Design provokes an emotional response. The positive we remember –  the Mini, the iPhone, the London Underground Map – the negative we try to forget. Websites are no different.

While all aspects of design are subjective it is possible to plan for the emotional response you want from your website. It is also possible to test whether or not your plan worked.

Emotional response tests, and the methods behind them, vary. One we use on some ILRT-designed sites is Bipolar Emotional Response Tests (BERTs).

BERTs ask people to look at a design and then pick their response when given a series of opposing (or near opposing) alternatives. For example

• Professional/Amateur
• Cold/Warm,
• Serious/Amusing
• Busy/Calm

The paired opposites are devised early in the project. There is normally a core of questions “as standard” but a designer or analyst will agree the final questions with the site stakeholders/owner.

Devising the series of questions is a subjective act in itself. The process can be very useful in getting a clearer view from stakeholders of what they their site to say about their organisation.

Using BERTs

The initial BERT is run with stakeholders to arrive at a benchmark emotional response. This is a ‘profile’ (a line graph is fine) of the kind of response that stakeholders want their site to provoke and the reactions they don’t want.

Once the benchmark profile is established, site visitors and users run through BERTs – normally for the existing site, new design prototype(s), and the final design. It is a quick and easy task to match the profile after each test to show how close one has got to the ideal.

BERTs can be run on paper or online. We issue BERTs via the service we developed – Bristol Online Surveys (BOS).

BERTs usually only take minutes for people to complete as the more immediate the response the better.

For these reasons we provide  “content services” to 40% of the clients I work with. This is where our staff spend time ensuring that clients’ websites have fresh content regularly, are up to date, have high quality images and audio / visual content, pull in the best RSS feeds, make use of Twitter and other social media, and generally ensure that every website does justice to its organisation! As well as improving content quality, I find that clients become considerably happier with the quality of their sites generally, and are able to think more strategically about their online communications. This is because they receive ongoing input from our web content experts.

Some examples of specific content-related services we’ve provided recently include:

• making changes to the text content of a website so that it ranks highly in Google search engine results, whenever a person searches for relevant terms
• sourcing high quality images for a collection of online profiles
• adding content to a site that was in preparation for going live
• taking over the entire management of a site’s content
• setting up and running a Twitter account, then pulling the content onto a website
• reworking content to reduce the amount of email enquiries an organisation received
• writing up new content from events that an organisation runs
• suggesting improvements to the structure of a site, to make it easier to use

If this sounds interesting to you, do drop me an email or give me a call.

Sarah Agarwal – sarah.agarwal@bristol.ac.uk – 0117 331 4395

• Where am I?
• How can I find out which software version I’m using?
• What does it look like?
• What were you doing?
• Who should I email or call?

Where am I?

The most helpful thing to include is the address of the page where you saw the problem.  You can copy this from your address bar – it usually starts with http.

How can I find out which software version I’m using?

Letting us know about how your system is set up can help us to resolve problems more quickly.  Support Details is a fantastic little website that tells you everything we need to know about your system. Just go to the Support Details site, and it will capture and allow you to send details about your computer to us!

What does it look like?

A picture is worth a thousand words – email us a screen shot when something does not look right or you see a strange message.

How to take a screen shot

• General
• Mac
• Windows using print screen or Snipping tool

What were you doing?

It helps to know what you were doing when you found the problem.  Please send us a detailed description.

Who should I email or call?

If we use Basecamp with you, post your support query there as a ‘message’, and select the people you want to receive it – normally the Project Manager at ILRT and the technical developer(s) or designer.

Otherwise, email both your Project Manager at ILRT and the technical developer(s) / designer. The only problem with email is if one of us is out of the office, and we don’t know you’ve emailed, which is why it’s good to email two or three people.

If you’re calling us, our contact phone numbers are on the ILRT website.

In this post, Paul Smith looks at some of the issues you should be aware of when selecting publicly available images to use on your website. He also provides a few examples of websites where you can obtain suitable, copyright-cleared images, and gives information about our professional image sourcing service.

All images on the Internet are fair game, right?

This is a common misconception, and definitely not true! The owner of the copyright for a digital image will have certain rights over how it’s used, which need to be respected.

Don't take liberties with Internet images

Using copyright protected images without permission could result in:

• stipulation for compulsory removal of images
• a request for payment
• potential legal action

The issues of ownership and copyright mean you may have to pay to use the image, or get permission, or credit it in a particular way. There may also be constraints on how you can use the image e.g. in what context, how many times you may use it, how you may manipulate the image, etc.

It is up to you, the user, to find out if and how you may use an image without violating copyright.

