Meta
Iterate and reiterate
They say a web developer’s work is never done, and this is especially the case with news websites such as Nouse. The Guardian, for example, update their website’s content management system every two weeks with various updates and changes.
One of the best ways to deal with updates is to use an iteration technique, whereby changes are made incrementally. This follows a pattern of several small updates rather than just a few large ones. Several iterations might be made before something is fully featured, with different additions along the way.
A good example of iterative development on Nouse.co.uk could be seen over the Roses weekend, where features on the liveblog and on the homepage were enhanced as we went along. For instance, on the homepage first of all the latest score was added, then the style of its presentation was improved, then it was made to automatically update, and then more changes were made as news developed to better represent the latest information.
Several more changes have been gradually made to the website over the past term and a bit, so here are some of the recent updates that you may or may not have spotted…
Paper archive viewer
We – finally – have a nicer way to view our online PDF archive of past paper editions, stretching back as far as 2006. (Of course, if you want any edition before that then every edition since the paper was founded in 1964 is available at the Borthwick Institute in the University library.)
The new viewer allows you to easily flick through the pages – which are now grouped by section and supplement – and zoom in on any you’d like to read. For those traditionalists, links to the PDFs versions of each page are also still available. This viewer was made especially for Nouse and is powered by JavaScript, meaning that it should be available across all modern devices (including the iPad and iPhone) unlike other commercial Flash based solutions that are available.
Improved search
It is widely known that the search function of our content management system WordPress does not perform well. Last year we experimented with using Google to power searches made on the site and, after experiments with a few other alternatives, I’m pleased to say that Google is once again the search provider – and this time the results are actually integrated into the site. In many cases it should mean much more useful and relevant search results. Try it out now to get a blast from the past!
Travel mini-site
Designed to complement the Travel supplement in our June 1 paper edition, the Travel mini-site features all the content that was printed and more! Take a look if you’re stuck for ideas this summer, whether you want to travel far and wide or stay a bit closer to home. Thanks to Camilla and the many contributors who made this possible.
Print and email buttons
Our existing print and email buttons disappeared with the site redesign earlier this year, but have now made a comeback next to the other social sharing options at the top of each article. Credits go to Jonathan Frost for designing the icons to fit in alongside the existing buttons.
Along with these additions there is also now a special print stylesheet, meaning that if you go to print an article then bits such as the sidebar, footer and menu bar are hidden and the main text is expanded to fit the whole page. This should make it a bit nicer on your eyes (and your printer) if you find the need to print something from the site. Click print preview in your browser if you want to see how it looks.
Mobile
Anyone who has download the new YUSU app will have noticed the seamless integration with Nouse’s own mobile site.
But fear not if you are not the owner of an iPhone! The Nouse mobile site works on almost any mobile device, regardless of manufacturer or size. Simply type m.nouse.co.uk into the browser of your phone, tablet or gaming device to receive the content of Nouse tailored to suit the smaller form factor. Perfect for on the go news and comment!
Muse homepage randomiser
The featured Muse article on the homepage is now randomly selected from across the different sections, meaning you should often see something new at the top of the Muse column. This article is selected using a randomising algorithm which takes the most recent article from each Muse section then uses the dates to weight which article should be chosen, so older articles are less likely to be “randomly” displayed than newer ones.
Miscellaneous
Various other behind-the-scenes tweaks have been made to hopefully make you experience on Nouse.co.uk a little smoother. It’s also worth mentioning that links to all of our past mini-sites can be found by following the link in the footer, including links to our recent mini-sites such as Roses, Fantasy Football and College Cup.
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And so the time approaches for the position of technical director to also iterate onwards – let me take this opportunity to say my thank yous and goodbyes…
To everyone who has contributed: there’s too many of you to name, but please all know that your dedication, efforts and writings (or photos!) are phenomenal and you are the people really responsible for keeping this website vibrant and at such a high standard. I never fail to be amazed by the talent on show – whether at this newspaper, other campus media, or the university as a whole – and it’s been a privilege to be a part.
For you commenting haters who have sprung up lately, call this spiel “smug” if you wish but please learn to be more constructive with your criticism. While I may not agree with everything written in the comments I’d still like to thank everyone who has taken the time to contribute to them and bring a bit of discussion and debate to the site. It brings the place alive.
Thank you to Ali for taking me under his wing and putting faith in me to carry on from the great job he did, and to Chris for originally putting in place the systems we use and rely on. When I look at what we’ve achieved this year I didn’t think it was possible to push the site so much further but I am proud and somewhat astonished. I’m sure Andy will continue to do a great job next year.
