On Aspire, a url for a Department looks like this:
http://liblists.sussex.ac.uk/departments/anthropology.html

A page for a course looks like this (for course l6061):
http://liblists.sussex.ac.uk/courses/l6061.html

The nice thing is that you can replace the ‘.html’ with .json or .rdf – while the html only has a link to the related list, the json and rdf expose other links and relationships, such as the department.

For us, most (but not all) courses only have one list. URLs for lists are not predictable in the same way as the courses URL. E.g.
http://liblists.sussex.ac.uk/lists/EEC1E2AA-C350-DAFC-BDE4-1E9EF5EC69E5.html

So what if you want to link to a list from an external system.

The University has a portal which includes for students a list of their courses and provides a link to those that have a reading list. Two issues: it needs to know which courses have a reading list on Talis Aspire, and it needs a way to link to them.

The easiest way to achieve the former is for the central admin/portal server to query (make a http request) for each course provided by the University, if it gets a 404, no list exists for that course. It can then flag each course that has a list (using a field in the database).

And what about linking to a list. We actually have three options. The first is to simply link to the course link above (second link from the top), this will show any lists for that course, but will normally require the user to click on the single reading list link to see the list items, which isn’t ideal. The second method is to process the json data in the step above (where we were checking for the existence of a course page), the data will include the URL for the list(s) which could then be stored in the portal DB.

But the third option is the easiest. Turns out there is a nice URL you can use, similar to the one above, which will take the user directly to a list for a course, if there is only one, if there is more than more it will show a list (of, ummm, lists) instead, and this URL is predictable for any given course code.

Here’s an example of both scenarios. Thanks for Chris Clarke at Talis for the information on this.

http://liblists.sussex.ac.uk/courses/l6061/lists.html [one list, norm]
http://liblists.sussex.ac.uk/courses/v1367/lists.html (json) [two lists]

Finally, I knocked up some bad php to demonstrate this. It queries the url above, and returns either the urls of the list(s) or a message to say there is no course or lists for that course code.

http://www.lib.sussex.ac.uk/coursechecker.php?course=v1367
http://www.lib.sussex.ac.uk/coursechecker.php?course=l6066
http://www.lib.sussex.ac.uk/coursechecker.php?course=abc [doesn’t exist]

<?php

# This script is past a course code
# it returns any reading lists attached to that coursecode

$baseurl = “http://liblists.sussex.ac.uk”;

$coursecode = $_GET["course"];
if ($coursecode == “” OR $coursecode == null) {
echo “no course”;
exit;
}

# this url will exist if there are lists for this course,
# and will not exist (404) if there are not
$url = $baseurl . “/courses/” . $coursecode . “/lists.json”;
# …also available in html and rdf

# Get webpage using curl
$ch      = curl_init( $url );
# OPTION: don’t put it on screen
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$page = curl_exec($ch);
$header  = curl_getinfo( $ch );
curl_close($ch);
$statuscode = $header['http_code'];

# if status code 404 then no page
if ($statuscode == ’404′) {
echo ‘NOREADINGLIST’;
}

# we have a page for this course
elseif ($statuscode == ’200′) {
# use json to return url to list(s), though if only one the original url,
# ending in html, will take you to it.
get_list_url($page);
}

# or maybe we have another status code
else {
echo ‘NOTSURE’;
}

function get_list_url ($page) {
# JSON
$data = json_decode($page, true); #true=array

foreach ($data as $listurl => $stuff) {
# we only want lists. not courses or departments
if (preg_match(“/\/lists\//”, $listurl)) {
echo “$listurl<br>\n”;
}
}

}

?>

So once a week, the central portal will query Talis Aspire for each course to see if there is a reading list, and store the result. And it will link to lists using the URL http://liblists.sussex.ac.uk/courses/{coursecode}/lists.html

Like

Unlike

Related posts:

1. Linked data & RDF : draft notes for comment
2. nostuff library catalogue using the Talis Platform
3. ircount development

So let the LMS be a record of what your library physically holds, and your discovery service a place where users can find (and see how to access) resources that are of interest to their research and work. The former being just one element (albeit a major one) of the latter. Meanwhile your LMS physically holdings can be shared with other discovery systems (such as union catalogues) to show what your library physically contains.

The blog post included a diagram. Some said it was rather crude, badly drawn and basic. It’s critics weren’t so kind.

New Library catalogue model

But I want to focus on the bit near the bottom, a line and ‘Endnote search’ with not even a box around it. And the point has nothing to do with Endnote. (well a little bit but who’s counting).

Story 1

I had a phone call from a trainer here at Sussex. Their problem went a bit like this: When showing postgrads Endnote and reference management, a common query arose, they wanted to import multiple records from the Library catalogue in to Endnote. This seemed reasonable. She had discovered a number of ways to import records: (a) from our discovery service – Aquabrowser (b) from our traditional library catalogue that comes with our LMS – Talis Prism (c) from within Endnote.

Aquabrowser has a nice ‘export to Endnote’ button on each record, we’d set that up. But there was no way to export multiple records. Talis Prism was no better. Endnote has a feature for connecting directly to a database (in this case our catalogue) via Z39.50. (This feature can be a real bane for libraries as it looks like a real time saver to researchers but often database vendors and ‘platform’ middle men don’t support this type of connection for institutional subscribers.) This connects directly in to our catalogue and uses the stupidly complex and ageing Z39.50 to retrieve results. And from within Endnote you can then easily add them to your Endnote library.

But the problem was these search results in no way reflected the results they had when using our normal catalogue, in fact they just seemed  to be of no real order. So they had to either use the web catalogue to download one record at a time, or use Endnote but with a strange set of search results which does not reflect what they found (and what they wanted to save) on the catalogue

Story 2

Sussex is about to launch an iphone app using CampusM. Very exciting. One of the developers was chatting to me and asked if our catalogue had an API which they could perhaps use in the future to search the catalogue from within the app. Now we Library geeks love standards and apis but the only one I could think of was Z39.50.

Problem: aside from Z39.50 being the most difficult thing to get your head around and use – is that, like Endnote above, the results would be not ordered, with no relevance ranking.

