So this is how I spent my Friday off work:
Radio 4 at 10:30am, Saturday 18th September 2010.
Last night was Liverpool’s first Social Media Café at Static. SMC’s are nothing new – they’ve been running in cities around the UK, and the world, for a while but it’s good to see one happening closer to home.
The format for the evening was three speakers with generous breaks between to grab a beverage and “network”. The organisers got some great talks:
Alison Gow: Data and the art of storytelling
From Alison we learn that you can’t get a job for the Guardian without talking about data! Alison has written up a blog post about her talk so go read it!
Josh: How to win Foursquare friends and influence people
Josh is involved in organising Social Media Café Manchester and popped down the road to talk about Foursquare. Once again, Josh has blogged about the subject so go read that.
I’ve got a blog post in draft (which has fallen foul to my 48 hour rule) about Foursquare and how we might be able to use it as a University. Hopefully I’ll be inspired to look at it again and publish it in the next week or two.
David Coveney: Social media and work
Final talk of the night was Dave Coveney talking about how work and social media mix. Once again his slides – as a Prezi – are online. They probably make about as much sense as Dave’s talk, and I say that as a compliment! It was very engaging walk through the history of social media (anyone remember CIX?) and how he makes use of social media personally, with the business as a side effect.
So overall a great first SMC Liverpool. There was some discussion about the direction to take the events but it will probably be a monthly thing. I’ve added the hashtag #smcliv to TwapperKeeper so you should be able to read through the archive of tweets there as it fills up.
Yahoo! have just launched a new Style Guide online and in print. Now style guides are not new – newspapers have had them for decades – but these invariably have their roots in print and there are many differences online.
The Yahoo! guide is written with digital publishing as the focus, concentrating on things that make writing for the web different to print. While most of what Yahoo! have collected isn’t new, it is good to see things collated in one place.
The guide also contains prompts for things organisations can do to build their own style guide, for example forming a style committee (one might say a Style Council, ha!) to make decisions, and maintaining a word list.
With an increasing demand for everyone to be able to publish to the web, a formal style guide may be required to ensure our high standards are maintained and advanced.
This week’s budget gave a good opportunity to see how different news organisations handled live reporting on their websites so I did a quick scan through a few TV and newspaper websites and screen grabbed what I could see.
The reason I’m interested is that the 125 anniversary has provided an opportunity for a large number of events on campus for some of these like the Manifesto for Change event to have a remote audience engaging online via streaming video and live chat.
Read more after the break!
Flickr recently started previewing their new photo pages. They’re quite nice but it does something that’s been driving me mad and I can’t work out how it’s doing it. It only happens in Google Chrome 5 and I’ve only seen it in a few places.
Take a look at this screen capture of Flickr’s new lightbox view. Note how the URL updates each time I click through to a new view. Nothing surprising there until you realise it’s not doing a full refresh of the page and is actually an Ajax call back to the server. (You may want to hit the full screen button, bottom right.)
Contrast that with what happens in Firefox – it’s still doing Ajax calls to make flicking between photos quick but the URL changes after the fragment
This technique is pretty common – Facebook have been using it for a couple of years and we even use it to give tabbed pages history on our site. It’s necessary because JavaScript isn’t allowed to set the full page URL without a page refresh, or at least that’s what I thought!
Google Maps has been doing the same as Flickr for a couple of months but I’ve still no idea how! Anyone care to read the Chromium source code or dig around Flickr’s JavaScript to see if there’s something different?
Update: also works in Safari, thanks Ross.
Over the last couple of months we’ve been working with colleagues in Learning Services to roll out a “live chat” service allowing students to ask helpdesk staff questions online.
Here’s what it looks like for the student:
And a sneak peak of what the staff interface looks like:
It makes use of an XMPP/Jabber server called Openfire with a plugin called Fastpath that talks to the Spark client installed on staff machines. Fastpath provides a web interface that can be embedded into the Learning Services website.
The service is currently a trial running 11am – 3pm so go along and take a look.
Last week I mentioned that while I couldn’t give a definitive list, our initial focus for a mobile website would be higher end devices. One thing we do know is what people are using at the moment to access our sites on the move:
Data for the above chart is taken from 14th April – 13th June 2010 and the usual warnings apply to statistics sourced from Google Analytics – it only includes browsers executing JavaScript.