Special thanks must go to Hannah, Camilla, Mia, Jonathan, Henry and Jake who each contribute in their own special but vital ways and have made this year incredible for me. I fail for words to give you the acclaim you deserve and express my gratitude, or for a way to better say goodbye.
So thank you Nouse. It’s been a blast, and you were great.
Nouse 2010/11 by numbers
1569 articles added to the website since the beginning of the academic year.
3182 comments published since the start of the academic year. Plenty more were submitted but didn’t pass moderation.
2384 spam comments that our system automatically blocks on every average day – hopefully no legitimate comments included in this.
164 comments left on the article with the highest number of comments this year, the article in question being our YUSU Elections hustings liveblog, and this coming just after YUSU wanted to entirely ban comments on the site – thus vindicating their worth.
375 people playing Fantasy Football this year, thanks to everyone who took part!
72 hours of liveblogs, a whopping half of that from Roses alone.
Infographic: Online Campus Media
NB: The data used for this infographic was taken from Alexa.com, and are estimations only.
Evolution
You need to have a redesign because familiarity breeds a kind of complacency
Here we are, about 5 meetings, several concepts, hundreds of lines of code, a fair few emails, texts and calls, 2 new plugins, 2 retired plugins, 2 rewritten plugins, a couple of late nights, and 1 and a half broken laptops later, welcome to the new Nouse.co.uk.
Our aim with this redesign was to freshen the site up a bit and to rearrange pages to make it easier for you, our readers, to find and look over content. On the home page especially we’ve brought everything together, providing a better overview of the latest and greatest content on the site.
I’d like to think we’ve gone for more of an evolutionary than revolutionary approach, building on the best of the old site and not changing things beyond being recognisable. Moving forward is an important step with any website and I hope people see this as a move in the right direction.
This design also aims to look to the future, embracing some new web technologies and increasing and utilising our presence on social networks to offer quicker snippets of news and links to features or news on other websites that we’ve enjoyed reading and think you’d like too.
The expansion of our “most read” sections to also include the “most commented” recent articles will hopefully help draw your attention to the active – and sometimes quite lively – discussion and debate that goes on around the site. Who knows, it may even encourage more to join in and add a comment with their point of view or insight on a topic.
As with most updates to this site, this can still be seen as a work in progress and we will continue to make tweaks here and there. We hope you enjoy using the new site and will appreciate any feedback, good or bad. The comments are open below for your thoughts on the redesign or even any feature requests or suggestions that you may have, or alternatively feel free to send me an email at tech@nouse.co.uk with any comments or ideas.
Last, and definitely not least, massive thanks must go to our graphic designer Jonathan Frost for his tireless and pivotal work on this, and also thanks to Hannah, Camilla, Mia and everyone else for their input.
Lights, camera, action!
Christmas is nearly upon us, but here’s one present you can unwrap early: the Nouse Film Awards mini-site.
Just in time for the film awards season, the site will bring you all the latest news from the Oscars and Golden Globes across the pond and from the BAFTAs and European Film Awards closer to home.
There will also be comment and features on the latest new releases and the awards ceremonies themselves, as well as a look ahead to next year’s potential blockbusters.
Kudos must go to Jonathan Frost for envisioning the design and to the Nouse film team for all their amazing content.
Finally, with term drawing to a close, here are the 10 most viewed articles on Nouse.co.uk over the past 10 weeks…
10. Langwith Bar Reps condemned by students for ‘horrific’ rape question in Freshers’ week bar quiz
9. Success of fee rise protest marred by violent minority
8. Will Amir Khan get a chance to fight Floyd Mayweather?
7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
6. Law students ‘prioritised’ over Management peers in allocation of departmental facilities
5. Big Bang branded ‘Big Con’
4. Students take part in Millbank Centre riots
3. Break-in confirmed at University library
2. York wins ‘University of the Year’ award
1. Societies express anger over UGM motion
This term there were 464 posts published and 952 comments left (at the time of writing) so thanks to everyone who has contributed, whether through an article or in the comment discussions.
Check back over the Christmas break for even more news, comment and reviews, and updates to the Film Awards site. Happy holidays!
Site admin upgrade
This is the moment that I didn’t notice was approaching until it hit me. But leaving the Nouse office for the last time in my role as technical director a few days ago, it felt a tinge different.
Things you don’t realise you have until they’re gone – being part of a larger effort, working with dedicated and banterous people.
All sorts of metaphors that come to mind right now seem rubbish and not quite accurate (calcium deposits on teeth, anyone?), so I’ll just leave it there, but suffice it to say a light, well aimed punch would be enough to send me into a ball of tears right now.