So how do I find out if I can use an image?

This really depends on how you are looking for images.  Let’s look at the most common ways you can find images on the Internet.

Search engines

Many people rely on search engines such as Google to do all of their online searching, including image searching, but this approach can be problematic. It will certainly find images for you, but all the images you find are on other people’s websites. You will have to contact the owner of that site (if you can find any contact details) to see if you can use any images which are on their site. Of course it might be that they’ve obtained the image from somewhere else, so you will have to follow the chain through to get permission. This is a lot of effort, unless it’s a really good image.

Photo sharing websites

The best known is probably Flickr. Be aware though – “photo sharing” means that images are generally made freely available to view in situ. Permission to reuse these images in your own work is not implicit, and not always straightforward.

By default, any images uploaded to Flickr are copyright all rights reserved (meaning you can’t use the image without the permission of the copyright owner). However, Flickr also allows its users to publish images under the Creative Commons licensing scheme. Creative Commons defines a range of licenses between full copyright – all rights reserved – and the public domain – no rights reserved.

Some examples of Creative Commons licensing options are:

• Attribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work – and derivative works based upon it – but only if they give credit the way you request.
• Non-commercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work – and derivative works based upon it – but for non-commercial purposes only.

Free stock photo collections

One example of this type of site is Stock.XCHNG which contains hundreds of thousands of free-to-use stock images submitted by keen photographers. Any usage restrictions are stated clearly for each image, and often require nothing more than attribution to the image creator. The main problem with this type of site is that quantity often obscures quality, and so you can spend a long time looking for that special image.

Commercial photo libraries

Some stock photo sites make huge numbers of images available which are sold individually at a low price – often less than £1. These sites usually require you to buy credits, which you can then exchange to download images. Again these images are licensed, but the licence is usually standard for all the images on the site. So once you’ve read it and understood that the license is suitable for your use, you can download as many images as you need without having to worry about each image. One of the best known is iStockPhoto which, as well as royalty-free photographs, supplies vector illustrations, video footage, audio tracks and Flash files.

Image finding services

ILRT offers an image sourcing service, – perfect if you want a professional eye to choose and check images for you. We discuss the kinds of images you require, source some of the best out there, and provide you with a range of choices to pick from. We also make sure that you can use the images legally. This is part of ILRT Content Services.

Where can I find out more about this?

JISC Digital Media is a service, based in the ILRT, which helps the UK’s FE and HE communities embrace and maximise the use of digital media – and offers free help and advice to these communities. They have produced a free tutorial to help with searching for images (on which this post is based) which offers more help with how to find images, and explains the various licensing models, as well as giving many more examples of sites for finding suitable images for your work.

Paul works on projects for the University of Bristol, for national and international collaborative projects, and for several JISC-funded services including Intute. Paul’s recent creations include websites for the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement and the Office of Fair Access. Since 2000, Paul has been working on the Virtual Training Suite (VTS) – a suite of online tutorials teaching subject-specific Internet research skills to students in Higher Education, which is currently part of Intute. Paul has progressed from junior developer on the VTS to now being the project manager and lead developer. His current work for ID includes a variety of projects using a mixture of web technologies including Perl, PHP and Python.

In his spare time Paul is currently teaching himself to play the guitar. He enjoys mountain biking, listening to music (and wishing he could play guitar as well as his heroes), playing video games, and is currently testing the extent of his DIY and gardening skills while renovating his house. He does not design clothes, but thank you for asking.

Over the last month or so I’ve been developing my own little Android application in my spare time. Having just released it on the Google Market, I thought it might be a good time to provide a short introduction to the world of Android.

What is Android?

Android is a mobile phone platform. It’s developed by a consortium of companies; the most important among them is probably Google.

Android differs from its nearest rivals (the iPhone or Blackberry) in a key respect: unlike the iPhone, which is a complete package of both hardware and software owned by Apple, Android is just the operating system – the main software which runs on the phone. In addition, this software is released as  open source. This means it’s very easy for phone manufacturers to put Android on their devices, and there are a great number already starting to do this.

Android sits alongside the current generation of ’smart phones’ which are much more capable than phones of just a few years ago. One of the most important factors of these phones is they are truly internet enabled. They run fully functional web browsers, have (relatively) large, easy to read screens, and are usually purchased with unlimited web usage.

My application, WhatGas Petrol Prices, is a community-backed application which allows people to locate nearby petrol stations and see fuel prices, and which offers updated fuel price information. The information for this app comes from the WhatGas.com community database.

Why develop an Android application?