The issues here are the same. Neither Endnote, nor a University iphone app is trying to be a fully fledged catalogue. Even if they did have the resources to develop search relevance and rank, it would be reinventing the wheel (which can only be bad) and ultimately would differ from the results seen within our main catalogue (Aquabrowser).

What’s more, in the model described at the top, the resource discovery layer (e.g. Aquabrowser) may hold records for items not on the catalogue (e.g. if we were starting again, our e-journal records would not be in our LMS, but indexed straight in to Aquabrowser).

So these ‘thin clients’ really just want to connect to a catalogue and get back some results in XML or similar which they just have to transform in to HTML (or display in an iphone app). They don’t want to implement a full bodied search interface, and nor should they have to.

The answer is, of course, that these clients need to an API provided by the Resource Discovery system.

The good news is that I think this is already happening, a number provide XML interfaces which developers can use. Aquabrowser for example has a SRU interface (you may need to ‘browse source’ to see this) and it’s own XML interface, though this is not very well documented at all (thanks to Ed Chamberlain for the help in finding the url for it)

Like

Unlike

Related posts:

1. Library search/discovery apps : intro
2. Library catalogues, search systems and data
3. Academic discovery and library catalogues

So I had a go at updating the template for this here blog to make it all html5. Turns out this is quite simple.

It seems you can probably just replace your doctype with

<!DOCTYPE html>

and you’ve got yourself a html5 webpage.

The W3C validator proves it so. From there I added some of the new section elements such as header, footer, nav, aside and article. It seems that these can apply to the page (i.e. the page’s footer) or a section (the footer of a blog post, where it shows tags and date published  etc). I used various sources on the web, via Google, including a few articles, and sample sites.

So nostuff mostly validates as html5 and makes use of some of the elements above, though this doesn’t affect anything visually at the moment (I think, I really don’t have much of a clue as to what I’m doing).

I’ve created a gzip file of the theme here. You’re welcome to download and use it, though it’s not really designed to be shared (includes my analytics/adsense codes etc).

Like

Unlike

Related posts:

1. WordPress themes and plugins

Part of this process involves buying a sofa which doesn’t suck as much as my current sofa.

Of course, I’m doing this the proper way of procrastinating and constantly looking at websites and not deciding anything (look out for my exciting new book of the same name, the ultimate manager’s guide).

One of the sofa’s which was luckly enough to make the final rounds (i.e. got to perform in front of Simon Cowell and co), was this one, called – cutely – Oscar. Simple lines, modern look, sofa bed. From Furniture Village, which seems to be DFS’ more mature cousin, though this perhaps doesn’t say too much.

All fine and good.

Then the other day I visited Engadget.com, not a site I normally visit but a link had caught my eye on Twitter.



Engadget screenshot, with interesting add

Notice that ad? A bit like travelling to furthest Siberia, walking in to the dodgyist bar and finding your nan there, distinctly out of place. Click on the image for a lager version.

At the top of an American website about gadgets is an advert for a UK middle-of-the-road furniture store, advertising the exact sofa I had been considering for some time.

This was no coincidence.

Nor had they been using Alien technology to read my mind. I had visited the furniture site using the same laptop (and presumably same browser), a cookie and advertising system was at play here.

In fact my mind was made up when this evening I saw this.

This was on Time Magazine’s website (again a US publication), on a Photo Gallery about Afghan Women (see this for background, wonderful world).

It’s that cheeky little sofa again, this time popping up next to a repressive regime. You Guys!

Finally, notice on the red border of the ad, bottom right there is a little bulge, clicking on it…

http://www.struq.com/consumer-opt-out/ “Totally personalised display ads”.

Does this freak me out. Probably should do, but at the moment it borders on fun, like most people my tastes and wants are diverse enough to create stupid juxtapositions (Serious News and Girls Aloud, Global Warming and fast cars). It becomes an issue when it goes beyond, ‘person x has looked at product y from company z so show advert to it’,and becomes one entity building a database of everything you view and do online.

What a scary vision. Think I’ll stick with what I know and just use Google and Facebook.

Like

Unlike

No related posts.

The script collected data from http://roar.eprints.org/ – to be used as this weeks ‘number of records’ for each repository.

The reason became clear quickly. A major revamp to ROAR had just been launch, showing off a new interface, which used the Eprints software as a platform (essential a repository or repositories). This was a great leap forward but unfortunately removed the simple text file I used to collect the data, and what was more, the IDs for each IR had changed.

I finally got around to fixing this in May. The most fiddly bit was linking the data I collected now with the data I already had. This involved matching URLs and repository names.

Anyways. Things should be more or less as they were. A few little tweaks have been added. A few bugs still remain.

As ever you can view the code and changes here: http://trac.nostuff.org/ircount/browser/trunk

And checkout the svn here: http://svn.nostuff.org/ircount/

ircount can be found here: http://www.nostuff.org/ircount/

Like

Unlike

Related posts:

1. ircount : new location, new functionality
2. ircount : Repository Record Statistics
3. ircount development

The day reaffirmed my view of Summon, it is ground breaking in the Library market, and with no major stumbling blocks. They are very aware that coverage is key and seem to be adding items and publishers. It searches items that a organisation has access to (though users can tick a option to search all items in the kb, not just those they can access). They have good metadata, merging records from a number of sources, and making use of subject headings (to refine or exclude from the search).

There was general consensus that it made sense to maintain only one Knowledge-base, and therefore in this case, using 360 Link if implementing Summon. There was also general dissatisfaction for federated search tools.

To me, and I must stress this is a personal view, there are two products that I have seen which are worth future consideration: Summon and Primo. Summon’s strength is in the e-resources realm and as a resource discovery service. Primo’s strength, while offering these features/services, is as a OPAC (with My account features etc) and personalisation (tags, lists). Both products are in a stage of rapid development.

In my view, one decision to implement one of these products – which ever it is –  will have a chain reaction. And I think this is an important point. Using Sussex as an example, it currently has Aquabrowser (as a Library Catalogue), Talis Prism 2 (for Borrower Account, reservations, renewals), SFX (Link Resolver) and Metalib (Federated Search).