Nouse web was in a strong position when I received it a year ago, and I’m happy to have pushed it further (hopefully in the right direction), and am equally pleased to see Andrew stepping up now to push it further again.
Each techie has a unique skill-set and background; mine, Chris’ and Andrew’s are all different and having seen Andrew effortlessly trump me on aesthetics a few times already, I’m looking forward to seeing what his unique flavour will bring to the mix.
Thanks to Team Web, past and present. Sara and Nanki are the real unsung heroes of Nouse – their anonymity to work ratio in getting articles online is staggering. The power houses that are Sport and Arts deserve special mention, but that must not detract from the huge amount of work done by all sections and their writers. It is testament to your articles that such a vibrant community has built up around the site.
Thanks to everyone for commenting. As with my realisation earlier on leaving the office, you the commenters are part of what I am attached to. You provide insight and clarification, zeal. Many won’t need telling, but to our more passive readers, do consider using it.
Thanks to Charlotte and Laura for putting up with me and for all the great work you do. Thanks again to Chris for helping out many times over the year, both pointing out problems and patiently helping when I was out of my depth.
Finally, here are the top 10 most visited articles this term. There were about 600 articles published this term – that’s too much for a basic Facebook stats lookup, but hopefully I’ll find out and add a comment for that later.
10. 2,348 pageviews, 66 comments Roses 2010: Friday – As it happened
09. 2,469 pageviews, 27 comments Derwent and Alcuin paired in College Cup group stages
08. 2,545 pageviews, 74 comments York Hornets win BCA Midlands competition
07. 2,628 pageviews, 8 comments Roses 2010 LIVE: Sunday
06. 2,704 pageviews, 117 comments YUSU website unable to cope with demand for ‘SinneD’
05. 2,718 pageviews, 40 comments Big D ‘SinneD’ promo video launched
04. 3,299 pageviews, 26 comments University of York ranked ninth in The Times Good University Guide
03. 3,518 pageviews, 118 comments Hockey Club fined following initiation video
02. 3,547 pageviews, 76 comments Roses 2010 Saturday – How it happened
01. 7,026 pageviews, 162 comments Top 50 short-list announced
And with that, here’s goodbye.
Nouse photography competition
This is a small reminder of the Nouse Photography Competition 2010, more information about which can be found on the Facebook event page.
Entrants may entry as many categories as they wish, with a maximum of two entries per category, in the following:
- Landscape
- Sport
- Abstract
- Portraits
- Nature
Entrants should send a high-resolution version of their photographs to photo-competition@nouse.co.uk, or alternatively leave them in the ‘Nouse’ post box at Vanbrugh porters. The competition is open from now, to any York staff member or student, and closes at 9.00am on Friday Week 8 (June 18th). Any entries received after this date will be dismissed.
Prizes:
Any competition entrant will receive a 15% discount at York Digital Image from now until the end of the competition – quote “Nouse photo competition”
The winner of each category will receive a £20 voucher for anything (prints etc.) from York Digital Image.
The winner of the overall competition will receive an A1 Block Print (24” x 36”) of their work.
The winning photographs will be published in a spread in the final edition of Nouse, on Tuesday of Week 9. Please note that by entering the competition you give permission for Nouse to print your photograph then, and in the future if necessary.
Any questions please don’t hesitate to email editor@nouse.co.uk – good luck!
Something to like
It’s been a while since our last Meta update so thought I’d break the silence with the latest site addition.
Before I get into that, I’m going to quickly plug a few things that you might not be aware about if you’re not a frequent Nouse visitor, but otherwise feel free to gloss over them.
If you’re a mobile phone user, you’ll be delighted to know that Nouse has it’s own mobile website! Of particular interest is m.nouse.co.uk/recent-comments/ which will give you a clean breakdown of the 10 latest comments on the site – great if you want to keep track of discussion while on the move.
It may not be obvious, but that Recent Comments title in the footer also serves as a link. If you’re at your desk and would like to check up on recent discussion, this page lists the 30 most recent comments for you, with the ability to quickly show contents of any comment by clicking on the plus sign next to it.
Whenever an event is on such as Roses, you’ll have noticed a link in the navigation bar allowing easy access to our mini-site for that event, but what about after the event? If you’d like to visit any mini-site from the past, check out the mini-sites link in the About section of the footer.
Search bar
A minor change, we’ve recently restyled the search bar, moving it higher up on the page. More importantly, the search provider was changed to Google, allowing in many cases much more useful results – try it out now to get a blast from the past!
Live blog
A live blog allows updates to be streamed directly into your browser, without needing to refresh the page, and is useful for describing large events such as the Roses tournament or YUSU elections. Most recently, we’ve added a comments tab to the mix, allowing comments to slide onto the page in a very similar way to authors’ updates.
