History of the University - an interactive timeline

Recently we published an interactive timeline on which you can explore the key milestones, facts and figures of the University's 50 year history. There are over 150 entries, including historical images, newspaper clippings and videos of the University's past, all in an easy to use and attractive interactive format.

Building the timeline

The timeline was built using Tiki-Toki, an cloud-based timeline product. We tested quite a lot of alternatives and nothing really compared; it's a great product.

Users can pan, zoom, enlarge and browse stories quickly and easily, including on tablets and smartphones. The timeline can be filtered to just show a particular category of story or searched for keywords. We've been really pleased with the response so far - everyone who has seen it seems to like it.

The Tiki-Toki authoring interface

From the creator's end, too, it is incredibly easy to use, requiring only a date and some text in order to place a story on the timeline. The software automatically places an entry in the relevant spot and manages the spacing of multiple stories. The ability to embed images, audio and video is also helpful, and has allowed us to develop a rich gallery alongside the textual information presented.

Top 10 press releases, features and public lectures on the web in 2012

While it may be April, there are always things we can learn from evaluating past years, so we’ve decided to have a look over the most popular news, features and public lectures were on the University website in 2012.

Press releases

The University’s Press Office published over 200 press releases in 2012, resulting in media coverage around the world. The top stories on the University website were as follows.

10. Yoga: a cost-effective treatment for back pain sufferers?

Published mid-August, this story of the UK’s largest study of the health benefits of yoga describes how specialised classes could be a cost-effective way of treating back pain. The story had a second spike in visits in mid-Autumn as interest picked up again on Facebook.

9. University of York formally joins the Russell Group today

This article from August announces the University’s joining of the Russell Group, following its acceptance to the organisation earlier in the year.

8. University of York students celebrate success

Graduation was in the second week of July. A lot of traffic here came from Google, Twitter and Facebook.

7. Academic leaders help York to mark its 50th year

For its fiftieth anniversary, the University appointed sixteen new professors, as detailed in this article from July 4th.

6. Scientists discover new clue to the chemical origins of life

Published in January, this story describes a process which hints at how life on Earth first formed. Almost a quarter of the article’s traffic came through the University’s RSS feed.

5. Pioneering archaeology wins Royal award for University of York

On February 24th the Queen presented the University with an award for its archaeological research.

4. Gender equality influences how people choose their lovers

This article from September covers a study from the Department of Psychology on how increased gender equality has reduced gender differences in mate selection.

3. “Trust” provides answer to handaxe enigma

Almost three quarters of the hits on this piece from November 21st are attributable to links from archaeological news aggregator archaeologica.org. It covers research by the Department of Archaeology which suggested that paleolithic handaxes showed bonds of trust between specimens of homo erectus, challenging earlier theories of dominance and aggression.

2. Scientists “record” magnetic breakthrough

Our most-visited science article for the year was this one, detailing how physicists at the University were able to use magnets in a way which could potentially have big impacts on hard drive transfer speeds. The discovery was cited on tech news website engadget.com, where it inspired a spirited exchange in the comments thread.

1. The University of York is to become a member of the influential Russell Group of leading UK universities

The University’s invitation to join the Russell Group in March 2012 was by far the most viewed news story of the year, receiving almost three times as much traffic as the second place story (see the huge spike in the chart above). Over 10% of viewers came from Facebook.

Features

In addition to press release stories, we also publish feature articles which either delve deeper into academic work taking place at the University and tell other interesting stories. These were the most visited last year:

10. Ant behaviour tracked by tiny radio receivers in pioneering scientific study‌

After fitting one thousand ants with radio receivers, scientists at York tracked them to discover how they network and live.

9. York wins Outstanding Engineering Research Team award

While the article concerns the Times Higher Education Awards 2011 and was published in November that year, this article continued to receive significant numbers of visitors throughout the first half of 2012

8. You@York

Applicants who received an offer to study at York gain access to You@York, a personalised site providing information from the University and departments. The traffic patterns are interesting here, declining slowly over the year and spiking on A-level results day in August.