Two example scenarios (and I stress there are other products on the market and this is just my personal immediate thoughts):

One: Let’s say Sussex first decide to replace Metalib with Summon. They would probably cancel Metalib (Summon replaces it). Probably move from SFX to 360 Linker (one Knowledge base). May then wish to review our Library Catalogue in a years time: Primo is no longer on the cards (too much cross over with Summon, which we now already have), so they either stick with Aquabrowser (but the new SaaS v3 release) or perhaps move to Prism 3 (Talis’ new-ish SaaS Catalogue). Sussex would end up with no Ex Libris products, but would potentially subscribe to several Serial Solutions products.

Two: Let’s say Sussex decide to replace Aquabrowser with Primo (which acts more like a Catalogue than AB). They cancel Aquabrowser. Primo would (in addition to being the primary OPAC) have Summon-like functionality, allowing users to search a large database of items instantly, with relevance and facets. So Summon would not be an option. Stick with SFX (Metalib would be a side feature of Primo, with a Primo-like interface). With a number of Ex Libris products they would want to keep an eye on the Ex Libris URM (next genration LMS), they would have no Serials Solutions products.

The following are some notes from the day:

Sue White from Huddersfield Library started the day, saying it is probably the best decision they have ever made.

Related posts:

1. Library search/discovery apps : intro
2. Library Catalogues need to cater for light-weight discovery clients
3. Library catalogues, search systems and data

Suddenly PR is in the limelight and seems to be getting support from those disaffected by politics in the UK. I’ve long been pondering about how it is best to govern this country. Mainly about where power lies: The UK, nations, regions, counties, local councils, etc.

• We need a Constitution. No “we’ve already got the Magna Carta” is not a valid answer.
• The Lords needs thinking about. Almost removing hereditary piers has been a massive step. An elected upper chamber is the obvious solution. Though I’m not 100% behind it. Voting brings in a whole range of cons, pandering to popular opinion, short term-ism, and attracting those who want to be ‘politicians’. The current setup, for all it’s faults, avoids some of this. Appointing ‘good people’ to a upper house has merits and when it works it ensures a group of generally wise people with varied experience and skills can debate and pass legislation. The problem with elected members is that only a small set of people want to stand for election, canvas for votes, etc… and they generally are not the best for the job.
• However, ‘who selects who sits in the Lords’, and ‘how do they ensure a balanced upper house’ are questions that are hard to answer, and maybe an elected upper house is the only workable solution. If so, I would want long terms (10 years for example) to avoid short term thinking, and measures to avoid whips and parties dictating free thinking.
• While all those Westminster traditions are cute (the ‘other house’, ‘my Honorable friend’, divisions rather than instant votes), they actually stop the important process of good law making. They need reforming. The Digital Economy bill was a good example of this. While those (there was only 40 or so) in the house were almost universally (and across party lines) against various points and the bill in general, when it went to a vote (division), hundreds emerged from the bars etc to vote as the whips told them to. They had no idea what had been discussed. They may not have even read the bill, but vote as they were told they did. An instant vote taken in the house would have avoided this.
• We need clear and simple rules about how the nations are given power. Westminster being responsible for the UK and England is stupid and broken. For example when the Treasury was faced with an urgent need to cut spending they looked at what they could cut. This included UK spending (Defence, International Development, national policing, etc) and English services (Education, NHS England, etc). Defence couldn’t be cut, we are still fighting a Blair war, and we have promised to ring fence International Development. But… what about the English Higher Education budget. That could be cut. And few would notice. Scottish HE funding is decided by the Scottish Parliament, whose budget is set by formula, so wasn’t an option to be included in the cuts (this is not a Scottish dig, another time it will be their formula ‘tweaked’ for the worse, the point is this happen at different times in different ways for the two nations). To me this highlights the problem well of our mixed up way of running the UK. Each nation should have the same local powers….
• Yes that means a English Parliament. Yes that would come with costs.
• Fixed term elections are an interesting idea. It would avoid the advantage a ruling party has of choosing the best time for them to call an election, and bring about an element of certainty of when election will take place.
• Voting is difficult at the moment as we are effectively voting on so many things. Who will make a good Prime Minister, Which party has the best policies, which party is best placed to run the country, which local candidate is best to serve your local needs, which local candidate has the best policies. I’m not sure what the answer is…
• …Maybe we need to elect those to run the executive separately from electing those to sit in the House of Commons. Would be a very big change but worth a ponder.
• Obviously PR is on the cards. It has pros and cons but I think now the Pros massively out weigh the cons. The current system is simple – in a good way. Who ever gets the most votes in my area gets the seat. Party with most seats runs the country. However, it seems the country is moving away from a two party system (the two main parties now receive far less of the over all vote than they used to), and therefore this system is representing the voting habits of the nation less and less. Other countries have moved to PR quite successful in the last few years. Scandinavia, New Zealand and Germany seem to do it well. We  can learn from Israel and Italy’s mistakes.
• For me, the current system has another flaw. The party that has the most MPs (who mainly vote as the whips tell them to) runs the executive (which creates the Bills and controls the whips), Makes the whole parliamentary process somewhat pointless (rubber stamping).
• I’m actually quite optimistic about this coalition government. While no tory fan, the two parties have compromised mainly on giving up their most extreme ideas, the Lib Dems make Tories more socially responsible, the Tories ensure the Lib Dems do not follow some of their more wacky ideas. It does actually make democracy work very well. By definition, the policy areas they agree on (e.g. scraping ID cards and the associated databases) are those which most people voted for (anyone voting LD/Tory voted for a party with that policy), are the things that got through the negotiations with ease. Surely a good thing.