Which brings us back to the present…
Facebook recommend
The recommend button under the title is as easy as it looks – simply click on it and your Facebook feed will show that you recommended the article, and provides a link for your friends to visit it. Change your mind, and all you need do is click the button again to remove the recommendation (go ahead and try it out on this blog entry as a test). If you’re not logged in when clicking the button, Facebook will offer a login page for you to quickly log in with.
So that’s our latest change and a short list of other useful features in case you’d missed them. Remember, these features are all written for you, so if there’s anything you think the site is missing or which could be changed, send us an email to tech@nouse.co.uk with the suggestion. Credits to Andrew Fairbairn for developing the Mobile site and Live blog update.
Well I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add in a few old nuggets, so here are a couple from last year to go out on:
News scroller
The scroller in the News section of the front page is interesting for one reason and one reason only – it can go back indefinitely all the way to the very first Nouse articles (trying clicking the right arrow a lot of times to test it).
News random archives
Tucked in at the bottom of the News page is a box listing a few articles taken randomly from the archives. Not very interesting technologically, but vast amounts of procrastination possibilities there.
Among many cool features developed by former Technical Director Chris Northwood is a map of York with Nouse restaurant reviews pinned to it – useful if you have a high end mobile phone and need to chow down fast.
That’s all, stay tuned for more updates as they happen!
Incremental site redesign
Over the past month the nouse.co.uk team has been conducting user experience testing on our visitors. On a number of page loads, visitors were shown a possible future design and presented with a pop-up with which they could feedback on the change.
Significantly, exactly 75% of all those presented with one of the designs (the new header design above) found that they preferred it. Reasons given ranged from “gr8!!!!” to “I really like the colour black and the colour white”.
This higher contrasting of text and background colour will be incrementally rolled out across the rest of the site over the next two months, subject to more user experience tests. We will also be seeking to establish contact with other media outlets, most notably the York Vision, with a view to increasing consistency across both sites.
“I really like the colour black and the colour white”
Test subject #2
Not only is this change preferred by the majority of our users, it is also a boon for accessibility on the site (see here for a page developed by Microsoft experts on the subject). The changes will greatly enhance user experience for poor-sighted people such as the over-60s, enabling grad students at York to better interact with the rest of the community on York Nouse.
Most visited this term
With the term drawing to a close, here’s a quick list of our top ten most visited articles this term (11th January to 19th March).
As could be expected, the list is dominated by elections-related articles. The only exceptions being number 9, which went online during the elections period, and number 5, which happens to rank highly for the Google search “modafinil”.
A special mention goes to the Off the Record blog page, which although not a specific article, shows the most recent blog post and got 3,496 hits in total.
10. 1,958 pageviews, 41 comments Hutchings and Ngwena joint favourites
09. 1,974 pageviews, 51 comments Ngwena and Humphrys face reprimand
08. 2,038 pageviews, 185 comments Presidential Debate Live
07. 2,062 pageviews, 164 comments Hustings Live – Wednesday
06. 2,107 pageviews, 73 comments YUSU bans Women’s Officer candidates from campaigning
05. 2,661 pageviews, 16 comments Modafinil: the new wonder drug?
04. 2,663 pageviews, 56 comments Let the mudslinging and the conspiracies commence
03. 2,687 pageviews, 92 comments Where the real power lies?
02. 2,765 pageviews, 200 comments Hustings Live – Tuesday
01. 8,149 pageviews, 120 comments Elections Night – Tim Ngwena re-elected president
Have a good holiday and check back occasionally for new articles and discussion!
Probing exit poll probabilities
This post is a couple of days late, since the elections were on Saturday, but well, I felt I should get to grips with the theory before making any bold statements. So for the past two days I’ve been solidly on Wikipedia learning about standard error and margin of error, testing values and looking up probabilities on the normal distribution tables.
Just when I’d more or less grokked it, I thought it might be wise to Google the “poll margin of error” to make sure I was definitely doing it right. Google Suggest offers the option of adding “calculator” to the end of my query, so I do. Then I realise I’ve just spent hours learning the theory behind this neat and easy to use calculator. Fail 
So, onto the post, shall we?
The question I’m going to answer may have crossed your mind recently:
“How likely is it for the exit poll to predict the wrong candidate?”
Here’s an appropriate snippet from the exit poll release:
Random sample of votes from first 24 hours of voting
The 24 hour thing complicates life because the first 24 hour votes may not be representative of the other voting days.
