iPhone, sat using a laptop and an iPhone… you get the idea.
While the flow of the programme could be better, many of the interviews are interesting. Most have been distilled down into mere sound-bites, for example Stephen Fry on Wikipedia:
I challenge anybody to find a better, faster source of perfectly acceptable knowledge for almost all purposes you would require as a normal citizen.
Pretty much sums up my own views on the site. These clips are too short though – it may be that the rest of what people said could be plain dull but it will be interesting to see the rest of them, and since the rushes have been made available, it should be possible.
This episode tries goes a limited way to put the web into context. It explains that the web is not the same as the internet and Bill Gates can be relied on to bring it back to Microsoft:
The personal computer was the template on which the web had to be created. You had to have millions of these common machines in order for it to make any sense.
Other interviewees aren’t so great. For some reason TV programmes keep asking Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen on to spout his views (I’ve mentioned him before when he appeared on Newsnight). Andrew Keen is like a Dementor of the internet – he sucks the very soul out of it while offering nothing of value in return.
I think it reflects the fundamental intellectual bankruptcy of the internet that someone like Arianna Huffington [co-founder of the Huffington Post] should have come to symbolise the supposed revolutionary qualities of it. I mean she’s an interesting woman, but she’s about as revolutionary as my dog.
The Virtual Revolution is an interesting blend of new and old characters. The old guard, represented by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and other pioneers of the personal computer have, arguably, a far more interesting story to tell which can be found in another documentary from 1996. Triumph of the Nerds, presented by Robert X. Cringely goes right back to the beginnings of the PC industry and goes into far more detail about how we went from typing pools to the point where everyone has a computer on their desk. It’s worth getting hold of a copy.
Don’t get me wrong, the web has changed the world (and I really shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds me!) but The Virtual Revolution could do a much better job of saying how it came about, what it means to us and promoting the geek origins of the web. I’d be interested to hear what other people think of the programme and I’ll certainly be watching the next three parts and trying to catch up with some of the interview rushes.
We’ve just upgraded to the latest version of WordPress MU – the system that powered blogs.edgehill.ac.uk. You can see that latest features in this video:
That video was embedded using one of the coolest new features in WordPress 2.9.1 – oEmbed. oEmbed is a way of websites sharing information about how content should be included in a page. Instead of having to copy any paste complicated HTML such as this:
We can instead just paste the URL onto a blank line in the post. oEmbed is supported right now by many popular websites such as Flickr and YouTube. We’ve also added oEmbed support to our own video streaming platform. Since we’re not one of the popular video sharing sites embedding our videos doesn’t work out of the box with WordPress but we’ve enabled it for our site. Here’s what it will look like:
Implementing oEmbed was fairly easy so keep an eye out for it on other content we publish.
Over the last couple of days there’s been a bit of snow around the country and I’ve been keeping our homepage up to date. Yesterday morning in between making changes I did a quick scan around some websites to take screenshots of their homepages. It’s interesting to see the different approaches which often didn’t correspond to the severity – some had big banners saying, effectively, “we’re open!” while others had a standard news announcing closure of campus well below the fold.
Our approach was to insert an additional notification area above the main feature. I think it’s obvious enough to be seen and appreciated as a temporary announcement while not being confused with, or detracting from, the main feature area. We also had announcements on the GO news area and posted updates to the Edge Hill Twitter account and Facebook “Fan” page
Everyone loves web stats, okay maybe it’s just me! Six months on and Internet Explorer has dropped to 76.9%, Firefox down a little to 13.5%, Opera has held steady while Webkit-based browsers, Safari and Chrome, have jumped to 5.6% and 3.6% respectively. Breaking down IE shows IE6 use continues to fall (down to under 11%) while IE8 usage has trebled. There’s hope for a standards-based-browser future yet!
Little did I know when I wrote this post that it would unleash such a debate! Ironically we’ve just had the 2’ of snow that benefitted Bath’s uptake so we’ll see whether usage grows!
And in at #1 is a little post I fired out about a typo on a map
Tags
As well as individual posts, a number of tag pages that rank pretty highly including “symfony”, “argleton”, “google maps”, “twiterdeck” and “facebook”.
