I've just discovered image maps

I'm probably being a bit slow off the mark here but I've just discovered that I can make image maps (or to be more accurate Matt showed me how the other week - he's going to blog about but he's been busy with other posts). I don't need to know about programming to do it (which is just as well), instead I just used image-maps.com.

Below is a photograph of Tryfan that I took last time I went up it. It's not the best example but I wanted to demo something that doesn't have straight lines. So if you hover over the image you'll discover various links:

• the stile links to the Wikipedia entry on stiles (fascinating, I'm sure)
• the wing mirror links to the 'Let me Google that for you' link for the same
• and the rocky profile that is Tryfan links to the Wikipedia entry on Tryfan (and if you hover carefully you'll see that the image map for that follows the skyline of the ridge)

Wikipedia entry on stiles
| Wikipedia entry on Tryfan
| Google search on wing mirrors
| Image Map

All-in-all I think it's pretty clever, and more importantly, potentially very useful, especially since we've tested it and we know it works in our Plone CMS (not everything does). Obviously it will work with any image - not jsut photos, so all I need is a reason to use them. I'm hoping that Marta or Steve or someone else in the team might think of how this would be useful.

Update

Looks like uploading the image is a bit flaky (worked to start with then stopped working) so I've recreated it with a url to the image to see if that's better...

Stile
| Wing mirror
| Tryfan
| Image Map

New front page done

Matt and I have been thinking about a design for a new front page of the Student Development site for a while now, and now it's done. After some really useful comments to previous posts (New front page progress and We need a new front page) we've finalised a design. It's not brilliant because we're working with some quite tight restrictions in our Plone CMS and we're having to do everything in tables, but I think it's a lot better than it was. We now have a lot more space to promote current news and events and the rather confusing team structure has been replaced by three clear themes. There's also more white space than there was.

Hover over the image below so see notes, or just go to www.le.ac.uk/studentdevelopment

New front page progress

I've been thinking on and off for about a month now about how we can improve the front page of the Student Development website. I blogged about it a while back (We need a new front page) and got some very useful comments.

The reasons for redesigning it are:

1. to give us more space to promote topical news and events
2. to theme our work under three main headings to give what we do more coherence (succeed in your studies, gain experience, plan for a career)
3. to make things easier to find

Having had an really useful meeting with David Morgan yesterday I've re-worked things a little (see draft below) to give the 'Latest news and events' bit more space for more stories and also given the three themes different colours to try and differentiate them a bit.

We're working within quite a restrictive CSS in Plone so it's not easy to make it look quite how I want it to but it's getting closer. You'll see I've put a space holder image in for story 1 - the reason being I couldn't find an image of the correct dimensions (long and thin) to go in that bit - which probably means that bit's not ideal.

There are still things I need to do, including:

• put in an obvious Information for employers link somewhere
• maybe also put in a link for PhD students to supplement the mentions they get within the three themes

What do you think? As usual, all comments gratefully received :)

Student Development staff can login to see the most up-to-date version here.

We need a new front page

Our current Student Development front page has served us well for nearly a year now. When I wrote about the plans for it a year ago I explained the criteria for the design and the proposed structure. Since then the structure of the front page has remained largely unchanged but there are now reasons to update it, here are the three main ones:

1. we are running out of front page space, especially as more and more of our work involves more than one of our teams (for example, the Leicester Award);
2. we need to give certain themes of our work more prominence - principally careers and support for postgraduate researchers;
3. we need to make it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for (pushing out information to Facebook and Twitter has helped a lot in this regard but we need to make the front page itself more immediately self-explanatory)

I intend to stick with the same folder structure underneath the front page as it reflects our team structure and makes the administration of the site much easier to manage. The different teams that make up Student Development are as follows:

• Learning Development
• Career Development
• Volunteering
• Work-related Learning (including Business and Enterprise Learning)
• Research Student team
• Employer Liaison

But the front page I propose to change to reflect three main themes (that Matt, Fran and I came up with last week) under which we think the work that each of the teams do should fit. The suggested themes are as follows.

Succeeding in your studies

To include academic skills development for undergraduates and support for research postgraduates (the latter's web pages we will be restructuring over the summer - I blogged about some ideas last week)

Gaining experience

To include work placements, volunteering and business and enterprise opportunities - for undergraduates and research postgraduates.

Planning for a career

To include the support offered by the career development team (whose web pages we will also be restructuring over the summer) and the Research Student team - for undergraduates and research postgraduates.

I'm hoping these headings will simplify things and so help us address the three reasons mentioned above. In terms of how it might look on the page here's a mock up (I'll figure out the relative sizes of the columns later) - click on the image to enlarge it.

I'm really interested to hear your comments; staff and especially students. Some questions to consider:

• do the themed areas cover everything?
• are the themed areas termed correctly?
• will the proposed changes address the reasons for change (1-3)?
• does the draft layout make sense?
• do you have any other ideas or suggestions?

Postgraduate research student pages

We need to restructure the research postgraduate's pages of our website, in particular the resources section. We've known this for some time but haven't had the time to devote to it. A couple of weeks ago Matt and I had a meeting with the Research Student Team to begin to talk about the restructure and last week we met with Duncan to decide on some headings under which to organise content. We looked at the Joint Skills Statement of Skills Training Requirements (JSS) and the headings that Vitae use in the Postgraduate researchers section of their website. The headings we've come up with are a combination of both of these and are as follows.