Like

Unlike

Related posts:

1. Davis (and Keene) wants England-only voting
2. Voting time
3. We’ve got a what?

Things that are important to me:

• Civil Liberties, privacy, and certain fundamentals of justice not being messed with on a whim.
• Reforming politics and government, in a slow and discussed manner (not Blair-boy’s ‘hey I’m so bored of a Lord Chancellor, lets scrape it…. who’s turn is it on the Playstation?’). I’m actually not convinced that an elected upper house is the answer, but if it is, it needs to avoid the mistakes of whips, parties, and short term thinking. PR must surely be a better system than first past the post.
• This includes a discussion on where we want discussions to be made, nationally or locally, etc. But this requires a public which understands that ‘local decisions by local people’ and ‘post code lottery’ are one and the same (which is used depends if the newspaper agrees with it or not).
• A Strong economy, which encourages small businesses (but with fair rules to protect and give employees rights… they are not all ‘pointless red tape’)
• A strong economy includes a strong financial sector. But carefully regulated to protect citizens from their mistakes and excess.
• A strong safety net for those (and there are many) who need it, whether it be age, ill health, disability, hard times or bad luck.
• Review of copyright and libel so they are fit for the 21st century.
• Strong planning laws to ensure we have a quality built-environment. but with progressive and new ideas (such as shared space streets, like the excellent New Street in Brighton). Quality public buildings and spaces (such as St Pancras Station and Wembley Stadium) are important.
• Education. I don’t have any answers but it needs to get better. Teachers need to be given space to teach, but in return they need to be good (not all are fit for the job). Endless government schemes don’t help, but nor do unions which seem to be simply against change.
• Ideas along the lines of ‘some people misuse X, therefore lets stop – and stigmatise X’ are generally a bad idea. Examples of X are ‘benefits’ and ‘not being married (and have kids)’.
• High speed trains are needed, to discourage air/car use, and to let people travel with ease, and to help move away from a economy focused around London.While Air/Road use should not be promoted, and in the long run other ways of living/working should be nurtured to avoid the need for travel, there is a need for some road improvements and probably (I regret) an extra runway in the South East England in the decade or so.
• We need an enlightened immigration policy. Though we all acknowledge open borders are not suitable for this small country (I am genuinely at a loss why people manage to illegally enter the Schengen Zone – in say Italy or Eastern Europe – and then rather head for prosperous Germany or beautiful France risk their lives on the bottom of a train trying to get in to the grey UK!), we do not want to be a place where others can not come to work, or escape from prosecution. Students and educated workers bring so much benefit to this country.
• ‘Heath and Safety gone mad’ is the refrain from the right of politics, and those who dislike the state interfering with their lives. This is easy to dismiss as the usual vile of a Daily Mail reader. Though there is argument that some things need to be rolled back. If people do really stupid things then that is their fault (obvious exceptions for children and those with learning difficulties). Vicarious responsibility can be a problem. Of course much Health and Safety law and practice is there for good reason but there are areas that need to be reviewed.
• Working together with other European countries makes sense, we have a lot in common, shared values, and common standards benefit us all. But there are areas of the EU which seem wasteful, undemocratic, unaccountable, etc. And these need to be addressed. There needs to be clear lines of what and where the EU can legislate on.
• Universities can be great for bringing in high tech companies, knowledge workers, and driving a SciTech, Medical, Creative industries economy. I’m not saying the tax payer should foot 100% of their bill, but cut backs have long term negative effects on a country.

This is not a full list, but just some of the ideas that came to mind. Feel free to comment.

Like

Unlike

Related posts:

1. Political reform : some quick thoughts
2. Davis (and Keene) wants England-only voting

The upshot of this is that the Lib Dems now have the slight chance that they will come a respectable third in the forthcoming election, instead of just a distant third. Obviously this is a matter of national emergency.

Luckily we have the great British press here to give an impartial view from the side. Especially so close to a general election. They speak the voice of the people. And act as the fourth pillar of democracy.

So on this important day, as the leaders take to the TV studio once again, with the sure knowledge the leaders of the two main parties are well primed in to stop this ‘Nick thing’, the papers are taking a reflective approach…

We start with the Express. They tackle the emergency by having the lead story, and the two main News stories dedicated to the serious issue at hand.

The Sun too decides the Nick of Doom is worth the lead story. They also manage to fit in the time of the debate, a welcome bit of advertising for which ever TV channel is doing it tonight (some company called Sky maybe, they’ll love the free advertising from these editorially independent chaps!).

The Telegraph goes for a modest ‘only the lead story’ approach. No. hang on, what’s that on the bottom right there, I see Andrew Gilligan, everyone’s favourite Liberal-left columnist does some important research. And who could have foreseen the timing!

Finally we have the Mail. Actually it looks quite tame for them. Just four articles, well, actually the FIRST four articles on their site, 222 comments and some video. They avoided any sort of emotionally charged piece by bringing up the Nazis and Hitler (but remember he wasn’t all bad).

But then I found a few more, in a novel idea of having more articles further down the page (who’d thought).

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1267921/GENERAL-ELECTION-2010-Nick-Clegg-Nazi-slur-Britain.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1267912/General-Election-2010-Liberal-Democrats-dirty-tricks-real-nasty-party.html

Lib Dems were the evil ones all along. Who Knew????

It’s like the fairground manager from Scooby-Doo all over again.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1267873/GENERAL-ELECTION-2010-Nick-Clegg-received-donations-directly-bank-account.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1267835/General-Election-2010-Lib-Dem-MPs-told-milk-expenses-leaks-reveal.html

That man on the right looks dodgy (and by dodgy I mean Working Class, obviously). God, can you imagine if the whole of parliament was fiddling their expenses.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/04/how-to-hang-a-parliament.html

In fairness (members of the press, click here to help sort out your confusion), this is just about a Hung Parliament rather than how evil Nick is.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1267839/How-Nick-Clegg-prepared-TV-debate-Sky-presenter-tells-talk-public-like-year-olds.html

No wonder the public like him. He talks to them like they are idiots. Which of course they are!

So that’s six articles from the Mail, all published today, 22nd (except the blog post, posted yesterday).

It’s not just the press who are alerted to his evils. Twitter too has done its bit: http://www.twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/nickcleggsfault

Finally. Serious bit… If you want decent news about the UK (or, for you crazy liberals, the rest of the world). Subscribe to The Economist, and also read the New York Times Europe section. Maybe we could have papers like that.

Related posts:

1. naughty boys and lots of sheep
2. People power : twitter is highlighting & affecting important issues.

We started to get a lot of feedback. We have feedback links on most web services we run and normally would get no more than one a year. What’s more many left one word responses, sometimes gibberish.

This was strange. The link was quite discrete. Why would people follow the link, sign-in and then just leave a few words, if any? why click the link in the first place. Even stranger, some left short cryptic messages along the lines that they were asked/forced to do it. Why? And by Whom?!

Still they came in, not huge amount but one or two a day. We even ask a few people why they left a message of random characters but got no answer.

Perhaps there was a link elsewhere on the web? We added something to the feedback form so that it tried to include the email it sent us the Referring page URL. This only semi worked as the authentication page (outside of our control) was in the middle, but didn’t throw up any clues.

