Southampton Open Data Blog

Grasping the nettle and changing some URIs

March 24, 2011
by Christopher Gutteridge

We’ve realised that using UPPER CASE in some URIs looked fine in a spreadsheet but makes for ugly URLS, and if we’re stuck with them, we want them to look nice.

Hence I’ve taken an executive decision and renamed the URIs for all the Points of Service from looking like this

http://id.southampton.ac.uk/point-of-service/38-LATTES

to this

http://id.southampton.ac.uk/point-of-service/38-lattes

meaning the URL is now

http://data.southampton.ac.uk/point-of-service/38-lattes.html

This actually matters, as these are going to become the long term web pages for the catering points of service, so aesthetics are important, and “If t’were to be done, t’were best done quickly”.

We’ve seen lots of visitors as a result of the Register Article, which is nice. (we saw a 10x increase in visitors, so that’s good)

I’ve just added in the lunchtime menu for the Nuffield. They are not yet quite taking ownership of their data, but that’s just a case of getting them some training. I’ve also talked today to the manager of the on-campus book shop to see if they want to list some prices and products. I’m thinking they could do well to list the oddball stuff they sell like memory sticks & backpacks.

Mostly I’m preparing to tidy up the back-end code — it needs to be a bit more slick and logical, more on this later.

Also today our very own Nigel Shadbolt is featured in the first ever edition of the Google Magazine. (It’s a PDF!)

Categories: In the Press, New Data, Policy, and Problems & Fixes.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *