Universities and the Web » websitemanagement

Thank Microsoft It’s Monday

Billy — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:22:51 +0000

One of the irritations in my work is receiving word documents for updated webpages with no indication of the content that’s been updated within it. A two-page word document for a staff profile might have two or three changes in it but I’ve got to check every word against the webpage to find those changes. The alternative of recreating the page from scratch is even more time-inefficient.

So I was made up this morning to find this 4-step tutorial describing the process for comparing two separate documents in Word. I can see me using this a lot!

Image copyright use according to the stock agencies

Billy — Wed, 19 May 2010 09:43:12 +0000

I try to regularly highlight sources of creative commons images on this blog, but it’s also important to understand copyright from the view of photographic stock agencies. One of them (their terms of use seems to prevent me from using their trademarked name or from reproducing a screenshot of their website) has recently launched stockphotorights.com, with answers to a lot of basic, but often misunderstood, issues.

Capture full webpage screenshots

Billy — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:11:28 +0000

Anyone working in web has to include screenshots in reports regularly. When the webpage is longer than the screen I’ve been using Photoshop to put together the final image. So I was pleased to see this Lifehacker article yesterday highlighting a tool for easily capturing full page screenshots.

Typically, on reading the comments to the article I realised that everyone seems to already have various methods and tools for doing this. Thanks for letting me know! I’ve now installed the Pearl Crescent Page Saver for Firefox and life has got that little bit easier..

National Archives release images under no known copyright restrictions

Billy — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:15:19 +0000

I’ve mentioned Flickr’s Commons before as a great source of historical photography for online publication, but it does tend towards US organisations/interests. So it’s great to see today that the UK National Archives are adding images to the Commons under no known copyright restrictions.

Not just photos either. There’s a set of historical documents, another includes seals and artifacts.

Best in higher education design

Billy — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:06:50 +0000

Design blog Smashing Magazine rounds up the best examples of homepage design in higher education.

There’s a few UK institutions in the list including:

Navigate using j and k on keyboard

Billy — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:07:34 +0000

Ever since I first used bloglines I’ve been trying to use j and k shortcut keys to navigate blogs and websites. I’d love to see browsers implement it as a way of moving between headers in page content (are there accessibility issues with this?). Thanks to this article on new wordpress plugins, I’ve been able to add the functionality to the index and archive pages of this blog using the Prev-Next Keyboard Navigation plugin. Try it out.

A year of Itunes U at UCL

Billy — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:59:25 +0000

Some thoughts on a year of Itunes U at UCL from Jeremy Speller, with interesting reflections on the workload involved (they’re now hiring an itunes specialist) and interaction with moodle.

Directions to campus code snippet

Billy — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:30:40 +0000

Another (potentially*) really handy bit of code from Google, this allows you to embed a form in your contact us/directions information allowing users to get directions from google maps to your specified location. My example below gives directions from any address to Southampton University:

You can specify a multiple choice for end locations.

*Unfortunately, I’d choose against using this at the moment as it seems to have problems with uk postcodes, I can’t imagine this remaining an issue for long.

Google helps with creative commons image search

Billy — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:35:33 +0000

[Image of fireworks over Oxford University, licensed by Simon Tong]

Google Images has added the option to search for images specifying a creative commons licence. This provides a much wider range of images to choose from, although I’d be extra careful about checking the licenses with images before using them.

Survey – investigation into the management of website content

Billy — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:04:15 +0000

A request from the efoundations blog for anyone involved in online content management in UK higher education to complete their survey – Investigation into the management of website content in higher education institutions. It took me a good 20 minutes to fill it in, but the questions were thought-provoking and I look forward to the publication of the report in time for the Institutional Web Managemant Workshop at the end of July [booking closes tomorrow, 19 June 2009, apparently].