Tuesday, 25 March 2008
Monday, 24 March 2008
Reading
Friday, 7 March 2008
hard times ahead
Purpose to provide and overview of what the site does and look at how its managed then future
Overview Looked at the style guide etc. understand it to
Centre
Folklore about who owns what they operate under house services estates, service driven,
Purpose of the site
Student service body of 25,000 to give them and the community staff as well as locals somewhere to do sport
Membership is 80% students 20%staff and the odd random people who live nearby
Site guided by being a sub site of uwe it just provides info to users
not a commerce other than provide information the audience is predominantly students aimed at providing info to students.
Do you need to expand?
The university. Have a commercial responsibility to the uni, prices are reasonable and the quality of service is good the public pay a bit more and they are seasonal too i.e. an opportunity to make money there.
Public will look at it, external clubs will look it Heartbeat and f…. clinic . the provision must be there. Needs to look corporate, don’t need to attract new members . the village students pay gym membership out of their rent. Talking about the gym. The hall is full of student clubs every week.
Don’t need the website to do promotion , the regeneration pitch university market to national Olympic association not through the website but face to face. Not in the business of being number one on google
Technology and tools
There was a very small sports centre. The website was controlled centrally 2001 richard had been managing a site at another institution. There was very little traffic because of the expansion then having a better website is better e.g. a photo of
Uses dreamweaver and ftp to upload to remote or on site his copy of dreamweaver
Did you design the site?
Derived from IT sportie CSS web engine that runs through epg (ethical policies group in charge of corporate look ) produce the style sheet – does n’t have to worry about the accessibility of menus of the left. 10% of his job is managing the site hence . small component which is why it is text driven thereis not the demand to make it moreat the memoment full in term time anyway drop in student numbers when they look to promote for example at the weekends / holiday they goes direct to government body and people through htewebsite will be able to download the dvd. OMNI making a video that will be showcaseing the centre.
Governance
No one has access they don’t want multiple people to one site 4 changes to make ath te moment . Various services e.g. operations, gym, clear divisions around the services on the site. If they want to change they have a word form (that is emailed to me) these are guidelines e.g. 4MB gif, plain text etc. what you
Guidelines for Publishing Material to the UWE Sport Website
In accordance with the in-house policy of the UWE Academic Technology Group, all University websites are currently undergoing review, in order to make them accessible to all members of the wider university community, using a wide range of browser software and accessibility aids.
In simple terms, the emphasis will be placed on text driven pages, limited use of images, and the creation of simple, uncluttered pages.
To this end, those wishing to post information on the UWESport site should adhere to the following guidelines.
1. Modification of pages will infer “responsibility” for that page – for example opening times, exercise classes, NGB courses, AAG applications etc,. It is the responsibility of staff to review pages relating to their particular area periodically to ensure that posted information is up to date.
2. All information to be posted must arrive in a plain text format.
Tables, images (unless strictly necessary), animations, clip art and so on, will not be posted
Where absolutely necessary, images may be submitted in JPEG format, as a separate file ideally no greater than 100Kb (to ensure rapid loading of pages where images are used).
3. Submissions should be electronic via the form attached and sent via email to Richard2.Bennett@uwe.ac.uk
The form requires the following information to be completed
i) the exact page URL (webpage address) to be updated
ii) details of whether the submitted information should replace, or supplement that already posted on the page.
iii) the date at which the new information will expire (if necessary)
iv) updates will take place each Friday; therefore submissions should arrive by 5pm Thursday evening for inclusion
4. Complex information
Extensive information may need to be split over several, simple pages for reason of clarity and speed of loading. Please discuss any requirements prior to submission of information, particularly before undertaking an extensive project to avoid time consuming modification and re-working of information prior to publishing.
5. Information for download (application forms, flyers etc) should be submitted in Adobe Acrobat format only.
6. For ease of recognition and transfer, authors should utilise either Times New Roman or Arial fonts, with a black typeface, in no less than 10pt font.
UWE Sport Website Modification Request
NOTE: website updates take place on Friday – submissions should arrive no later than
| Name: | | |
| Address of page to be updated: | | |
| Date this update expires: | | |
| Should old information be deleted? | YES | NO |
| Or supplemented? | YES | NO |
| | ||
| Information to be Posted: | ||
It is more hassle as Richard is competent at Dreamweaver. They don’t know about the rules for mobiles etc. regarding accessibility for mobiles etc. got the right text engines on the main site. Do we call it UWE or University of West of England. The standards tries to deal with that by having only one person .in charge
The web standards has been replaced and called the web management group been elevated to director level as they had no power to enforce change. Only recommend or a forum for good practise.
Art media design. Want to have a nice flash website their website would look great on a high speed connection. There is alegal responsibility to make the site look good fbe and cems have their own servers and they do their own thing. It runs of fbe servers and they have the staff to man their own webservers
METRICS
Not because I don’t want to but can’t. Sawmill is a marketing product that the university use for metrics. Richard cant measure hits. Does that annoy him? He says not commercially driven, so OK.
The CMS is coming UWE-wide. It will change how everything is done tying all the loose ends together. They put courses up for education and is downloading.
Doesn’t give any extra thought to design. So that headings are ok for screen readers etc. put in the code inspector.
Stuff comes up around tables is nature of the data which is tabular. CSA will do audits on the sites to make sure they are accessible
Q: Does anyone use a reader on the uwe site?
Student affairs do an audit if nothing works then they get pulled up. Marketing do it from an up to date angle.
Previous stuff
Web2.0 – will it impact on them it will be university wide w
Sharepoint has been installed toe in the water with that .