In a previous draft of this post I went into mind numbing detail explaining how to discern and proportionally apply the difference in voting patterns before and after the 24 hour period. After all of that, I ended on a sentence that pretty much said: “I currently don’t know the change in voting patterns, so I’ll assume it to be 0 for the rest of the post”.
Right, job’s a good’un.
Next up, inputted into our statistical equations, if we were getting really serious we’d want to know the population size from which the sample was taken, that is, how many votes were cast in total in the 24 hour period for each position. However, this theoretically shouldn’t affect the value of the equations if we’re using the right methods. The statistical calculator assumes a multiplication factor of 1.0 and the one I worked out was 0.94, so that’s good enough for me.
Now we enter the part which used to be littered with calculation print-outs, equations and useful numbers, but we don’t need that anymore thanks to the calculator.
The next bit of useful info from the exit poll data is the sample size used, which is 100.
To give a sense of scale, my estimated number of presidential votes on the first day was 1773. In general, the larger the sample size in relation to the total vote count, the more accurate the poll.
Fun fact #1:
Given the sample size is fixed at 100 for all positions, and the presidential race is likely to get the most votes, it follows that the presidential exit poll is the least accurate of them all.
The sample size isn’t the whole story, because in STV some votes can get discarded along the way. In this case, we had 40 votes to Hutchings, 34 to Ngwena, and 26 discarded.
Now we have that, we can enter it into the calculator, obtaining a standard deviation of 0.59. The calculator looks this up in the normal distribution for us and returns a value of 55.5 percent. If I’ve interpreted the calculator correctly, this value applies to the range outside the two votes (outside 54% and 46%), so there is 55.5% chance that the value falls outside that range.
If that doesn’t mean anything to you then that’s fine because it doesn’t mean much to me either, so I’ll have a go at rewording it. In doing so, I will have to take the assumption we can apply the same analysis about the 46% mark as the calculator did about the 50% mark. Though this is not strictly true, they’re close enough for that to work.
Now the rewording: If Ngwena’s vote goes more than 4% in the right direction away from the predicted vote, he has a chance at winning. This tells us that 55% was our lower bound of confidence on Hutchings winning. Now, if we take the two tails of the distribution on either side of that, and only look at one of them, we get the probability that the poll was in fact incorrect and should have shown a Ngwena win.
This is 27.8%, giving another interesting stat.
Fun fact #2:
The poll was only enough to show Hutchings having a 72% chance of winning.
(The reason this is an approximation is because one of the sides of the distribution will actually be a tiny bit smaller than the other)
Lastly, we do a bit of retro-analysis:
“How likely is it for Ngwena to have won by as much as he did, just going by the exit poll?”
Ngwena actually won by 58% to 42%, which is a complete reversal from what the poll predicted, so the probability will be even smaller.
(Another assumption here is that the ratio of discounted votes remained the same in the real election as it was in our approximated poll)
58% against 42% is a 16% difference between candidates, which is double the 8% difference found in the poll, so I’m able (I think…) to simply multiply our standard deviation value by 2 (0.59 times 2 is 1.18).
This gives us fun fact #3:
There was an 11.9% probability for Ngwena to win by as much as he did from the poll prediction.
As noted earlier, this is all assuming the Monday votes are representative of those on later days, which could very well not be the case. In fact, judging by these stats I’m pretty certain the voting patterns did change over the different days. Approximately 90% certain in fact
In truth, randomly sampling a poll for which you have all the data is very much an exercise in pointlessness. Nonetheless, some info is better than none, and it keeps tensions at nerve-breaking peaks, so all in all I’m still in favour of having exit polls.
I’d really like to suggest that the union draw the sample from the entire data set though, it doesn’t really serve anyone to do it this way. In fact I can’t help but feel a niggle of doubt when confronted with a stat that says there is a 90% probability that this outcome shouldn’t have been predicted by the poll, and pulling the sample representatively will help to quell any accuracy doubts in future years.
If someone at Nouse remembers I think it’d be a swell idea for us to release an accuracy value along with the exit poll release next year too.
Well that’s it folks, hope you found this as much fun as I did, lol. If you’re a bit of a mathematician and think I did something wrong, please use the comment box!
Statisticalities
First off, tonight’s Hustings was genuinely the most enjoyable night I’ve had in some time. You’re bound to take that with a pinch of salt, being the unsolicited opinion of a great night out from an out and out nerd, but ask anyone who saw it and I think they’ll agree.
Attached to that preamble, I invite any unfortunate souls who missed it to check out the YSTV recordings which are now present on the YSTV site (of course), and our own election candidates page.
Now, for the statistically hungry, I have good news: you broke a record!
The comment count on our live blog for tonight’s Hustings is currently sitting at 195, which hands down beats previous articles.