It was frustrating, clearly something was making people follow this link, and continue to complete the page. Why?

It was during another batch of emails coming though in in January that again I tried asking people out of interest why they provided us with feedback. At last someone answered; they were just trying to renew their books and it came up.

This didn’t make sense. The few links to ‘My Account’ were clearly labelled and they were no where near to the feedback link. These were normal static links, no special code of javascript. They are on different servers and systems. How could a large number of people end up at our feedback page?

I thanked the user for her response, and then asked if they could explain a bit more. They confirmed they just clicked on the My Account link on the top left of the screen. Impossible!

I can’t quite explain the next line of thought, but it was something to do with the links being far away from each other. I tried resizing my browser. This happened:

It’s hard to spot. The two links on the far right have wrapped around on the green bar, they are almost unseen.

Just underneath the ‘My Account’ link you can see the tops of the tall letters for the Feedback link. The penny drops! It seems so obvious now. It quickly became clear that due to the html/css (imperfect) design of the page clicking on parts of the word ‘My Account’ would actually use the feedback link, and so take users to the Feedback page. They quite reasonably thought that they had to fill out the form before they could renew their books.

I can now sleep soundly at night. Mystery Solved.

No related posts.

Things I saw that I liked:

• An iphone app developed which allowed you to point your iphone in different directions (think augmented reality) and show what was currently on in the room your iphone was pointing in.
• This was possible because the wiki and programme exposed data in a machine readable way, using RDF & ical for each event, geo co-ordinates for rooms. With out this the above would not have been more difficult to produce. It proves the saying: the coolest thing to be done with your data will be thought of by someone else. And likewise, set your data free.
• Another app, little more than a simple iphone switch, allowed you to turn a light on and off. Of course the iphone could have been anywhere in the world when it turns the light on and off, the app calls a REST web interface on a notebook running a webserver which was connected to the light. Simple implementation of a nice idea, which much potential (someone was discussing how they want to be able to control their heating from their phone if they are out for the night, or if they are coming home early).
• RFID tags connected to the door of each room, each attendee had a small RFID tag so they could record if they entered or passed a room. A web interface was built to display this data and lots of ideas of how we could build on this. The RFID readers where a simple consumer model (from Touchatag), connected to netbooks and similar near by, and a mac mini acting as a central place to collect all the data. It was coded in ruby and used Redis as a quick and neat way to collect the data.
• A Developer Happiness iphone app which shows a number out of 10 representing on average how happy those at Dev8d are. It builds on the Happiness Pipe site built last year.
• I’m not sure how far they got, but some explored an open source OCR code library. They had the idea they could use these to try and OCR a frames from a videos on the web. This would have massive potential. indexing words from videos (say on youtube) whether super implanted on the screen, or signs and general wording in the image, would help improve searching for videos no end for starters. (of interest to us whose work includes resource discovery).
• A cheap 3D printer, which can almost replicate (print) itself. Clearly a device that can build a huge array of items (from wine glasses to children’s shoes, though made out of a plastic like substance) has potential to change the world we live in. Was very impressive to see it.
• Lots of hardware hacking going on and clever genetics stuff too, in fact loads not covered here.

I created a twitter account which posts the latest blogs, videos and photos. You can read about it here (this is more for info, sounds stupid when coming after the amazing things above). I also started to learn Ruby on Rails and python.

I was somewhat envious of those who by the end of the few days were able to say ‘look what I’ve built’, but then I’m no a developer as such, and certainly not as clever or geeky as some at the event. That is not to say I wasn’t busy, trying out lots of little things, discussing things with others, meeting lots of new people, attending expert talks and a couple of coding labs and trying out lots of things.

An example of 45 minutes: On seeing a tweet saying Ed Summers (LCSH Linked Data fame) was starting his expert talk for 15 minutes I went running in to that room to catch it (with power cable tailing behind me), great talk and was followed by a couple of guys from Mendeley – a great app and like last.fm they are collecting a lots of data which we should be able to do some interesting things with using the new API. This was followed by a great talk from Kate Pekacar from the MLA explaining their efforts to open the data of various collections and their keenness that the likes of Dev8D create useful new ways for people to discover these collections. Three different talks yet all interesting stuff and related to the day job.

I was lucky enough to attend the awards ceremony on the Friday night. One of those receiving an award was Garry Bulmer, who had run the popular Arduino workshops, who said teaching and working with those who were so enthusiastic and smart was a joy. This seemed to sum up the event well. It works because those attending want to challenge themselves, try something new, work with new people and move sightly outside their comfort zone. It would be easy to not do much at barcamp style events, but the reverse actually happens as people try and squeeze so much in to the few days, often working on tasks late in to the night.

If I had to sum up what I got out of this – a difficult task not due to lack of quantity but the sheer broadness and soft qualities of what has been gained – I’d add to what I’ve already out above:

• There were 15 minute expert lightening talks that have informed and got me thinking more than entire one day workshops and conferences.
• In terms of hard facts, getting started with two programming languages both very useful when working and developing for the web. Learning these would have taken days in themselves, it’s hard to stress how much you can pack in to an afternoon when you have an excellent expert leading the session working with bright people in the room (my brain hurt a lot throughout).
• Motivation is hard to identity, quantify and where exactly it originates, but I come away from this even with a higher opinion of the industry I work in, the Tech/dev community around Higher Education and our ability to break through old ways of working and needless bureaucracy. I think it helps those attend see a bigger picture to what they are doing. Tired yet with a fresh urge to build new things and Get Things Done.
• I ended up talking to lots of people I wouldn’t do normally, neither personally or socially. This is useful in itself, but I think the experience itself is useful (especially for the socially inept like me). I found myself a few times suddenly talking to people (often from the States) who have created high profile web apps, including those which have nothing to do with HE or libraries.

All in all. Tired. Good event. Good food. Metropolitan line crap. Well organised. Nice people. Brain hurts. Learnt lots. Shambrarian meeting a success . Chatted Lots. Drank a moderate amount while adhering to medical daily recommended limits. Obviously.

Like

Unlike

No related posts.

