Wikimapia

Something new just as the year ends, Wikimapia is an open collaboration tool that mixes Google Earth imagery with Wikipedia editability. Users can mark on the map areas and places of interest and put some information about these places. Potentially very interesting, though place entries seem quite prone to vandalism (such as the Villa Park entry).

Calendars

A calendar of events at the University is something we wish to add to the site ASAP so i have been exploring Google Calendar and playing around with creating an online calendar for the University. Here it is below, take a look. You probably need to advance to later in the year to see anything...

Xmas greetings

Today i created an e-card for the University in order to save a rainforest. Its actually very simple to do, much simpler than the last time i had to do this for the International Office some years ago where i had to create a cgi script to send the card (cgi development was always difficult on the old server as i didn't have a shell account so couldn't see any error messages unless i downloaded the 700MB+ error file.. anyway enough happy memories!) The lovely cgiemail script allows you to send HTML mail as long as you put the correct content header in.

So it works great and won't leave the server open to spammers, excellent.

Returning RSS

Older readers may remember the old UCE website had an RSS feed, actually this was generated by a Perl script i wrote to read the news headlines page and then create an RSS feed from it. Finally i have had the time to update the script to work with the new site. It is playschool level RSS of course. Hopefully the future CMS generated website will be able to offer much more extensive and automatic generation of RSS feeds.

Of course that begs the question, what is RSSable (that is a word i made up earlier, its not just James who is destroying the English language)? News is obvious of course, and blog posts (the RSS feed link for which is below) but what else on a University website? The latest courses added perhaps. What do people suggest?

Staying on the RSS vein, the likes of Yahoo! are working on Media RSS which will do for images and videos and the like what normal RSS did for text. This is an interesting development i am watching with interest.