You might have guessed this already, or possibly don’t care very much, or perhaps both, so I now hastily change tack and re-theme this post with a list of our most commented-on articles:
Top ten most commented articles on Nouse:
195 – Hustings Live – Tuesday
173 – Welfare issues at the centre of recent UGM motions
166 – Pirate Scott defies odds and sweeps to presidentia…
149 – Anti-BNP rally held in York
115 – ISA President accused of imposing ‘biased’ penalti…
101 – Anti-BNP campaign provokes battle over legality of…
95 – Controversial Gaza UGM Motion narrowly passes desp…
92 – YUSU criticised over decision to remove charity fr…
92 – Where the real power lies?
85 – Tim Ngwena wins 2009/10 YUSU Presidency – How it h…
I’ll admit to a bit of luxurious disappointment that we didn’t break the 200 barrier outright, but am heartened there are still big events ahead in the coming days and we could just make it still.
And lastly, budged along to the bottom of the post, I end on a grand finale of raw numbers for you to explode in ecstacy over.
This funny looking picture shows the number of open connections to the website. Normally, the website receives its traffic spread out all over the space-time continuum, so open connections at any time tend to be never more than 4 or so.
The liveblog changes that by keeping the connection open until you close the page, so you see above, we had roughly 40 people connected at any one time.
The interesting thing, and I’m rediscovering this here, is that on conferring with our Google Analytics stats, the average time spent on each visit to the page was no more than 5 minutes, meaning those 40 people were continually changing at quite a high rate (one every seven seconds).
One last gobsmacker of a statistic before I really must go:
Since the liveblog received 1,500 pageviews, it follows that a whopping 7,500 minutes of your time was spent on that page.
Well done to Charlotte, Laura, and Victoria for blogging, and Nousies Hannah, Hannah, and Camilla for mining quotations.
Nouse on the Mobile
Phew… production days are busy! Thanks to everyone for keeping the discussion lively here on the web, and keep it up!
At time of writing I’ve still got a few things to finish off, like adding author photos for our beautiful writers, but am pleasantly interrupted from all this by an email from Nouse Web Developer Andrew Fairbairn.
It’s done. Culminating months of hard work and overcoming of technical hurdles by Andrew, I’m incredibly excited to introduce to you Nouse‘s very own mobile website!
The new site can be found at m.nouse.co.uk and will work on both computer and mobile – though obviously it’s been designed and optimised for the mobile.
We hope you like it and find it useful, but if you happen to cast a critique-al eye at it and find something amiss, we have surely obviated the need for a frown to cross your face.
In other words, please send your feedback to mobile@nouse.co.uk
Although we could automate feedback by writing programs to send ourselves mail, we’ve tried it and it’s not quite the same, so we gladly await yours instead.
As you can tell from the paragraph(s) above, I’ve gradually slipped back into nerd mode, and so I’ll take that as my cue to stop talking.
Feel free to end here with a massive grin on your face and, of course, go on the mobile site!
Passing on the baton
It’s all over. 4 years at York, and so much has changed in that 4 years, and so much will continue to change. As I was leaving the YSTV studio on Friday for the last time, after signing out my last ever key to the Nouse office, the workmen were putting up a sign in the Goodricke porters’ lodge: “Department of Mathematics. James College”. When Hes East is complete, the Uni will be unrecognisable to me if I ever come up and visit, my department won’t be next to the library any more, and Nouse might have moved into bigger offices in Langwith along with YUSU (here’s hoping). And yet, I will look back fondly on those things I remember which even people now don’t – living in Alcuin when it was a building site, the fountain between Vanbrugh and Physics, being able to quickly hop between Alcuin and Langwith without having to run down a massive hill and cross a road.
But I digress. I’m very nostalgic and sad about leaving, but I know I’ve got an awesome team to take my place. With the difficulties of holding by-elections over the summer, and with me technically no longer a student and no longer able to hold an officership in Nouse, Ali “Fantasy Football” Clark is Acting Technical Director until next term’s elections – and with the huge success of Fantasy Football and winning the technical achievement YUMA, Nouse.co.uk will surely continue to grow on to bigger and better things.
I’m not completely walking away just yet though – I have plenty of time this summer, and a few ideas I’d like to see in motion (including one suggested by a very drunk deputy politics editor in Ziggy’s back in autumn term) will come to fruition by next year.
Looking back over the year it’s staggering to see how far we’ve come: collaborating with other media societies, a redesigned website with a minisite for every major event, and according to Google Analytics an increase of 79% in visits to the site.