Mobile computing – in theory you can do it. They are not interested in browsing critical information on the mobile.m They use fixutes live. Many universities are using it . hes not sure its compliant , its easy to use so that the members of staff can do the input/output andn table management . It doesn’t work in mobile mode. Considering it’s a commercial site they are paying for is it that good? Go with the flow. The students don’twant to see a handbuilt table.
Monday, 3 March 2008
Assignment 2
Further to our conversation this morning. Here is my timetable for the next two weeks as I think you said that you were going away after that. My weeks follow roughly the same pattern so you can assume that the following week is the same.
| Date | Available times |
| 4/3/8 | 8-12:30 |
| 5/3/8 | 9-10:30 13:30-17:00 |
| 6/3/8 | 13:30-14:30 |
| 7/3/8 | 12:30-13:30 14:30-17:00 |
| 10/3/8 | 9-5 |
| 11/3/8 | 8-12:30 |
| 12/3/8 | 9-10:30 13:30-17:00 |
| 13/3/8 | 13:30-14:30 |
| 14/3/8 | 12:30-13:30 14:30-17:00 |
I should take less than an hour of your time so bear that in mind when making a date i.e. on 10/3 the latest time to start would be 4pm. I would also ask that if you have any supporting documentation that it is made available for the meeting or even better, emailed in advance.
The coursework brief states "The review and audit of a UWE website". The review section means that I will be seeking to understand the purpose, audience, scope of content, site structure, technology and report on these. In the audit I shall be examining the site's management including maintenance, construction and governance. If necessary I shall produce recommendations complete with rationale.
I am currently preparing a questionnaire so the more information you can give me in advance the better service I can offer you in return.
Thanks in advance,
Ian Cutts
M. 07900 344 289
I understand your needs to keep certain data private and shall respect this.
Friday, 7 December 2007
Semantic Web
We are looking at methods for automating the web, enabling applications to use the data existing in websites as well as the data being useful to people. One new thing I learnt was that the Opera web browser has text and voice recognition built in. This means that if you can't be bothered to read a passage of text then it can be read off by Opera and in turn transfered to your mp3 player for later review.
Eliza & Turing
Eliza was designed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum and was an early stab at artificial intelligence. It worked using a a form of psychology named after Carl Rogers who, in the 1940s and 1950s developed a way of communicating with his patients by developing a relationship with them and trying to empathize with their situations. The graphic on the left is a sample of his work in action. Of course, this is a very rudimentary form of intelligence and is easy to spot when the person at the other end is not a human being. In 1950 Alan Turning produced a paper called "Computing machinery and intelligence," in it he defines the test as "a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test." As machines get faster and capable of more complicated processing then it is hoped that soon we will get intelligent machines. However, in the 1970s IBM claimed that they would have speech recognition cracked very soon and yet in 2007, when talking to another graduate we spoke about his placement work at Intel that year working on exactly the same thing! It is obviously not that easy.
Tuesday, 4 December 2007
Unkept promises in 1st life
Still it is no excuse this is the final year and the purpose of this blog is to record what is happening around me. One thing that I have really noticed on the final year is that you have to write everything down and get it transcribed and organised immediately if you are to have any chance of making future reference to it. In the two week (I'll be honest 2.5) weeks since my last entry I have skipped class and generally not applied myself to this module as well as a few other (bloody, Internetics!)
Still here's the resume of last Fridays class: It was just Ivan and myself present
Firstly we enjoyed a video from Google telling us about their company policy with regards to 20% time, if you work for google you can spend 20% of the time doing what you want. (Is that how orcut came about?)
Moving swiftly on through the music site shazam (I didn't know the Opera text browser had a built in text to speech converter) then on to data structures for social networks. It seemed amazing that whatever diagrams we did pull up they managed to miss the vital link between two people, the basis for a social network.
If you've got the time and want to blow your mind read this article about google
Finally, for this post I spent an hour with Chris watching him "play" second life. I thought it was a place for, well I don't know what but UWE have got some land there and they want to erect a building with interactive whiteboards and all, what ever next...
Sunday, 18 November 2007
Is there no end to web 2.0 applications?
Tuesdsay
We have been fortunate to get an extra hours teaching from Chris this week the subject of which was the Romanian styled oXygen engine. Our tasks was to use existing XML files and use the software generate html output. Of course we are only scratching the surface but it look like there's a lot out there for XML.
Friday
We listed to Chris talking about a pro gramme called LinkedIn. A business roladex type interface - more professional that FaceBook! It links (in his case) lots of professional contacts. We recognized that 150 is the optimum number of contacts and that split between the following categories:
- Professionals
- Friends
- Hobbies
- Neighbours
- Family
- Hobbies
There are so many social networking sites out there. I looked at another called orcut It
is an online community that can help you maintain relationships with pictures and messages, and establish new ones. Orkut helps find people who share hobbies and interests, look for romantic connections or establish new business contacts. You can also create and join a wide variety of online communities to discuss current events, reconnect with old school mates or even exchange your favorite recipes. It also has a feature called scrapping which is a form of offline communication. Anyone can visit anyone else's profile (unlike Facebook)
Orkut Büyükkökten a Turkish software engineer started the site as a google employee in Jan 2004. in Oct 2006 there were 37 million accounts and in August claimed 67m users
Why use orkut?
Because it is affiliated to google (is that a reason to use it?) - its free. It organises contact into "Social", "Professional" and "Personal" where you can rate these contacts as "Best Friends", "Good Friends", "Friends", "Acquaintances" and "Haven't met"