As an Android phone owner, I already have a vested interest. I’m also interested in seeing how the Android app market develops, how easy it is to develop applications and what the capabilities of the platform are. I was also simply frustrated one evening when I couldn’t find a free app to show me where the nearest petrol station was!

The app has only been out a week and I’ve already got several hundred people downloading it.

So go on tell me, which is best… the iPhone or Android?

As an end user I would definitely say the iPhone’s user experience is a much smoother, richer experience. Its combination of hardware and software means that what it does, it does very well. Android, in this respect, is a bit more of a jack of all trades. It doesn’t feel as fluid or quite as polished. However as a developer, I would definitely favour Android. It has an excellent developing environment (which is based on free, open source tools), it lets you do more with the phone (like running background services) and there isn’t the vetting procedure imposed by Apple when releasing apps. It also brilliantly integrates my Google-based life.

I think we’ll see Android getting a lot more attention over the coming months and years.  It, the iPhone, Blackberry and Palm are all revolutionary devices and it will be interesting to see where they go next.

Chris Bailey

Ensuring your website runs smoothly

One of the simplest ways to monitor your website is to visit it. Since it’s not practical to do this ourselves, we set up a monitoring system (Nagios) that does this for us. We know what we would expect to find on specific parts of your site, so we configure the monitoring system to visit these areas. We make sure that these areas are representative of all the different technologies on your site. The monitoring system visits these every few minutes and compares what it finds with what it expects to find. If there’s a discrepancy, it alerts us so that we can investigate further.

Of course, it’s more helpful to spot potential problems before they arise. To do this, we monitor all sorts of information about the systems that host your website (using tools such as Munin and MRTG), to make sure they can meet the demand placed upon them and to spot anomalies as they occur. So, for example, this graph was generated by one of these tools and shows the number of requests made over the past few weeks to a CMS that we host. Whilst the details aren’t important, you’ll see that there’s a large ’spike’ in the middle of week 50.

Coincidentally, at this time we were trialling Splunk; software which collects and correlates data from all our different systems in one place. This helped us to rapidly track down the problem to a 3rd party, who were inadvertently accessing content from the CMS several times a second and thus slowing down the site. So we contacted the 3rd party who were able to address the glitch in their system. As you can see from the graph, the traffic was back to normal the following day.

Collecting all these data serves other purposes as well. For example, we can analyse the performance of your website and identify potential areas for improvement. Once these improvements are made, we can then confirm that they’ve had the desired effect. In fact, there’s a whole host of techniques we use when trying to squeeze the best possible performance out of your site and we’ll take a glimpse at some of these in a future posting.

What is Virtualisation?

We often refer to using virtualisation when we want to run some software on a computer that it wasn’t designed for. In most circumstances we do not see the layers of virtualisation and to an extent this is the point. Virtualisation is all about layers. We have a layer below which has a feature we want to make use of and a layer above which is incompatible, and in between a layer which enables each side to “talk” the same language.This middle layer simplifies or simulates the way the lower layer works so that the top layer can understand it and interact. Think of it like the travel power adapter you take on holiday; you have a socket on the wall which has 2 round pins but a plug with 3 rectangle pins, the adapter virtualises the connection so we can get electricity.

At the ILRT we make use of virtualisation extensively at many layers of our hosting services to give us more flexibility and to make more efficient use of the resources we have. We are able to separate out the components of these services so that they perform better and more securely side-by-side. We can reduce downtime caused by the need to take server hardware out of service to perform maintenance by simply moving the website or service live to another location. It has also extended our ability to work on more exciting and diverse applications by increasing the numbers of concurrent services we can run without needing to buy in new servers. We have consolidated old hardware thus also reducing carbon emissions.

For the future

In the coming years virtualisation will develop to give us more freedom provide a multitude of services on varying scales. However, there may come a cost of managing these services and there are some exiting areas of computing which start to sound more like science fiction. The following sections take a more extensive look at the different technical aspects of virtualisation and how we are making use of them.

So… What is Virtualisation?

Lets start again. Virtualisation refers to the abstraction of the functionality of a device or software component from another interfacing device or software component. Using the term “virtual” gives us the impression that what we are using is fake in some respect, but we are really wrapping the functionality in a common format which is more generally recognised and interchangeable often with very little overhead. You could almost say that a wolf in sheep’s clothing is a virtual sheep! It may appear to look and act like a sheep but under the skin it’s something else. However, it’s not quite as sinister as that; in computer science there are many aspects of computing which are abstractions. In fact, at nearly every level of your computer there are layers of virtualisation. For example, your hard drive is split up using disk partitioning, presented to the operating system as virtual disks that it treats as multiple physical disks. The OS doesn’t know whether they are real separate disks or just one. On a different level, your web browser connects to web sites over network connections provided by your OS. The browser doesn’t know or care by what medium the Internet is provided, be it over your cable modem, via a wireless airport card in your Mac or via your phone. So, therefore, you could say the connection is virtualised.