Now, this may be “journaljism”, blowing my own trumpet, but I’m pretty pleased with my achievements, but of course I couldn’t have done it by myself. Henry, for understanding the importance of the website and making sure it gets the right amount of emphasis, Jim, for putting up with my constant “This might be an interesting story” phone calls and e-mails, Mike Tomasello, Ali Clark and Alex Muller for turning up to and putting up with my 12 hour hackathons to get those new minisites up and running, Jenny O’Mahony for teaching my how the Nouse site worked when I took over, Tom Brearley for helping rebuild the Nouse network, and for everyone in the office who suffered when the part I tried to do without Tom’s help collapsed, Anna for being incredibly patient with all of those videos, and Matthew for those 2am discussions on the landing. And of course, Lida, Beth and Emily for editing all those pieces that people sent to go online, and to be there every Tuesday when everyone else was relaxing for producing the paper whilst we had our own copy, paste and resize image frenzy to get everything online for people to comment on. All of the writers, many of whom I never met, for actually getting the important stuff, content, and of course, all of our commenters. Some comments made me laugh (one of my favourite ones was left by someone who used the e-mail address “youknowwhothisis@northwood.com” in the comment field), some made me cry, but most were good and important discussion. I like to think that some of the issues brought up by our articles and the subsequent discussion actually led to real change.
Now that’s over, I can cover the thing I actually wanted to write about: Every term I sent out a “top 10″ to the Nouse mailing list covering what the most read articles of the term are. Mainly because I find these kind of stats interesting, but I know some of you do too.
So here’s the top 10 of this entire year:
10. JSoc accuse University staff member of anti-Semitism – I personally was surprised that this was the only article where Nouse was accused of being irresponsible to appear in the top 10, but our first article in this countdown was a highly controversial article from February following accusations made by JSoc against a staff member causing an absolute flood of comments and 2700 views.
9. Friday’s coverage of Roses – the smallest day of Roses takes quite a low position in the top 10 with only 2730 views.
8. The sad news of Ron Weir passing away – it’s no surprise such a moving story as this appears so high, with both current students, staff and alumni adding their consolations to their article.
7. Police search student accommodation – one of the biggest news stories of the year, and it happened outside of term time too, meaning Nouse.co.uk was the only site to cover it, bringing us 2830 views.
6. York’s sex trade – probably slightly surprising to see a feature from 2007 this high, but further investigation reveals the reason. Nouse has a very strong Google presence (incoming links from national papers, other blogs, etc all make it), which actually makes this article second on Google for “sex in York”. What can we say, sex sells – 2910 views this year in fact.
5. Sunday at Roses – no surprise to see the second biggest day of Roses take number 5 with 2930 views.
4. The gender-neutral toilets UGM – covering a very controversial topic and an absolutely staggering number of comments, this is also the most commented piece on the entire website, 173 comments and 3180 views.
3. The liveblog of Roses Saturday – another unsurprising one here, the biggest day of Roses takes it place at number 3 with 3950 views.
2. The sports team’s interview with John Motson – largely helped by a huge amount of incoming links from major forums and the “blogosphere”, this tallied up nearly 4780 views.
1. YUSU elections live blog – I guess this is no real surprise, it’s the biggest single night of the year for campus media, but there it is – at over 9000 views.
And that’s it. Bye.
Downtime
As any webmaster will know, downtime is evil. It’s to be avoided at all costs. When it happens, you look bad, you lose visitors, and if you’re a commercial entity, advertising revenue.
The Nouse site was down for a few hours around midday today, and although as much I hope to be able to say “it’s not my fault” and blame external factors, it was. Problems I did not foresee during what should have been a lightweight procedure essentially crippled our MySQL server, until I figured out the problem and solved it.
Last night I started an overhaul of our databases. Due to a legacy issue with WordPress, our database stored UTF-8 text, but it was identified as Latin-1. This caused a huge number of internal problems – backups are double encoded UTF-8 (which is horrible, every quote is replaced with three characters) and the databases actually held incorrect data, which made doing anything outside of WordPress complex – MySQL would convert any UTF-8 data incoming to Latin-1, despite us actually wanting UTF-8.
The solution was deceptively simple, and thanks to blogger Alex King, I solved this last night.
The motivation to solve this is that this character encoding issue was blocking me from introducing something I wanted to do, and mentioned a few entries ago – migrating the original Nouse site over to WordPress.
It’s this migration that took the site down today. Our central “wp_posts” table hits 213 MB in size, with the vast majority of that being fulltext search indexes for the search function and the related posts plugin. It’s these indexes that started to kill the site. An INSERT was taking up to 2 minutes, which was fine on the wp_posts table in our testing site because nothing else was trying to read that at the same time, but what I did not realise was when I ran the operation live on the server, it would start blocking normal wp_post reads, tying up Apache processes and quickly hitting the connection limit.
