This week we have mostly been launching this: We'll blog more about it after the Christmas break but a few interesting points below: New server build to support the new WordPress powered homepage. Varnish caching layer to make page serve times fly! New Faculty of Arts and Sciences website. Lots of support to departments updating [...]
Week Notes: 13 December
WordPress 3.8 is now running on both blogs.edgehill.ac.uk and the Corporate Website. There are lots of new features covered in the video below but if you're an editor and want the old colour scheme back then get choose light from the edit profile page. Updated the Web Services blog to the latest Twenty Fourteen theme [...]
YouTube Live Streaming Graduation Ceremonies
Last Saturday saw the campus taken over for Edge Hill's winter Graduation ceremonies and I was there to see the Real Jenny Barrett graduate. We've been streaming graduation ceremonies live online since Summer 2008 - I blogged about the use of eStream at the time - and the system has worked very well and allowed [...]
Week Notes: 6 December
Discussions between ourselves and Infrastructure Solutions about how we can get contact information about staff out of Outlook and Active Directory for use in staff profile pages. Demonstrated some ideas for how research case studies that form part of Edge Hill's REF submission can be showcased online. This will make use of our story functionality to [...]
Week Notes: 29 November
This week's new homepage developments: Refactoring have some of the site works, in particular to simplify how JavaScript and CSS interact to style the page. Switching the responsive navigation from jPanelMenu to Sidr allowing the contents of the menu to be dynamically extracted from existing elements on the page rather than replicated in the HTML. Started building [...]
Week Notes: 22 November
This week saw many in Corporate Communications and Student Recruitment get their first look at the new homepage design at Tuesday's super-Edmon meeting. CAKE conference holding website and discussions about developments for the full site next year. Websites migrated to TwentyTwelve child theme: Centre for Learning and Teaching Geography Media We now force users logging [...]
Week Notes: 15 November
Steve Daniels and I attended the Percona Live London conference on Tuesday. Steve has a bit of a write up. Jenny Jordan and I represented IT Services at the first meeting of the Student Affairs Committee. There's always work going on across the University to improve the student experience and some of the changes in [...]
Percona Live London 2013
Over the recent months I've been pushing myself to be more of a software engineer than a "coder". To that end I've been investing my time heavily in a lot of things, and part of that is attending talks and conferences on interesting topics. So when I saw the tweet below, I jumped at the [...]
Week Notes: 8 November
The homepage designs have been honed and debugged and are perilously close to being ready to go live. Part of this work was reviewing how far to go to support non-JavaScript users. GDS have some interesting findings showing a gap between the number of users who have JavaScript switched on and off: people who have [...]
Week Notes: 1 November
Following Bath's example - we've never been afraid to steal some of their ideas - we're planning to publish "week notes" each Friday giving a summary of the week's activities. Launched a beta version of our new Google Site Search powered corporate website search engine. Work continues apace on the new corporate homepage built in [...]