Counting down to Christmas

If the mention of advent calendars makes you think of cheap chocolate and badly made cardboard doors that fall apart when you try to open them, think again. Here's a run down of a couple of online advent calendars that are worth a look this year:

24 ways

24 ways is "the advent calendar for web geeks" - a great place to learn a little something new in the countdown to Christmas. The articles are written by a line-up of some of the web's most talented designers, bloggers and visionaries, and cover a real diverse range of topics. So far this year there have been some excellent posts ranging from cutting edge topics like new features in HTML5, to good old back-to-basics stuff like writing really good content. The site has been running since 2005, and the archives are worth a good rummage through too.


25 days of blogging at Edge Hill University

The Web Services folks over at Edge Hill are running their own version of 24 ways this year, with guest posts and an equally diverse range of topics - I was very pleased to learn today that the Radio Times website uses hCalendar microformats - who knew. Makes me wish that we could make more time to blog!

New Computer Science website live

Yesterday the Department of Computer Science launched their revised website, now managed and published using the Web CMS.

This is the first site we've published to a separate sub-domain and the publication process presented a few challenges along the way. However, we're happy to report that the issues we had are all resolved and all seems to be working well.

Many thanks to Computer Science for all their hard work and congrats on a great result.

Blog publishing from Word

I've just created a new document in MS Word 2007 for the first time since I upgraded and there were two options presented: blank document or blog post. I'm not supposed to be writing a blog post right now, but the temptation is too good to resist.

Early signs are good, because Blogger is listed as a blog I can write for. The next step doesn't fill me with confidence because Word announces that when it contacts the blog provider my username and password may be visible to others. But I'm reckless, so carried on regardless.

I'm now writing my blog post in what looks like Word's normal editing screen, just with a few things removed. It's actually quite good.

Site Manager conference and version 7.0

Myself, Paul and Bill were in Dublin last week at an event called T44U, a conference run by TerminalFour who supply our Site Manager Web CMS. Hearing how lots of other Site Manager users run their systems is always fascinating and it was a great opportunity for us to pass on ideas about the product to T4.

The main focus of T44U this year was version 7.0 of Site Manager, currently in development. This is a major new version of the product and significantly enhances the user interface. We're part of a beta programme for the new version and have been trying out the first release for a month or so. There are lots of improvements, but of course as an early release there are still issues to be worked through so we've been sending lots of feedback. We were name-checked as the beta-test client who had submitted the most feedback, so there should be lots of York-influence in the final product! It'll be a while yet before it's ready for general release, but there's definitely lots to look forward to.

Finally, Paul and I gave a short presentation at T44U on some new functionality that we commissioned and developed with T4. I'll not go into details here (far too dull!), but the basic change is that we can now easily use a variety of file extensions for pages on our site. It may not sound exciting, but it makes provision of RSS feeds lots easier and facilitates the creation of iCal feeds and integration of Coldfusion content.

Mo-vember!

A heads up to our colleague in the Computing Service, John Cooper, who's participating in Movember. This is an annual, month-long celebration of the moustache, highlighting men’s health issues.

To date, Movember has raised over £30 million globally for the fight against prostate cancer and depression in men - suicide being the second biggest cause of death for young men in the UK.

John's facial hair is coming along nicely - please have a look, vote on his mo, and support him if you can.
http://uk.movember.com/mospace/5162

Happy Birthday - Firefox turns five!

In case you missed it, Mozilla Firefox turned five years old yesterday, which is nearly a lifetime in Internet years.




I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how browser usage has changed on our site over the last couple of years. We started using Google Analytics back in May 2007, and Firefox usage has been steadily on the increase since then, rising from 11% to 21% of our traffic:



Over that same time period we've seen Internet Explorer usage drop from 86% to 66%, and Safari and Chrome on the rise, with 8% and 3% shares respectively.

Browser	Percentage of traffic, October 2009	Percentage of traffic, May 2007
1. Internet Explorer	66.32%	86.24%
2. Firefox	21.29%	11.18%
3. Safari	7.75%	1.77%
4. Chrome	3.30%	0.00%
5. Opera	0.64%	0.24%

And amazingly, Netscape is still lurking in the top ten, with 832 visitors (0.10%) last month, who must still think it's 2002.

The York Management School now live

The York Management School is the latest University department to go live with a new site using the Web CMS.

The School is using some of the recently-launched templates including staff profiles, tabs, image gallery and events and news listing.