We’ve Moved!

You can now find us on our University hosted blogging system on the Web Team Blog. There’re no new posts, but that’s where they would be if there were!

Website Redesign

Today we launch our newly redesigned website.

We’ve been working hard for around 6 months on the new design.
Stylistically we hope it looks like a cleaner evolution of our previous design. Behind the scenes however this is a very different website to the one we had previously.

From a users perspective we now have the global navigation bar at the top of every page linking you through to some of the more important top level sections – such as Undergraduate, Postgraduate, International and Alumni.

Forming part of the footer of each page there is also a secondary global navigation to stuff like Departments, the Jobs page, Site Map, Telephone and Email Directory and so on.

Speaking of the Telephone and Email Directory – we’ve also implemented a faster way to access this information. When you start typing in the search box at the top of any page you’ll notice a bar popping up giving you the option to either search the entire site, the telephone and email directory or our new Directory of Expertise. In a way this is a “global search” to complement the global navigation. We hope to expand on this in future.

From a technical perspective having the new site implemented in HTML5 and CSS3 means we can do some pretty cool things. The site is now fully responsive – it will adapt nicely to your device. If you’re on a Smartphone, tablet, or on a widescreen monitor the site will adapt itself to give you a good browsing experience. Our old site easily broke below a certain resolution and wasn’t really usable on a mobile phone.

This is just a first step on the mobile front though – we’ve got more developments planned to optimise the mobile experience even more – but as a first step we hope you’ll agree that this is a vast improvement over the previous site.

We’d like to give the guys behind developing “320 and up” and “less css“ as they are both very much the foundation on which the new site has been built. We’d also like to thank all the students and staff that helped shape the site during the beta phase. Your feedback was very useful and some pages have changed a lot as a response to that feedback.

As in any site re-launch – were sure that there will be a few problems that crop up over the next few days, but we hope that for the most part the transition will be a smooth one. If you have any comments, positive or otherwise – or if you spot any issues – then please let us know by emailing www@aber.ac.uk

This is very much a first step in modernising our website. We hope that it will provide a solid foundation for the future. We have a long list of some of the stuff we’d like to get on and do now that the site is launched. There will be more exciting developments coming over the next few months.

HTML Emails

We’ve recently been having more and more requests from departments within the university to send out html formatted marketing emails. There seems to be a trend towards HTML emails as a replacement for flyers for a specific event, and also as news letters.

The theory is very nice, but the truth is that HTML emails are a pain to code. It’s like coding web pages in the mid 90′s – all tables and inline styles on every element.

How the emails end up appearing in the recipients mail client will also very a lot so you have to be careful when designing them that they work in as many mail clients and web mail systems as possible .

On top of that, most of our staff use Outlook as an email client, and you cant author HTML emails in outlook. You can in Mozilla thunderbird but we don’t have the resources to talk people through setting up thunderbird as their mail client just for this purpose.

So you have fragile code that you don’t want the user to mess around with too much and no easy way of enabling people to send their own.

The idea of a HTML Email Management system grew from this. The idea being that we can design a set of templates and all the user has to do is fill in the text and supply a list of recipients to send to.

Initially I was going to try and design my own system, but that would have been very time consuming. Searching the web I came across PHPlist – the feature list roughly corresponded to what we wanted for our management system.

I have had to do a few customisations to the base system – I installed the PBTS plugin that enables multiple content areas, which we needed. I also installed and customised this patch that enables phplist to talk to LDAP server – making it possible for staff to login to the system with their existing AU accounts.

Done a few customisations of my own to mould the system to our needs a bit more, and now it’s mostly working.

We need to build up a catalogue of templates for the user to choose from and it needs more testing in real world situations, but hopefully this gives us a more pain free and maintainable solution for sending out HTML emails.

Things I should have written here …

By now I should have written about T44U … I should also write about “Institutional and Social Web Services: Evidence for Their Value“, but that hasn’t happened yet so I do have an excuse.

In the mean time, I’ve just found out about 24 Ways – an advent calendar for web geeks – enjoy

I plan to come back soon and blog properly!

Javascript Documentation Processors

I’ve recently been going over a load of our applications to improve the quality and standards of our documentation. While we’ve mostly always had inline comments in code, the quality of those comments has varied a lot and we’ve had no central documentation resources.

For PHP there are plenty of documentation generators , phpdoc and doxygen being probably the leading examples. We had tinkered a bit with doxygen in the past so it wasn’t a big decision to standardise on that.

While most of our applications are php based there are some (like our google maps application) that are almost entirely written in javascript. Other applications have javascript files that augment the application.

Documenting just PHP would therefore only tell half the story – we needed something similar to doxygen for javascript.

Considering how extensively and widespread javascript has become over the past few years as the de facto standard in rich web applications I was surprised at how little tools there were for generating documentation. The ones I’ve managed to find are:

• jsdoc (no longer maintained)
• jsdoc-toolkit
• yuidoc
• pdoc

jsdoc initially seemed straight forward, but on running it against certain files it would always fail with a segmentation fault. Since it’s no longer maintained, it seemed a bit of a dead end unfortunetly

yuidoc seemed promising – it’s used in house at yahoo to generate documentation for their yui api. It’s a python based application though and has a lot of dependencies. I tried, and failed to get this working on my local machine. Wouldn’t have been practical to get running on our central server so that anyone in the team could use it.

pdoc – similar to above, but this time based on ruby. again wouldn’t have been practical to get running on our central server so that anyone in the team could use it.

jsdoc-toolkit – this was finally the one I settled on. It’s only requirement is java which is available on the central server and it produces nice documentation – especially when alternative templates like codeview are available for it.

The only problem I have with jsdoc -toolkit is that it’s very much geared to javascript api’s, and as such will by default only produce documentation for public functions. For API’s this is obviously fine, but if you want to have every funtion documented like we do then you have to jump through a few hoops when commenting and put explicit

*@name

*@function

*@description

tags into the comments of internal functions – that way the parser will pick them up correctly.

So there we go, apologies if this was long and technical, but I thought I would share the research in case it’s of use to anyone else.

Similarly, if anyone has suggestions for different alternatives that I’ve failed to find then I’d be interested in evaluating them, even if we are all in all happy with the solutions we’ve settled on.

Best UK University Web Sites – According to Sixth Formers (via UK Web Focus)

Brian’s blogged about this interesting survey from Times Higher. I’m on holiday at the moment, but wanted to do a quick “reblog” as WordPress calls it. Might blog more about how the Aber Uni website is doing in relation to the points the students make when I’m back at work.

This week’s issue of the Times Higher Education contains a six page article on “Deciphering the code” which asks “do universities’ websites tell prospective students what they need to know” and invites a panel of sixth-formers to identify the top University Web sites – and those which can be improved. What were the best performing institutional Web sites? The top ten sites are listed in the following table – and although I an aware that the metho … Read More

via UK Web Focus

Registering an interest for 2011

Aberystwyth University is lucky enough this year to have so many high quality applicants that we wont be going through the clearing system when A Level results are released on Thursday.

It’s not all over though as a form is now in place for students who have missed out to register their interest in coming to Aberystwyth in 2011.

http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/clearing-update/2011-entry/

This was a bit of a rush job to get ready as we only heard about it the middle of last week, but it’s ready to roll. Good luck to everyone expecting your results on Thursday.