This post goes through some of the techy stuff behind it. If you’re just interested in features, I’m afraid there’s none yet, but you can now compare more than 4 repositories, but that’s as far as you’ll want to read.

Subversion and Track

The first thing I did a few months a go was create a Subversion repository. I seemed to time this quite well in learning how to use subversion just as every man and his dog gets excited by GIT.

I also installed Trac (using Dreamhost‘s useful one-click install), which I haven’t really used other than to browse the code and view changes (time-line).

The repository is publicly available from here: http://svn.nostuff.org/ircount/

The trac site (which can be used to browse the code) is found at: http://trac.nostuff.org/ircount/

It took me a while to get svn working well. Originally I would edit the files in a local working copy of my Macbook, and then use subversion to load these to the server to test. Of course, this meant every little change had to be manually checked in to test it. I got apache and php working on the Macbook, and setup the Mysql db (on the Dreamhost server) to allow connections remotely which allowed me to test/use files located in my local copy. This seems to work well.

I use svnx as a GUI Mac client. It’s free and is easy to use.

The code. The rewrite

I don’t do much code writing or developing. Anyone glancing at my work will take that as plain obvious.

I’ve realised when writing code I have a tendency to be very linear and unconsciously put efficiency before good design. Anything more than one database call per page was unthinkable, loading in other pages a sin, which often led to large unwieldy while loops processing the results from a massive database call. Database calls are mixed with html output mixed with logic.

This is just about ok when showing information about one Institutional Repository. But when comparing a number, it becomes unreadable, and not in any state to be reused. The key aspect of comparing a number of IRs is that you need to ascertain a number of facts for the page as a whole (the earliest data collection date for the page, the higher record count for the page – for the chart for example – which could be from any of the IRs).

My  aim was that the page files should be little more than calls to a few discrete functions.

I’m not quite there yet, but it’s a start. archive.php is mainly a set of function calls, but there is still too much in there, and random bits of html code dotted around. There’s also too many arrays holding information the repository (php) objects can provide. include.php holds the functions, but is now a little bit unwieldy itself, with functions ordered randomly. The third file of note is class.archive.php. This is a repository object, which can grab data from the db for the repository, and return it to the calling page in various ways.

My original plan was to merge the code for showing one repository, with the code to show more than one, to make it easier to implement changes (not having to update two files). By the end of it, I’m now wondering if it would be easier to have two files again, for the little changes, which both call the same core functions.

Google Chart

Google Chart is a great API and I recommend anyone to play with it.

However one of the problems of the last version of ircount is that the URLs for the chart images often became too long (more than 2,000 characters) resulting in no chart being shown. The Chart URL includes each data point separated by a comma, so four repositories multiplied by 100 weeks (for example), multiplied by 4 or 5 digits per datapoint (4 digit number plus a comma), it soon adds up.

One solution was to only pass data per month rather than per week (roughly reducing the number of data points to a quarter of the original). Another would have been (and probably will do in the future) to make use of Google Chart’s encoding function, made easy using these helpful functions.

Overcoming this in an efficient way was a challenge. Originally I had a Google Chart PHP object. IR data would be passed to it in one method, and another method would return the URL.

This seemed sensible at the time, but deciding which php object did what became confusing. For example, the first thing the chart object needed to do was decide if the URL would be too long for the Repositories in question, taking in to account the data we had for each repository. Should the chart object loop around each data point for each repository to first decide how many there are? or should the repository object be handling this by telling the chart object how much data it has? How to avoid the need to loop through the same data several times. Does it matter which object does the work? It’s for the chart, so the chart object should do it, yet other parts of the page may want this info about the repositories, so the repository objects should provide it for all.

In the end, I did away with the chart object and used a function instead, which is passed an array of repository objects, which in turn handle a lot of work.

Future

The foundations are about there. For any page I (or anyone else) wishes to create. A couple of lines are all that are needed to take one or more repository IDs passed in the URL and load in all the data for them, ready to be used as needed. We can then easily call a table or chart to display for these repositories (or a subset of them).

As I mentioned above, the only real improvements are the ability to show more than 4 repositories at once (the chart stops showing once you get to about nine repositories), and the chart is more robust and will now show when it would have failed to do so in the past.

Google Chart does have an encoding which allows far more to be passed in a condensed way, and this php function looks very useful for using it.

If I was starting again today I would look to use a framework such as Zend Framework or CakePHP, or maybe even have a go at Ruby on Rails. But perhaps a third rewrite is a little over the top for now.

I need to tidy up the table view a bit (some nasty code there) and then look to a few new features, may be collecting more data, and exposing it in some computer friendly formats such as atom.

So ircount is really no more than a play thing for a bad coder to make mistakes and learn a little bit along the way. slowly. but if you have any ideas or thoughts I would love to hear them.

Like

Unlike

Related posts:

1. ircount : Repository Record Statistics
2. ircount : new location, new functionality
3. ircount : update

I round up my findings here:

Three twitter clients

Twirl

Adobe Air based, with a simple, effective and attractive interface. It just works and has some nice features. You can activate searches so that their results appear in your main feed. updates can appear on screen in small popup notifications. In many ways I see it as the baseline of what a client should be.

Very occasionally it’s non native Air roots would show through with quirks with widgets and UI controls (e.g. a scroll bar not behaving like it should). It could be easy to miss replies and mentions that come in when you are not looking, once off the screen there is no indication that they are there. Some of the newer clients go further than Twirl with integrating with third party apps and displaying conversations. Clicking on a hashtag will open a web browser twitter search, it would be neater if it opened it’s own search tab instead.

Seesmic Desktop

Seesmic bought twirl a while back, and their website now implies Seesmic Desktop is the main client. It’s currently my twitter client at work.

The good: (often) auto completes on usernames. Handles multiple accounts well (they all seem to handle more than one account). Two (or more) column layout works well, but seems to require less screen space than TweetDeck. A good all around client, similar to Twirl

The not so good. Interface could be better, and perhaps too cluttered. On my work PC the interface stutters a little when new tweets come in, a slight delay while new avatar images load which for someone reason is noticeable and a little distracting.

A mention must also go to Seesmic web client. An excellent choice if away from your normal computer. Acts like a desktop client in a web browser.

Echofon

This is the client I have stuck with on the Mac.

