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

Vanbrugh goes live

The new Vanbrugh College website went live today.

The home page features a striking image of the College piazza shortly after it was first built, an image which tones in with the new College colours of purple and teal.

Psychology goes live

The Department of Psychology has a new website within the Web CMS.

The Department was one of the first to agree to move their site over and its size and complexity gave the team some useful integration challenges - experience which has improved the service for future users.

The migration is phased, so much of their content aimed at staff and students is still on the old site and will be moved later in the year as part of Phase 2 of their project.

Halifax College

The new Halifax College website went live today in the Web CMS.

This marks the half-way point in the Colleges project, with three more colleges working away in the system and another due to go live next week.

Update to freqently asked questions CMS template

If you're a CMS user you might have spotted that pages generated using the FAQ template have changed slightly in their appearance and behaviour, which should increase their usability a bit.

Before

Here's how they used to look. Clicking a question reveals the answer.



After

Here's how they look now:



Have a look at a live example on the Department of Physics website to see the full effect.

What's changed

• The answers now slide into place rather than instantly appearing. With the previous instant reveal there was always a chance of "blink and you'll miss it", and not quite noticing that the answer had appeared.
• The background colour and borders should help to tie the question and answer together - in the previous style it wasn't always clear where one answer ended and another question began, especially when the answer contained headings, or when FAQs have been used amongst normal page content.
  
• Minor change to font size and removal of underlines on headings to increase readability.
• The whole width of the question area is now a link, so there's a larger link target for people to hit.