However, more recently the term virtualisation specifically refers to three main areas in large scale computing. The first and foremost is the virtualisation or abstraction of an operating system from the hardware it operates on by way of a virtual machine: more on this below. The second is storage virtualisation, where mass storage devices which appear to be local to your computer or to a service actually live elsewhere or possibly even in multiple places at the same time. We call this a storage area network or SAN for short. The third is desktop virtualisation which are provided remotely via a single instance server, therefore, making more efficient use of powerful hardware but only needing a lightweight thin client desktop machine.

When it comes to the popular usage of the term we are usually talking about OS virtualisation. This is where we want to run multiple operating systems on a single piece of hardware by sharing software components or by using a hardware emulator in software. Computers have evolved to have massive capacity in the last decade and we often want to make more effective use of these resources. Running a single OS or application on these machines would be a waste of these resources. With virtualisation we can divide up the resource and allocate just what we need when we need it. Diverse software can co-exist where there would have previously been incompatibilities. For example, we might have an application that only runs on Windows 2000 but we only need to run it once a month for half an hour. It seems a waste to have a server on 24×7 wasting electricity or or a server off depreciating in value whilst it’s not in use. So it would be great if we can use the hardware for something else in the meantime.

The software that provides the layer of virtualisation is called a hypervisor, also known as a Virtual Machine Monitor. This layer sits between the hardware and the OS. It often provides an abstraction of the physical devices to the OS in a common way that is easy to interact with. So often this is a very good way to get old software to work on new hardware. The hypervisor schedules access to the underlying hardware and provides other external components that the virtual machines may make use of, such as virtualised networking components.

What is a Virtual Infrastructure?

Infrastructure is a term which collectively encompasses all the interrelated components which are required to run a large scale service such as the many web projects which are hosted by the ILRT. This would include networking, servers, databases, applications, storage, etc. A virtual infrastructure is where some or all of those components are provided virtually by a hypervisor or by way of virtualised services. It also is used to describe the administrative mechanisms which larger scale platforms employ, where many hypervisors running on many physical machines work collectively in clusters. This only further abstracts the service from the hardware. Once upon a time you could say X service is running on server Y but now it’s a floating variable that could be in one place one day and somewhere else the next with little to no noticeable affect to service availability.

There are now many commercial and open source solutions which not only provide the primary aspect of virtualisation, the hypervisor, but also the tools to construct a virtual infrastructure. One of the most interesting things to come out of this is that organisations are able to rapidly and very freely deploy large numbers of virtual services in a fully automated fashion.  This has coined the phrase cloud computing and companies like Amazon with their Web Services have adopted infrastructure as a service. However, with the ease of this creation there comes an expensive price of how to manage all the instances and this has called for some advances in the nature of systems administration in the direction of autonomic computing with self configuring and self healing networks.

So how does this affect ILRT?

At the ILRT and across the University as a whole there are many flavours of virtualisation in use. In our production environment we are currently using Ganeti an open source cluster management tool written by Google which we use to control Xen based Linux servers and a network based storage replication component DRBD. We are always researching ways to improve the flexibility, reliability and robustness of our services and Ganeti has enabled us to advance our hosting environment in all these areas. We are also extensively using configuration management to automate systems software maintenance and deployment. In the future we hope to extend the ways in which we manage the whole deployment life cycle as part of the virtual infrastructure with ever more layers of abstraction and automation.

If you are interested in more details on the specific configuration of our services please feel free to email the author of this article: matt.baker@bristol.ac.uk

Today the web statistics site StatCounter is reporting that Firefox 3.5 has become the single most popular browser with 21.49% of the market share. All is not lost for Microsoft however. If you categorize by browser type, all flavours of IE are still pulling in 55% of the global market and Firefox is still on catchup with 32%, but it appears that more and more users are seeing that IE is not the only game in town.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-200811-200912

This demonstrates the reason why, when we code for the web, we always make sure your site works with as many browsers as possible as you never know which will be top dog next.

We have experts in writing, producing and publishing compelling text, video and audio content for the web. We also build and support online communities and interactions on behalf of our clients using social media such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, commenting and surveys. We can provide regular support (eg N days per month) or one-off support on a specific project. More information on the ILRT website.