7. University of York wins Times Higher Education Award for Support for Early Career Researchers

The University won the award mentioned above, while several departments were shortlisted for other awards. The feature detailed the steps the University has taken in order to qualify, as well as information on the awards ceremony itself.

6. York celebrates ‘ideas’ with events for everyone

The annual York Festival of Ideas provided many experiences and exhibitions under the theme of “Metamorphosis”.

5. HRH The Princess Royal opens Diamond Wood at the University of York‌

HRH Princess Anne visited York to open the Diamond Wood at Heslington East in September 2012

4. “It’s behind you!” A look into the history of pantomime

An interesting entry on the history of pantomime, this was originally published in January 2011 and saw consistent hits throughout the year followed by a significant boost in the run-up to Christmas. Almost all hits were directly from Google, where the page ranks highly in searches for “pantomime history”.

3. Welcome to the University of York!

This feature provided links to resources that new students at the University would find useful. Most of its attention was focussed very clearly on the week running up to Welcome Week.

2. Public in the swim at York Sport Village

The £9m York Sport Village opened in August, featuring a swimming pool for both students and the public. The opening of such a large development generated a lot of interest, with the bulk of traffic coming directly from Google searches.

1. The Times Higher Education 100 Under 50

When the University was named one of the top ten “young” Universities in the world in May 2012, this feature summarised our achievement and the areas in which University excels. The page received almost eight times as many hits as our number two feature, including a large spike on first publication but then a steady stream of additional visits throughout the year (the page was linked prominently from most web pages using our standard design).

Public lectures

The University puts on a large number of free public lectures each year, attracting many people from both within the University and from the local community. The lectures cover all sorts of topics and are well worth attending - look out for the summer programme for this year coming soon.

In 2012, the most visited public lecture web pages were:

10. Sounds which can't be heard: The hidden secrets of an MP3 player

Professor David Howard from the Department of Electronics gave this lecture on the compression techniques used to shrink MP3 files.

9. Did Twitter save Bletchley Park?

As part of the Athena Swan programme, Dr Sue Black from University College London delivered this lecture on the efforts to save the World War Two codebreaking headquarters at Bletchley Park from decay.

8. Music and Physics

Professor Peter Main from the Department of Physics gave this lecture on the intermeshing of science and art, receiving a lot of attention in February.

7. Divided Britain: The causes and consequences of income inequality in the UK

On the theme of economic trouble, former Director-General of the Council for British Industry, Sir Richard Lambert delivered this lecture on the causes and consequences of the wealth gap in the UK. Interestingly for a lecture, this received fairly consistent traffic throughout October and November, instead of a large rise then fall.

6. Remembering the past: Protecting the future

York’s own Dr Jane Grenville delivered this lecture as a part of the events surrounding Holocaust Memorial Day

5. The Public Secret

Royal Holloway College’s Professor Robert Eaglestone delivered this lecture about public awareness of genocide as a part of Holocaust Memorial day.

4. Austerity or stimulus? How Keynes and Hayek shape our economic debate

This economics lecture was delivered by journalist Nicholas Wapshott and discussed how modern economic theories impact the global economy. Traffic to the page gradually rose before the event itself, before falling once it was over.

3. What do animals think?

This Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture was delivered by Cambridge’s Professor Tim Crane and focussed on questions of consciousness and existence.

2. Unemployment in recession

This topical lecture from Professor Christopher Pissarides of LSE covered modern thoughts on unemployment and its causes. Traffic followed a U-shape, peaking both when tickets became available and on the day of the talk itself.

1. Paradox: The nine greatest enigmas in science

Professor Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey delivered this lecture on mysteries and questions that people have about science. As expected for a popular figure in science education, demand for tickets drove traffic particularly high in the weeks preceding the talk.

Campus Investment redesign

We've been working on a redesigned Campus Investment section of the website, trimming down a lot of the content which was either out of date or no longer relevant, leaving us with a significantly more streamlined set of pages.

All projects have been organised into categories - past, present and future - for those which have happened and are archived (such as Goodricke or Langwith colleges), those ongoing (such as the Chemistry redevelopment) and those yet to begin (such as College 9).

We hope you enjoy browsing through the listings; they've got a lot of pictures which are more prominent than before, giving a much clearer insight into how the University's campus is developing.

Are homepage carousels effective? (AKA the Brad Frost Carousel Challenge)

After reading Brad Frost's blog post about the effectiveness of carousels a couple of months ago, I decided to take up his challenge and see just how well the carousel on the University homepage was performing.

We put a lot of effort into producing a steady steam of features to go into the carousel, but does anyone actually read them?

The University of York homepage, complete with carousel in the top right

Our carousel is of the auto-advancing variety, with controls for pagination and pause / resume provided below. We didn't previously set a limit on the number of items that could be displayed in the carousel, but there were often eight or nine items to cycle through at any one time.

The results are in

We started tracking clicks on the carousel slides towards the end of February, along with clicks on the pagination and play/pause controls below. Technical details of the tracking setup can be found towards the end of this post.

For the first two weeks of tracking (20 February to 5 March), the distribution of clicks on the carousel slides looked like this:

Click distribution on carousel slides, 20 Feb to 5 March

It didn't come as too much of a surprise that the slide in first position got the most attention, but I wasn't expecting to see such a large skew. Around half of the clicks were on the first slide, with numbers dropping off rapidly after that. The poor slides in position eight were barely ever seeing the light of day.

The pause / resume button is rarely used, with less than 300 events registered (257 pauses, 36 resumes) since we've been tracking it. This suggests that the button is probably not noticeable enough.

Fewer carousel slots = more clicks?

Given that the items in positions outside the first few slots weren't getting much attention, we decided to reduce the number of items we have in the carousel to a maximum of five.

Total numbers of carousel clicks, 20 Feb - 27 March

We reduced the number of slots to 5 on around 15 March. Since then we've seen consistently more clicks on the carousel than we did when there were more features to choose from.

A possible explanation is that some of stories that we've had in the carousel over the last couple of weeks have been a bit more high-profile than usual (the announcement of our new Vice-Chancellor, BBC Question Time being broadcast on campus and our China graduation ceremony), which may have generated more interest anyway.

A more interesting theory is that we're seeing the paradox of choice in action - that giving people more choices creates anxiety and results in them not choosing anything. By reducing the number of items available to choose from, it's easier to make a choice and click on something.

We'll come back to this in a few weeks and see if we're still generating more clicks with fewer features.

The technical bit

If you're interested in how we're tracking this, read on.

Clicks on each of the carousel slides are tracked as events in Google Analytics. Analytics requires three values when tracking an event (category, action and label), which we're tracking as follows:

• Event Category: Carousel
• Event Action: slide-N clicked 
• Event Label: Destination URL

So an example event might look like:
'Carousel', 'slide-1-clicked', 'http://www.york.ac.uk/50/events/china/'

The call for each event is automatically assembled with jQuery, so there's no manual tagging required each time a new item is added to the carousel.

Categorising events in this way seems to work well as it allows us to view the data in quite a lot of different ways within Analytics.

Look out for

Something that tripped me up at first was that not all of the clicks on the carousel were registering with Analytics, and were appearing as 'cancelled' requests within Chrome's inspector panel.

Look out for cancelled requests (shown in red) in Chrome's inspector panel

The simple solution to this is to delay the request by a fraction of a second so that the event has time to register before the destination page starts to load. See Google's documentation on tracking outbound links for how to do this.

Direct Edit: a quicker way to edit your CMS content

Some of you may have noticed the appearance of a new 'Direct Edit' link in the footer of your web pages in the last few days. If you've not tried it yet, Direct Edit is a really quick way to make edits to your web content, especially when you just need to make small changes.

The link to Direct Edit is available from the bottom right of every page published from the CMS

When you're looking at a published page, selecting the Direct Edit link will take you into the CMS (you'll be asked to login if you haven't already done so) with a view that might be new to you. Instead of the usual listing of your content items, you'll see a view of the page with dotted red lines around each of the content items.

In the Direct Edit view each of your content items will have a dotted red line around it

When hovering over any of the dotted boxes an option will appear to modify that content, which will let you make your changes. You can also delete content items and see the page history from within Direct Edit.

Direct Edit works with most of our templates, but not all of them just yet. If a template can't be used in Direct Edit then you won't see the red dotted lines around that particular content item.

The other link in the footer is 'Modify', which takes you the same view you would see when selecting 'Modify content' from within the CMS (we renamed this from 'Edit' to clarify the difference between this and Direct Edit).

Happy editing!

Hello from a new member!

Hello, I'm Cieran!

I'll be working with the Web Office for the next few months, helping out with general projects and anything that arrives. I've just transferred over from Student Support, where I was redesigning the International Support website. One of my first jobs will be working on an interactive timeline for the University's Fiftieth Anniversary website. I'm looking forward to all the new challenges I'll be facing over the next few months working here!

Mapping with TileMill

When we launched our interactive campus map last year, we were using a third party company called CloudMade to generate our custom map tiles from OpenStreetMap data. CloudMade weren't making updates to their map data quite as often as we needed, which is problematic when you've got a big campus expansion project on the go that means new buildings are appearing all the time. So we went looking for a replacement.

Finding a replacement

Ideally a replacement tile provider would give us the same functionality as Cloudmade, just with more frequent updates.

We looked at a lot of alternatives, but nothing was looking too promising. Some of the options we rejected were:

• Google Maps - half the campus is still missing.
• Stamen - beautiful watercolour maps, but too light on details to be practical.
• MapQuest Open - nice enough looking maps, but not enough detail.

The best option was looking like MapBox, which would give us the control and level of detail we needed, but that looked like it could be a bit pricey.

Enter TileMill

My search continued and led me to TileMill, an open source project by MapBox.

TileMill is different to the other options I had been looking at: rather than being a service that provides tiles itself, it's a piece of software that lets you design and publish your own interactive maps.

Campus taking shape in the TileMill interface

TileMill takes all sorts of different data formats as an input: ESRI Shapefile, KML, GeoJSON, GeoTIFF, PostGIS, CSV, and SQLite.

You then have full control over how your data looks through a language called Carto. Carto is similar to CSS but has extras like variables and functions that make it much more powerful.

The map data

If you really wanted to you could download OpenStreetMap's data for the entire planet and work from that, but that's a 250GB XML file that I'm not sure my PC could cope with.

I came across a company called Geofabrik that provides more manageable shapefiles of smaller parts of the world (often down to individual cities), which are updated every few days and can be downloaded for free from http://download.geofabrik.de/. In the end we paid Geofabrik for some extra data to be included in a custom set of shapefiles, so it wasn't completely free.

Making it look nice

Getting started with Carto is easy enough if you already know CSS, but I found the most time consuming part was deciding exactly what to show at all the differing zoom levels. When you've looking at a bird's eye view of the whole campus you only want to see the major landmarks, with more detail being revealed as you zoom in, down to the names of individual buildings and car parks.

Luckily there are a few examples bundled with TileMill that help you get the hang of what works best at different levels.

An example of some of the Carto styling rules used on our map

It also takes a bit of thought to get all of your layers appearing in the correct order. At various points I ended up with bridges going underneath roads and the entire campus looking like it was underwater!

Outputting the tiles

Once you've got your map looking how you want it, it's time to export it. TileMill gives you several formats to choose from for your export.

In order to use this with our existing maps setup (see the previous behind the scenes post), we needed the individual map tiles. TileMill doesn't quite let you do this directly, but you can export to a single MBTiles file, and then use a utility called mbutil to extract the individual tiles from that.

Our map covers central York (up to the outer ring road) at six different zoom levels, which resulted in about 15,000 tiles. You can easily end up generating hundreds of thousands or even millions of tiles if you go down to very high zoom levels for large areas. Be prepared for a wait (and have plenty of spare storage space) if you decide to do that!

Making it live

The final step was to put the tiles on the web and change a single line within the map application code to point to our own tiles instead of Cloudmade's servers.

The interactive map with new tiles in place

We're now able to make much more regular updates to the map, and TileMill looks like it could come in handy if any other projects involving maps come our way.