In the Press
Interview with Christopher Gutteridge
by Christopher Gutteridge
There’s an interview with Christopher Gutteridge (me!) on this weeks Ubuntu UK Podcast.
(If you’re wondering, data.soutampton.ac.uk runs on virtual machine running Ubuntu)
Actually, it’s worth giving a shout out to the technologies we use, but I’ll save that for a future post.
Grasping the nettle and changing some URIs
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!)
We are featured in The Register
by Christopher Gutteridge
I recently had the slightly scary experience of giving an interview to the Register, along with my old friend John Goodwin. I appear to have made it onto the frontpage of the site, along with my comment about how much I hate to see people still using PDF to simulate A4 paper in documents never destined to be printed.
Knowing that The Register tends to quickly puncture pretentiousness, I did my best to be as straight-talking as I could. The article has come out well, but with slightly more colourful language than I’d have used talking to the BBC!
The Register: Southampton Uni shows way to a truly open web.
Interview on
by Christopher Gutteridge
I’m very please with this interview published on semanticweb.com, it represents what I said pretty clearly, and gets the message out that I planned – this is a part of business as usual, not a gimmick,.