The Good: Nice simple interface. One of it’s best features is it’s pop out draw which shows conversations, this is useful, click on the conversation button next to any tweet to see the whole thread, including those you do not follow.

Another nice feature, clicking on a link to an image (on twitpick, yfrog, flickr etc) opens a window showing just the image, no need to load a webpage to have a quick look at an image.

When replying/mentioning someone you can undo the twitter ‘reply’ functionality (i.e. so it’s just a tweet that mentions their username, rather than a tweet which replies to a specific tweet), useful because twitter will only show your reply to those who also follow the person you are replying to (i.e. probably most your followers will not see what you are saying).

Not so good: no auto complete on usernames. when I’m in the middle of composing a tweet and click on ‘reply’ next to a person’s tweet, I want their name to appear where the cursor is, not at the start of the tweet, this is quite annoying. It has a search tab, but no way to auto-update search results (e.g. when following conference tweets), or for them to appear in your main stream.

TweetDeck

Seems to be the most popular client in use at the moment. Like Twirl and Seesmic Desktop it is Adobe Air based.

The Good: Allows for users to be put in to groups and different columns for different groups, e.g. a group of core friends you don’t want to miss anything from. Seems to be the choice of power users. Auto completes usernames.

The not so good: interface isn’t great, and seems to take up a lot of space, with each tweet taking up more room, and the need of multiple columns. Personally, I know it’s very popular, but the interface has never worked for me. Partly because I prefer my twitter client to tick away on one side of the screen while I work in another app which uses the rest of the screen. Tweetdeck doesn’t seem to be designed with this in mind.

Tweetie

I haven’t tried but some people I follow on twitter highly rate it. Not free but sounds like it is worth checking out.

Twitt

Seems quite a new twitter client for the Mac, see their homepage here.

I haven’t really looked at it other than start it up quickly, so can’t really comment. UI seems simple, uncluttered and nice, but there seems a lot of space around each tweet, so less tweets on screen at anyone time. One slight annoying thing, on first start up, rather than asking for a username, it just stated there was an error getting tweets, not a huge problem but not very welcoming. One to watch.

To Conclude…

Having tried a few clients, here are some of the features I like (or would like to see) and will keep an eye open for when looking at any new client.

• Seeing conversations with one click without needing to go to the browser (echofon does a great job here)
• Autocomplete usernames. (Tweetdeck/Seesmic Desktop), so I don’t have to remember the exact spelling of a username when I want to mention someone.
• A simple way to browse all the people I follow (sorted alphabetically and any other useful way), for when I want to mention someone but have no idea of their name but will recognise it when i see it, or recognise their avatar.
• A way to workaround Twitter’s broken replies (i.e. if you reply to someone only those who follow the person you are replying to will see your tweet, even if it is of general interest). When you reply to someone, some clients allow you to click a small button so that your tweet is a normal tweet (which so happens to mention another user) rather than a reply. Useful, but wonder if there is more clients could do to work around this.

There’s not much between them. I’m currently using Seesmic on my work PC and echofon on my home macbook, but would happily be using Twirl or Tweetdeck as well. All have useful features that others do not have, but none seem to have a killer feature which puts them above the rest. We should of course be thankful so many people and organisations have developed clients for free!

I’d be interested to here what features others find useful, and which clients they prefer. Why is TweetDeck so popular?

Update (2nd Dec) : A few days after I posted this I tried using TweetDeck again at work. I still don’t think the UI is as good as others, but it does have some nice features and gets most things right. Of note is the username auto completion. But perhaps its biggest selling point is that other clients tend to each miss one or two bits of useful functionality, where as Tweetdeck has most of the features you might find useful. For example, you can mark a user as spam and their tweets and replies are removed from view. Another example, from any tweet, you can do just about any action for the user of the specific tweet (see user profile, add user, email tweet etc). Seeing conversations, profiles and pictures within tweetdeck is also useful.

It’s weaker points (apart from UI): I have the window wide enough to see ‘All friends’ and ‘mentions’ and it’s easy to miss direct messages. Also, I’m not keen on how it handles multiple accounts. I had set-up Seesmic Desktop so that the main tweets column showed tweets for my main account. But the mentions column shows mentions for either my main account or a work related account (where it was important to respond to any reply that occasionally came in). It doesn’t seem possible to do this with Tweetdeck, and so far it seems that basically all settings are for all twitter accounts, i.e. can’t use different settings for different accounts.

Update Feb 2010:

• DestroyTwitter is a nice Adobe Air app, it uses less resources and screenspace than others. Smaller and a nicer UI than Tweetdeck, but with less features. Available for Windows and OS X. The developer is currently taking a break from developing it.
• Seesmic for Windows is a Windows native app,  not to be confused with Seesmic Desktop, an Adobe Air app. This is nice and you can expect updates and new features in the future. With its left hand bar it does take up a bit of screen space (and it doesn’t highlight when a new reply/mention/dm has come in). No auto-complete when writing usernames in tweets yet. But one to watch and one of the very few Windows native applications.
• Seesmic Look had an impressive launch event, and takes a different approach. Almost a ‘twitter for those who don’t tweet’, it focuses on browsing and navigating through tweets, and grouping them in to topics.
• Finally, with the advent of the new Retweet system and lists, it brings me sadness to say that Twirl must now be considered obsolete. I now recommend to those who use it to try something else: Echofon for OS X, DestroyTwitter or Seesmic Windows for PC and TweetDeck for power users .
• Finally a quick heads up to the new Feathers iphone app from fellow (but much smarter) Brightonian Aral Balkan, not a main stream twitter client, but one which allows you to tweet using unusual characters and unicode.

Like

Unlike

Related posts:

1. People power : twitter is highlighting & affecting important issues.
2. ecto : first impressions
3. PubSubHubbub instant RSS and Atom

Many attempts to use drap and drop to replace programming lead to confusing design. Examples are yahoo pipes, Business Objects, and most of all MS Access.

What’s impressive with Automator is that it always seems it was designed with the very problem you want to solve in mind.

My Problem (apart from the drink)

I use command+shift+4 to get screen grabs a lot. For twitter, for blogs (in fact for this very post), for documents, etc. However I end up with lots of images on my desktop called Picture 1, Picture 2, etc.

I want to keep these, for future use, but want a clutter free desktop.

