Where does all the bandwith go?

Another graph-based post - stop me if you're getting bored of them!

Arthur from the Computing Service recently blogged about how the University's connection to the outside world gets used:
 

Here black is the overall, purple is streaming protocols and green is “standard” protocols (including http, email etc). A lot of people are watching a lot of videos and/or playing flash games.
(BTW If you’re wondering how academics ever get to do any work, most of that video is actually going to the student study bedroom network rather than the main campus network)

Some quick stats on the Uni’s external link 

UCAS release iPhone app for tracking university applications

UCAS have recently released an iPhone application,  which allows students to track the progress of their university applications. According to UCAS, it allows you to:

See which universities have offered you a place, and view any replies you've made. You can find out the key dates in the UCAS calendar and get the answers to your questions in the FAQ section. 

What's it like?

There's not really anything to say on the content or functionality of the app, as you can't get past the first screen without a UCAS username and password, but it sounds like a good idea.


UCAS on the App Store

Writing for the Web session in July

There's another of our semi-regular Writing for the Web sessions coming up next month, on Tuesday 6 July.

These sessions are a quick introduction to the challenges that face us when we're writing content for websites, with lots of practical tips and examples of how to create content that is more likely to be discovered, read, and acted on.

The session is an hour long, from 9.30am to 10.30am in HG21 Heslington Hall.

If you'd like to attend, please let me know (pak500@york.ac.uk). Please let anyone else from your department know if you think they'd find it useful too.

Image by surrealmuse

When all you have is a (jQuery) hammer, everything looks like a (jQuery) nail

It's no secret around these parts that I'm a big fan of the jQuery JavaScript library. It's certainly changed the way I write code, and has allowed me to do things that I wouldn't have thought possible before. But like most things, it's possible to rely on it a bit too much.

Recently, I wanted include a Twitter feed in a website. My immediate thought was "I bet there's a jQuery plug-in that does that".  And of course, there was one. In fact, there were quite a lot of them.

I tried a few, many of which had lots of impressive sounding features ("show all the tweets from user xyz that use the hashtag #foo and mention the word 'bar'!") . But I wasn't really happy with any of them, as they all felt a bit slow and bloated (probably due to the big list of features that I didn't actually need).

I then remembered that Twitter provides lots of ways to get this data via the Twitter API, as RSS, XML, JSON or whatever format you want. Once you've got that, it just takes a few lines of JavaScript (or you could just use the JavaScript that Twitter provides) to turn that into a feed that's embedded on your site.

Done, without a jQuery plug-in in sight.


Image by Cellular Immunity