What is clear though is that Apple’s devices are massively more popular than anything else – over 75% of page views are from iPhones and iPod Touch browsers.
Mobile usage is fast moving so we’ll be continuing to monitor trends and statistics will drive much of what we do in our forthcoming developments.
Earlier Steve Daniels sent me a link to a BBC Manchester news story about offices made out of shipping containers. Long time readers may recall that I have a bit of a thing about using shipping containers for interesting purposes so it’s worth a read read:
“These are new shipping containers where, in very simple terms, we’ve taken the front of the container off and we’ve put a glass screen in with glass doors.
“We’ve fitted them out with carpet and supply power and broadband connectivity and the tenants bring their own furniture – very simple and very affordable.”
Exactly a year ago we launched our first mobile websites at Edge Hill using a plugin for WordPress to provide a mobile friendly theme for our blogs. Yesterday we committed the first code for a mobile version of the main Edge Hill website.
It’s been a long time coming with a lot of talk followed by research and attending conferences but we’re finally on our way. Universities all over the UK and abroad are waking up to growing mobile usage and an expectation that we will provide services on multiple platforms. And there are almost as many approaches to take as there are universities from dedicated mobile applications for each platform to open source libraries.
Each HEI must decide who their target audience is, what they want from mobile services and the best way to deliver that information. For us, with limited resources, that means making choices about where to start and prioritise.
At Edge Hill we have for a long time had quite a clear split between internal and external content. The corporate website – www.edgehill.ac.uk – is the place for public information about the University: courses, history, departments, news, events etc.
GO on the other hand is clearly inward facing. It targets staff and students with personalised information of interest to them. Access to web based university systems is provided through it most of the time you only have to log in once per session to get to everything.
This provides a nice divide that can apply to what we do for mobile devices. Initially we will be working on a mobile version of the corporate website with internal systems following later.
So what does that mean? For me there a number of things that we need to address.
- Make pages look good on small screens
- Tailor information for mobile-device situations
- A new mobile information architecture
Let’s address each of those in turn.
Make pages look good on small screens
With the new iPhone 4 having a resolution of 960 × 640 pixels it’s no longer fair to say they are low resolution – that’s higher than a printed page! But there’s no escaping that mobile devices have small screens. This means that normal web pages must be zoomed out to unreadable levels to display fully. Additionally, older devices have poor quality web browsers unable to properly render the complex HTML we use on our websites and making the site look even worse.
For mobile devices we will be redirecting requests to a separate version of each page rendered with a different template. Pages will be stripped down and designed for maximum readability. Exactly how pages look will depend on the phone (and the web browser). I can’t give an exact list of devices that we’ll be testing against and aiming to support but it we will initially be focusing efforts on higher-end phones for example, iPhones, Android and Palm Pre.
Aside: there are two main factors that promote the use of mobile websites – devices and data. Modern phones make browsing mobile websites much easier, they often have applications for direct access to services like Facebook or Twitter further promoting use on the move but without data this is impossible. Unless a user has free or very cheap data they will be disinclined to make use of services. Therefore we can get maximum return on investment by targeting services at those users with both devices capable of accessing our site and the data package that allows them to do so.
Tailor information for mobile-device situations
I was struggling to come up with a good title for this point, can you tell? Essentially it breaks down into two things: place and position. Place is where you are when accessing a mobile website, for example you’ve got off the train at Ormskirk railway station and need to know how to get to campus. Position reflects common use of mobile devices while sat on a couch or on the bus in lieu of a normal computer. Both these affect the type of information you offer and may require changes to be made to existing content.
A new mobile information architecture
Tying together these two things is the site structure. Having pretty looking mobile pages is no use if you need to navigate through several pages to get to the information you want. What might be a feature on the homepage of the desktop website may be unimportant for most people accessing from a mobile device. The aim here isn’t to make some content inaccessible, merely to highlight key areas and make it easy for users to find that information.
So this is week one and it’s still early days. Because the mobile website will sit alongside the existing site it’s likely we will preview alpha and beta versions ahead of a full launch. We obviously cannot afford to buy every possible device so we’re looking to recruit testers that we can get feedback from so if you have a mobile phone with free or cheap data that you don’t mind using to try out our mobile sites, let me know in the comments or by email.
Stay tuned for more about the progress of this project over the summer – there should be lots of juicy technical detail of our design and development process!
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