I started working at Edge Hill around the same time IT Services launched the GO portal and there was talk in the office the first Christmas about how many people would be logging in on Christmas day.
We don’t have the stats for Christmas day 2006, but we do have last couple of years so now you can check out how many people were logging in a year ago today (except I’m writing this in November so it’s not a year ago for me).
Last year GO received 840 visits on Christmas day. Here’s an hourly breakdown – thick blue line is 2008 stats and the thin green line is 2007:
The main Edge Hill website received even more visitors. Again, thick blue line is 2008 stats and the thin green line is 2007:
I wonder if either site will beat those figures this year!
That’s all for 25 days of blogging – I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of the posts and thank you to everyone who’s commented. See you in 2010 where we’ll start it all again with some very exciting projects on the cards (well, on the product backlog actually!)
I don’t like to predict the future – usually because I’m wrong – but I’m going to put my neck out on one point for the coming year. 2010 will be the year that data becomes important.
I’ve long been a believer in opening up sources of data. As far as possible, we try to practice what we preach by supplying feeds of courses, news stories, events and so on. We also make extensive use of our own data feeds so I’m always interested to see what other people are doing. Over the last year there has been growing support for opening up data to see what can be done with it and there’s potentially more exciting stuff to come.
A big part of what many consider to be “Web 2.0” is open APIs to allow connections to be made and they have undoubtedly let to the success of services like Twitter.
Following in their footsteps have been journalists, both professional and amateur, who are making increasing use of data sources and in many cases republishing them. The MPs expenses issue showed an interesting contrast in approaches. While the Daily Telegraph broke the story and relied on internal man power to trawl through the receipts for juicy information the Guardian took a different route. As soon as the redacted details were published, the Guardian launched a website allowing the public to help sort through pages and identify pages of interest. Both the Guardian and the Times have active data teams releasing much of their sources for the public to mashup.
The non commercial sector have produced arguably more useful sources of data. MySociety have a set of sites which do some really cool things to help the public better engage with their community and government.
In the next few months there looks set to be even more activity. The government asked Tim B-L to advise on ways to make the government more open and whether due to his influence or other factors there are changes on the horizon.
Conservatives and Labour are battling to be seen as the most open parties by opening policy documents to public scrutiny.
But it’s set to be the election, which must be held before [June], which could do the most. Data-based projects look set to pop up everywhere. One project – The Straight Choice – will track flyers and leaflets distributed by candidates in order to track promises during and after the election. Tweetminster tracks Twitter accounts belonging to MPs and PPCs and has some nice tools to visualise and engage with them.
I believe there will be an increasing call for Higher Education to open up its data. Whether that’s information about courses using the XCRI format, or getting information out of the institutional VLE in a format that suits the user not the developer, there is lots that can be done. I’m not pretending this is an easy task but surely if it can be done it should because it’s the right thing to do.
Since I started writing this entry a few days ago, the Google Blog post on The Meaning of Open. Of course they say things much better than I could, so I’ll leave you with one final quote:
Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.
Do you ever have really great ideas that on second thoughts are incredibly stupid? Yeah, I have them all the time but usually I’m sensible enough not to tell anyone about them. A month ago I was caught out by an email from Corporate Marketing Communications and Student Recruitment asking what people are doing for the anniversary celebrations. I had a flash of inspiration and fired off a reply:
I’ll do something with Twitter or a blog for 125, maybe similar to the 365 projects that people do – one photo per day for 125 days.
It was that quick. Fast forward 30 days and I’m starting to think that was a really, really stupid suggestion. Writing 25 posts across the whole team has been difficult enough so what am I playing at committing to posting every day for four months?!
If I’m going to have any chance of making this work I’m going to a) need help and b) make it simple, so give me your ideas, people! My initial thought was to raid the archives, take a load of photos and just post them rather than having to write lots for each day – that way I could spend an hour or two every couple of weeks and schedule ahead. I could also broaden it out and persuade other people to blog or highlights from some of the 125 events happening on campus.
Picking things that might be of interest is also important – I’m not doing this for myself – so what would you like to see? Post your comments below!
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