It took me quite a long time to realise the cause of the long inserts. Once I did, a simple ALTER TABLE wp_posts DISABLE KEYS solved it, re-enabling at the end to enable the fulltext searching once again. This change was dramatic, instead of running for an hour and only getting a sixth of the way through the conversion, by the time I had switched back to the other terminal, the job had completed.
So, I apologise for the downtime earlier – I had a few people e-mail me to complain about the site being down, but think of the silver lining on the cloud – we now have an additional 800 or so articles in our archive, stretching back to 2003.
The articles back then are written in a different style, less “broadsheet”, more of an “us against them” mentality (Nouse wasn’t redesigned into it’s current form until 2005 – look at the old PDFs for comparison!), but for people like me who like seeing the way things were and with posterity, they’re fascinating.
Lies, damn lies and statistics
Okay, so it’s been quite some time since my last blog, but I’ve got a very good excuse – I’m a finalist, and essay deadlines and looming exams have got in the way of doing Nouse things.
Nothing too exciting has happened technically with the website since Roses, with the exception of the EU Elections tab, which was quite a simple job with HTML and then abstracting some of the lightbox code from the YUSU Elections minisite to make it reusable.
One thing I’ve talked about in the past with non-Nouse people is how we monitor things, both the Nouse server, and the website itself.
The website itself has nothing particularly fancy, Google Analytics is the workhorse and what we use as our official statistics, but we also have AWStats running which analyses log files hourly and makes the result available, instead of the lag that GA has.
One tool I’ve seen that does look particularly interesting is Woopra (Tim Ngwena tweeted about this a while back), which offers live tracking and analysis. This would be particularly useful for watching the statistics on live events such as Roses or Elections, but I’m unsure if putting yet more JavaScript in the site is such a good idea, and Google Analytics is far too good a tool to let go, so at the moment I’m not implementing it.
So far, so normal, however as Nouse operates from Linode as opposed to a typical shared server, there is a lot more that we can monitor, and it is normally these tools that interest other people.
I’ve been using MRTG now for quite some time on my own servers and graphs are quite nifty.
MRTG is designed to map the traffic of a router, but can easily be extended by a script that provides two numbers (representing “in” and “out” bits per second, but the labels can easily be changed), a hostname and an uptime. There’s a number of fairly normal things I track, such as CPU usage, RAM usage, HDD usage, etc, but there are a few things in particular that are more important for Nouse:
The first is the number of Apache requests being handled. This is crucially important, especially considering how heavyweight WordPress is in memory use (just under 60 MB per request) and keeping this below the point at which we start swapping and performance degrades past a useful point is very important.
The second thing I track is MySQL activity – both read (SELECT) and write (UPDATE, INSERT, DELETE, etc), and is the best indicator of server load. Looking at the year graph also shows us a few interesting events:
The blue line represents SELECT statements, and the green line UPDATE, INSERT, etc. The interesting events you can see on this graphs is when I configured WP Super Cache which made a massive difference to server load, and also when I deployed the new site, which contained an annoying bug resulting in far too many INSERT statements (the Popular This Week plugin used to count a view as when a post is displayed, but WordPress thinks a post is displayed whenever it’s headline is shown, resulting in an INSERT for every headline, rather than one per pageload). Spotting once this bug was fixed is also quite easy on that graph. Another interesting point is the increased amount of queries since May, which I hope means that the momentum we gathered during Roses has continued through the rest of the term.
The final thing I track was developed for the live blog and shows how many people are currently connected. Here’s the graph from Friday:
The little blip the day before is a result of testing, and at first it might seem that the numbers here are quite low, especially as Google Analytics recorded over 2000 views for the live blog on this day alone, but I suspect that means that user behaviour is that for something like Roses, most people just popped in to check, and then moved on, coming back later, rather than leaving it to run all the time.
Of course, statistics are useless without anything to compare it against. The Yorker no longer publish their web stats on their advertising page (we do, and I try to keep them up-to-date, especially considering the massive growth we’ve seen since the new site launched in February), but if they’ve not grown since they last published them (which seems unlikely, of course), our statistics compare favourably.
(Also, in an unrelated note, I will be filming some of the Apprentice York stuff for YSTV tonight, and one of the remaining teams include Nouse Comment Editor Charlotte Hogarth-Jones, and News Correspondent Holly Hyde, so I feel obliged to recommend that you all pop down to Derwent tonight to support Mr York 2009, where Nouse editor Henry James Foy will be competing against a few people, including regular Nouse commenter, Dan Taylor).