The problem is, if I try and drag these in to a folder, there will already be a Picture 1, Picture 2 from previous occasions. Leading to annoyingly having to rename every file, or create a sub-directory for each time it runs.

Now I have a simple Automator script.

Each time I run it, it moves everything in to a folder, with the create date in front of the name. It was easy to search for ‘actions’ (‘move’, ‘rename’) and browse (‘Files’ -> ‘Find Files’).

Like

Unlike

Related posts:

1. Mulberry Dead… woohoo

Curious, I read the Guardian article it linked to. A gagging order to stop a paper report the proceedings of parliament. This is not very good. I muttered and got back on with the this and that. A few minutes later another tweet from secretlondon came in:

Now we have seeds of information! To Hansard, To Wikipedia, To Google. Who were Trafigura, who were Carter-Ruck?

Soon other tweets were coming along about this, and I was adding my two pence too, re-tweeting the news and adding my own little links to what I was finding.

Hansard provided the details the Guardian couldn’t report, and it quickly became clear what they were trying to hide.

By now twitter was alight. Hashtags came in to usage. Following these produced more information, once someone found something, they didn’t just share with their followers, but with everyone now following those tags. Previous Guardian articles (amongst others) were brought to our collective attention.

Before this I had not heard of Trafigura or Carter-Ruck. I suspect many were the same, yet now we were angry about what we read about their questionable activities (one apparently dumps nasty stuff in Africa, the other boasts about suppressing the press, regardless of truth). A storm was brewing and I felt it had yet to peek. But it was late and sleep beckoned.

The next morning I was curious if there had been any developments over night.

First thing I came across was a Spectator online article (a publication on the other side of the political spectrum to the Guardian). It quoted the Guardian article heavily, but then went on to quote the part of Hansard that contained the question (and company name) that the Guardian could not and provided links. I tip my hat to them. #Trafigura was now trending, celebrity twitterers (including our Lord Steven Fry) were highlighting it and more.

It felt like it was everywhere, on the news, and over in coffee room colleagues were talking about it. The Streisand effect had truly kicked in. Before noon on the 13th the case had been dropped. The Guardian was no longer prevented on reporting on the story.

Five Days later

Five days later a Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir wrote a homophobic piece (since edited) about the very recent death of singer Stephen Gately. A similar thing happens. A storm brews up. Not organised. But distributed little efforts or raising attention, mainly through twitter, which leads to coverage in main stream media and changes to the article and headline.

Black Out and Breaking News

And back in February there was a ‘black out’ campaign because of a proposed repressive internet law in New Zealand. Again, partly due to the coverage on sites like twitter, the section in question was scrapped.

It’s not just campaigns and activism. Breaking news is spread rapidly via twitter, such as the plane crash in New York (Twitter broke the story, and first images of the plane in the water came from Twitter), and Michael Jackson’s death.

But twitter doesn’t always have it’s own way. There was a Green avatar campaign for democracy in Iran, which sadly never saw success.

We’re seeing two things here…

1 – That information is now able to spread much faster than it ever has before. This has always been the case with the Internet, and has increased each year with new technologies (blogs, social networking), but especially with twitter.

2 – That people spreading this information leads to the main stream press reporting on it, and those under pressure back tracking. (I wonder how essential that middle step is?)

Twitter is such a good tool for the first point. It is instantaneous, not just the web, but on computer twitter clients and phones, and messages are public by default (unlike many other social networking sites where they are restricted to a specific groups or trusted circle of friends). Having an Open technical platform (which allows any other website or application to access tweets) also helps.

So…

My instant reaction is that this must be a good thing. When something bad is happening in the world (sorry, that sounds very simplistic) twitter, and other websites, can spread the information quickly and widely, even to those who don’t follow the news each day. This can lead to positive change.

The Trafigura/Carter-Ruck case is a good example of this. Imagine if it had happened 10 years a go. People (well, only Guardian readers) would have read the Guardian front page but not had a clue what it was about. In fact The Guardian may well not have run it as a front page story (or at all) as it would have simply confused/frustrated their readership. The Guardian took a gamble by putting this on to the front page, knowing (hoping) it would then become a story in its own right. It did, probably more than they ever hoped.

Noteworthy information is a virus, once it is in the wild it is unstoppable.

But all is not rosy. It will be slippery slope. I’m reminded of the 1995 film ‘the Last Supper‘. In the film they start off killing of the worst people in society, but as time goes on, things become more complex and grey and less clear cut. The Trafigura case was clear cut. Those trying to stop the BBC putting Nick Griffin on to Question Time, less so. There’s a thin line between the people power righting wrongs and mob rule.

One final example – baby and bump

Last Christmas I came across a news story about a ‘Lapland in the New Forest’. Long story short it was a con. Promised a lot, but was little more than muddy fields and a few fun fair (pay to use) rides, two santas (queue for hours, not allowed to take photos) and the odd tree with fairly lights, with staff who were untrained and the worst possible people to be interacting with kids.

For some reason I looked up to find out more. And I came across a thread on a web based forum called baby and bump (you can guess what it’s for). The thread was the top result on Google so became one of the main exchanges on the web for those affected by this.

The thread starts off with a few excited people discussing going to the Lapland attraction and how excited the kids are, and how much they have splashed out (money they couldn’t afford to throw away). Then those who visited the first few days after opening reported back, while others are in denial that it can be that bad. Then it really starts, more report back, and others start to join the forum simply to add their experience.

Then the fact finding starts: the owners name and address, other business addresses, legal rights, who in the council to complain to, who in the press to contact, how to file a small claims, the owner is related to the leader of Brighton (my) Council!

I like this example. It isn’t the twitterati or tech-savy web2.0 types, but just families on a simple web forum. No one organised anything, but many added bits of info, supported others, or shared their experiences. I would say it very much played it’s part in the early closure of this cruel con. After returning from a horrible day, cold, upset kids, after paying quite a sum upfront, it must feel frustrating and helpless, I think even finding others who have been through the same must be of some help. The Internet can really help in such situations. But it’s not the power of the internet, it’s the power of people. The Internet just acts as a enabling tool.

So Twitter is allowing us to share information and become aware of facts/situations in a way not thinkable until now, and at a very quick speed.

Related posts:

1. Twitter clients
2. UCU: Guardian article