• Managing your research (Vitae = 'Managing your research project', JSS = A: research skills and techniques, C: research management)
• Managing yourself (Vitae = 'Managing your yourself', JSS = D: personal effectiveness)
• Communicating your research (Vitae = 'Raising your profile', JSS = E: communication skills)
• Developing your career (Vitae = 'Developing your career', JSS = G: career management)
• Supervision and key relationships (Vitae = 'Supervision and key relationships', JSS = B: research environment, F: teamworking and networking skills)
• Completing your doctorate (Vitae = 'Completing your doctorate', JSS = B: research environment)

I'd be interested to know whether people think that this is a sensible structure and whether you have any recommendations for external content to go under these headings to supplement our own. I think we'll start applying these headings to our resources section and then apply them to the rest of the site in due course.

In a minor update last week I changed the front page of the research postgraduate pages to be a summary view of the latest news items in order to make this page as up to date and dynamic as possible. I think the way Plone renders images attached to news items in the summary view works pretty well.

Developments I'd like to see in Plone

After a really useful conversation with Nick and Jeff in the web team yesterday and some useful comments on my The automated feeds are working post (including one from Alexander Limi, the co-founder of Plone) I thought I'd put up another Plone post (my second ever).

I'm not a techie, but I have been using Plone now for more than four years so I know it pretty well from a user's perspective. Whilst there's no such thing as a perfect system I really like Plone and the ethos behind it, I especially like the flexibility of the sharing permissions that it gives us. The web team here at Leicester have done a great job in setting it up and supporting it with very limited resources (and for the record, they should get more).

So, here are some of the developments I'd like to see in the future (apologies in advance if I'm making any techie faux pas).

Selectively cascading portlets

In versions 2 and 2.5 of Plone the portlets were created as pages and you could just point to them from the relevant folder level and so have one portlet selectively cascading at different levels of the site. This system was a little complicated to use but it did give good flexibility and avoided having to create the same portlet multiple times at different levels. In version 3 it seems to be all or nothing - I can block or unblock the portlets above in the folder structure but I can't say 'do block this one but don't block this one'. Consequently, for example, the Contact us portlet on our site has to recreated six times futher down in the structure to allow different teams to have the same Contact us portlet but more specific news and events collection portlets.

Thumbnail images from news items into Facebook

I've set up news items to push out to Twitter and Facebook using the RSS and Twitterfeed (see this post for the Twitterfeed set up). What would be nice though would be if Plone could take a thumbnail of an image attached to a news item and put that in the Facebook post. Currently it doesn't do this so all our automated posts look very similar (look for the posts that come from Twitterfeed on our Facebook page)

NOT statement in collection fields

Within the Title and Description fields in collections it would be really useful if it allowed more logical statements. At the moment you can have AND and OR but not NOT. And NOT would allow more flexibility.

More flexibility in the start date field in collections

In order ro push out events to Facebook and Twitter I use a collection to create an appropriate RSS feed. However, I don't want to push out events to these networks as soon as they are published because often we schedule events as a block a term in advance. So to get round this I've set up collections with the following criteria:

• Item type = event
• Location = (relevant folder + search sub-folders)
• State = published
• Start date = 1 day, in the future, on the day

This works ok but it only lets me push out events the day before...

I've just looked at the criteria again and it looks like I should just be able change the 'which day' field to 2 days or 5 days or a week. That looks like it should solve my problem but I think I tried that before and it didn't work. I set it up more than six months ago though so I can't remember. I'll have another check but if anyone can tell me so I don't have to check that would be great :)

Bookmarklets

I understand there's an addon for bookmarklets (share on Twitter, Delicous, Facebook etc)  but it conflicts with the feed mixer portlet. It would be good to get this fixed.

Editor bugs

I prefer the TinyMCE editor to Kupu, on the whole, but there's a bug in TinyMCE which means that if you add a link to an image in a portlet the image dissapears (but works fine with Kupu editor).

I've probably got some other suggestions but I'll just throw those out as a starter. It's not meant to be critical - just suggestions from an avid user.

The automated feeds are working

I've just realised that if you edit a news item in Plone that's already published and then save the changes it acts like a newly published item. How do I know this interesting piece of information, I hear you cry? Well, it's funny you should ask that...

Yesterday I was showing a colleague how to create a collection in Plone that would pull in not only the news items that she published in her area of the website but also appropriate news items that others published elsewhere in the Student Development website. So in order to demonstrate this I went to a relevant news item and categorized it (that's what Plone calls it but most people will call this 'tagging') and then saved the changes. The collection item was set up appropriately to display item type (="news item"), location (=http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ssds/sd), categories (="Leicester Award") and state (="published") - so the item was fed into the collection accordingly. However, it wasn't until I was on Twitter a few minutes later that I realised that adding a category to a news item (or presumably any kind of editing) and then saving the changes causes the item to be re-published. Not only did the news item appear in my colleague's collection it also re-appeared:

• at the top of the Volunteering team's latest news feed
• at the top of the Student Development latest news feed
• at the top of the news portlets on every page in the above two sections
• and on Facebook
• and on Twitter

Not only that, but within 15 minutes the story was retweeted by University Leicester (followers = 278) and Aaron Porter (followers = 2,031).

The problem was the story was six months old! So we quickly added a sentence to the bottom of the news item to say "The deadline for completion of this year's programme has already passed, but you can register now for the 2010/11 programme."

As my colleague said "It's all good publicity". And at least I know all the feeds are working. Thanks for the retweets!